RH

I honestly didn't know about it since I don't use social media or read much news. I was in my office, in the basement, watching TV and my wife called me and was like "come out to back porch." Lol, I though she was seeing someone in our woods or something. Nope! It was this. To me, this is cooler than the eclipse.

Seriously, this is something I thought I'd never get to see unless I planned a trip to Alaska. For those of you up north, this might be common but I've never seen this. Anyway, if you are in EST (and I'm assuming the other time zones, but in a few more hours) step outside. You should see a pinkish hue to the sky and, sure enough, from time to time it streaks across the sky. Peak time is suppose to be 3-4:00 AM. These were taken from my back porch about 10 minutes ago.

Y'all remember back in the 90s and early-00s when every new system seemed to be a remarkable, technical bump and we all just had to have the next new thing, 99% based off of graphics? Yeah, well, IMHO, dev studios have been acting that we still behave and think that way. What makes matters worse is the oft-needed Day-1 patch and, even then, dev studios worked so hard to make technically impressive games, it takes often months for AAA titles to be patched to a state where they are what the original designers/artists intended. No one wants this. Nintendo, in their own way, gets this. That's part of why focusing on "withered hardware" has allowed them to stay relevant. When you are a dev team and you know you're not going to make the most technically impressive game of the year, you focus on what's enjoyable and fun. To many studios have focused on massive environments or hyper-realistic graphics and left game play (and often even bug testing) along the wayside. I can enjoy a good looking game, but this day and age, the "oh, shiny!" affect only keeps my attention for 5-10 minutes. After that, I need good, inventive gameplay. I just don't see that in many AAA titles, which is why I stay mostly stuck in the past and if I buy something new, it's almost always an indie title.

In my opinion, keep it simple.

We need new blood. Who should we call out? I know I didn't have a clue what this was about on NA until about the 3rd or 4th time I saw a WW game and I was simply curious. Forum newbs need to know.

One more quick note, though checking the board is important, one of the easiest way to tell if a GB game is legit is that 2-digit stamp on the front. To my recollection, I've not seen any bootlegs with it, though honestly, I've not bought many GB games in the past few years so I don't know if that's changed. That said, if you have a bunch of GB carts, just look at all their stamps. The stamping mechanism for GB games (and all Nintendo games that had a label stamp) is very distinct and would be really hard to replicate. If I had to guess, these were stamped while rolled across a metal back, and the pressure was adjusted to be hard enough to cut the sticker, but not cut through the sticker. This is why the label seems to bubble in the curve of the "2". Also, these stamping bladed were used a lot so I think the angle of the cut on the blade was probably wide as to not wear out. Regardless, the cut is harsh, but not so harsh to truly damage the sticker. These are the fine details I've noticed. NES back-label stamps are the same, but they are bigger.

Yeah, looks legit to me. It's also from Japan and, other than Tetris, 9 times out of 10, stuff from there is going to be in an 8 of 10 condition, or better.

Wow, was this for the non-existent Earthbound 64 that Nintendo started working on but never released?!

I've seriously considered saving up and getting one of the new, expensive RetroTink's just for this purpose. I have a lot of VHS tapes from my childhood and, for some reason, some of them recorded in an odd interlaced way and we can't even watch them on an old LCD TV without combing. I know the RetroTink has a lot of advanced algorithms for handling interlacing, plus it has good scalars, even for video like VHS. It's quite expensive and more that I'd tend to want to buy for a single gaming item, but for archiving family memories, especially that I can share with my Mom, Dad, Aunt's, Uncles, etc. It's not that expensive.

You know, it's an interesting thing. About 10 years ago, I was watching a variety of music videos on YouTube and Twisted Sister's We're Not Gonna Take It came up. I actually watched that one, partly for nostalgia because I'd not seen it in 20-25 years but also because I was struck by a realization of something--this childhood "rebelliousness" of the teenage crowd of the 80s and 90s was often portrayed against really strict fathers. However, after getting older and hearing the life-stories of so many people that had Dads like the guy in the video, I learned that overwhelmingly, many of them had been drafted at one point or another. This may not seem like much, but from further observation of the fathers of that generation, many of these men came back hardened and PTSD left them afraid of not having hard, well behaved kids. Why? Because when you go to war, your best chance of survival is actually following orders. I know the music video was a caricature, but it was a caricature of truth and I ended up feeling bad for the Dad. Yeah, he was a portrayal of harsh, strict rules but the fact is, he acted that way probably because of war trauma. It stung. Again, I get that it was a music video, intended to be rebellious and fun, but looking back with older, historical eyes, it just felt sad. We tend to stack our trauma onto future generations, but it's often hidden. Anyway, I quoted you guys because C. S. Lewis went to war in WWI. It was a different time, but he was one of the few who fought the trauma and tendency to run towards cynicism that produces a rigidity of adulthood. He wasn't a "man-child" and was a very productive and prosperous man. Nevertheless, he enjoyed "childish things" because he didn't want to let go of joy.

I'm not going to junk up this thread with too many details from my mega lot but take a guess which game I had the most of (across all systems. Answer and interesting details in the spoiler. Also, for the games that I had the most duplicates of, I took one of each for a system and threw them in Mid-Sized Priority Mail boxes. You can see those auctions in my account, however, no one's as interested in them as they are the mass-lot of the spoiler game.

Here's a break down of my family members that were older and a formative part of my development/gaming life. My Pawpaw (Mother's, Father): I'm not sure why, but he bought a NES "for the grand kids", and since we were a family where 3 of his 4 children lived near him, my grand parents home was a hub we all frequented 2-3 times a week. I played a LOT of NES at their house, and from time to time Papaw would play too, but not much. Regardless, the following year after he bought his own NES, he bought one for each household of his grand kids. *Sniff*, he was a great grandpa. My Mother: I've recounted her story before because I think it's infamous but, in short, my was originally indifferent to video games. She didn't like them but she didn't mind them. She regulated me and my brothers time a bit, but so long as our school work and chores were done, and no one wanted the shared TV, we could game as much as we wanted. Then... Dr. Mario entered the house. She became super-addicted, with my Step Dad, and one day she "woke up", saw her problem, and vowed to never buy another game console, and she never did. She was still cool about buying games for the systems we already had, though. Also she let my buy my own game units, like the Game Gear and later the N64 and she encouraged my biological Dad to get me a PS1 for Christmas. My Biological Dad: My Dad was (and still is) a bit of a techno-hippy. He always loved the state of technological progress and as a younger guy, he enjoyed arcades, the Atari 2600 and computers. My brother and I would go over to his house on the weekends in the 80s, and though he never owned a console beyond an Atari 2600, he did rent a Genesis for my brother and I rather frequently. When the PS1 era came around, I was saving like mad to buy one of my own and, surprise!, Christmas 1997, my Dad bought me one! I also really, really wanted Final Fantasy VII. I already owned it, but the experience of my Dad buying my PS1 kind of adds to the nostalgia of that game. My Step Dad: Other than playing for a few times with my Mom, I really feel like he never got into gaming at all. He was a pretty rigid, "military" minded kind of guy, but he was cool. it's hard to explain, but though he was tough, I knew he loved my brother and I as his own sons. Regardless, his attitude towards video games, surprisingly, was simply ambivalent. Looking back, it's kind of weird cause he completely seems like one of those guys who should've hated them and felt they rot kids brains. But... he didn't ever seem to be that way. I guess because even though I played a lot of games, I never made it a problem. And that's pretty much it. I've also before mentioned how my Aunt, who was younger than my Mom, was dating a guy who she eventually married, but back then in the early days, she took my brother and I to his house to see if he was cool with kids. I don't know why but I always remember it, and he won me and my brother over because he took us for a drive in his brand new, gold Corvette (man, that thing was soo 80s, and amazing) and we then spent our time playing on the Intellivision (before the NES era.) It was a really rad day. My aunt and uncle went on to raise two gamer cousins of mine, one of which was a physicist USC, until he got tired of working at a University and entered the public sector a couple of years ago. I guess games did NOT rot his brain.

You know, that was the weird thing. I saw games for almost all modern systems, and there's even some PC titles in there. I literally think this was the entire bin of returns for something like 3 months that were shipped to the distro center in this area. Regardless, I've not seen a single PSVR title, but if I find any, I'll send you a message. My job tomorrow is to sort by system, then by sealed/CIB and last alphabetize. I'll do PS5 first and then get a list of VR titles for you, if there are any. I actually thought about you as I rummaged through the lot--"Dang... there's nothing hear to share with FireHazard?!"

Well, I’m probably going to post this on Reddit too just to see people both lose their collective minds, and call me a liar, but I just got the pick-up of a life time. For just under $1,000 I got all of these games (plus several I’ve sold already in the past few days, plus a brand new PS5.) The games are probably about $1.50/ea and I’d say that are 30% sealed. The scoop is a local thrift shop received a massive pallet of modern titles from a Wal-Mart distribution center. These are all customer returns and from spot checking discs (and reading the notes on the labels) most people didn’t want them and that was the reason for the returns! I’ve not found a scratched disc yet, either. Anyway, I bought a bunch at $5/each a few days ago and today I told them to name a price on the rest. At $500 for what you see hear, I couldn’t say no. Boom, instant PS4/5/XBox Series-X collection unlocked! 95% of these are going up for sale. To recoup costs, after I sort through them I’ll likely put CIBs in medium priority mail boxes and $1-auction the boxes on eBay. I’ll pull out the better condition/sealed items and sell them in lots of 3-5 or individually depending on value. Seriously though, I like to give you guys first dibs. If you send me your list of games you want for the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series-X. I will set them for you guys and we can strike a really good deal. I could be open to trades later but I have to dig myself out of this $1,000 hole first. My wife is typically skeptical of my… business moves but even she could see that all these games for $1.25-1.75 was a steal.

Possible, final bump. I'll be listing this unit on eBay tomorrow, to be scheduled for Sunday evening. Will likely be a $1 auction cause that's how I roll. Full discloser--the kids begged to give it a try. Sigh... I walked through the setup process, again, and installed Sonic Frontiers. They played it for about an hour. I also _think_ I figured out what the disc problem was--the person might have put the disc in upside down! Why is this a problem? Well, I didn't know which way to orient it this last time and I put it in the wrong way. However, the PS5 doesn't give you ANY warning that it can't read the disc nor, in 2024, does it have an extra layer or anything it could read that would allow the unit to know it was an upside down disc! To make matters worse, for a half-second, I thought the drive might have actually been broken because it does spin-up the disc a bit. So. PSA, if you ever get a new PS5 and it seems like it won't read the disc, eject it and flip it over. It might just be gaslighting you!

Dude, I've mentally "invented" hundreds, if not thousands, of things because that's the way my mind works. Several have gone on to be made by others and they were successful and this psychological phenomena (or whatever it's called) has a name. The fact is, it's easy to creatively see problems and then solutions. The really, really hard part is putting your thoughts on paper, organizing them, speccing out the requirements, finding the first few key people to help, securing funding, and then simply initiating. It takes a LOT of work to make big, successful companies, even if the market is 100% new and wide open. This is why I've never done much. I like to dream, but I'm happy being a smaller part to a bigger project. No, Uber didn't steal my idea. Uber was obvious. What really happened was someone had the idea and they worked ridiculous, 120 hour weeks with a team of hard working idealist to pull it off and properly market it to venture capitalists, and it worked. Uber was probably mentally "invented" 1,000 times before it became a thing. That Thomas Edison quote, "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" is not entirely true. I'd pin it more on .01% inspiration and 99.99% perspiration, of which, most of us don't have to see our ideas through.

I remember when Microsoft bought Minecraft/Mojang. I really thought Minecraft was on a downward slope and had reached it's prime. There was no way they'd make their money back on that one. In all my predictions about games and business, that one has probably been the most incorrect, ever. I'm quite shocked at the longevity of that one game. I mean, I get that they hyper-expanded it, but you're basically running around in a super-blocky world. I'm surprised no one's tried to do the same thing, but with better graphics. And I'm not talking about anything wild here. A generative sandbox, even voxel based, can look way better. And yes, I'm aware of the mods. I fooled around with many of the high-def ones and such, but certainly we can do way more than what Minecraft has to offer and, yet, still be all the same. I'm just bitter that Microsoft bought Mojang and immediately killed Scrolls.

I think Candy Crush refined that wretched process, but I don't think it set the trend. I'd have to research, but someone, I'm sure, put the pieces together, probably raked in a few hundred million and then got the attention of all other game makers who then realized this was the next big way to make billions off of the masses. Candy Crush might have been the first real game with mass casual appeal, though. I really think it all started with some gacha, but gachas aren't as casual as they seem. Some of the ones I got deep into, I spent hours on and never spent above my limit. They all tend to limit your gameplay by making level advancements based off of so many turns you can earn per hour. Of course, you can pay to unlock more points for more turns but there's always to earn those, or you can wait two hours and try again. Of course, when these games are new, they sprinkle all kinds of incentives, plus each time you level, however that works, you get all of your points back to play through levels. This means that for the first 10-20 levels, usually you can play as much as you want, and the point of that mechanic is 100% to get you hooked. I still have Survivor.io on my phone, but I only open it once every few months. It was pretty reasonable at the beginning and, IMHO, the first 3 months of any of these games is when it's best to play. For free, you can usually do pretty well and get out of the game what it has to offer. I don't know why I keep Survivor.io around but I guess it's because I just don't play it much and I only get the itch to play it every 6-8 weeks, I play it a couple of days and then I'm good. I probably dropped $20 on that game? Again, I know these things are semi-predatorial, but I also believe in personal responsibility. I go more than $20 out of that game when I played it a good bit when it launched, so I see no harm. I'm not going to be dropping $1,000 on it over a few years, though. If anyone has seriously kept up with that game, even casually, it wouldn't surprise me if they've spent that much as a "low spend" player.

Bum

I'm not sure which one to pick, but I think another option is an early, Pay-to-Win gacha style game. Are these things terrible? Yes, but whomever invented/perfected the model changed the gaming industry, though for bad. I can't remember which specific medieval based game it was, but I remember seeing Kate Upton in a commercial for it and I thought it was insane that they'd pay a super model, in her prime, to film commercials. I then researched and that specific mobile game had already raked in over $1B. I was wrong--paying for a commercial like that was probably cheap. Is that the most profitable game, ever? No. But these game makers learned that with loot crates costing hundreds of dollars and some influencers willing to drop $10-20k on your game as soon as it launches, masses will follow and will drop $100-200 a month, just to stay in the top 1% of the leaderboard. It's insane, and I don't get it. I have enjoyed some of those games and for a few, before I started collecting, I allotted myself about $20-30/mo for the gacha-du-jour for my personal preference. I was gainfully employed and it was casual entertainment and it was my way of keeping the servers running. However, when I started looking into the top-tier players and how much money these games make, I was blown away.

Yeah, to be clear, this isn't my personal choice by preference but that one game sold millions of Wiis across the globe and is probably only rivaled by Tetris, especially paired with the Game Boy. Plus the Wii was a difficult sale, but Nintendo did what Nintendo does and found that magical, secret sauce to allow the whole package to work and have mass-appeal. Did the Wii experience translate well past Wii Sports? Not for most games, but it did for a few. Regardless, everyone including their Mom, Dad, Grandparents and Dog had a favorite game on the Wii Sports disc and it was literally a global phenomenon.

So far? Wii Sports if I'm trying to be 100% objective.

Many decades ago, when the internet was not afraid to be non-PC, there was a site called "Engrish.com" and I think it might have even been a part of the "Cheezburger Network", which was a series of sites that made most of the images we call memes today. This was back around 2001, or so. Anyway, Engrish.com was dedicated to all of the random English words that are, and were, posted all over Japan, often with no contextual relation to whatever "thing" it was stamped on. I recall they had a FAQ page and, supposedly, the site was ran by a Japanese-American who could speak both English and Japanese with high-proficiency. According to him and his personal knowledge, it's not much different than someone getting a tattoo with a Chinese or Japanese character or two that says something meaningful to that person. Except, in Japan, they put a LOT more English everywhere and it's less about what it says and more the aesthetic of having English plastered on something. Often the context works, but other times, the context is wrong and potentially funny... much like someone who has "Soup" tattooed on them, rather than "Hope", but in Japanese. Assuming that information is correct, there's probably an element of that desire when they put the English name on these boxes--they simply like English and the way it looks. Keep in mind, they tend to only do this with English and, from my observation, it's American English too, not British English. If I had to guess a reason why English is singled out, it probably goes all the way back to the General McArthur era when the Japanese people gained a deep since of respect and appreciation for America when we helped re-establish them as a prosperous nation and we then became strong allies with them. In other words, they probably like English for the same reason several generations have been obsessed with Mickey Mouse--it represents a lot of good after a very tragic era.

Here are the sealed, non Switch titles I have that are not on eBay. Make offers. Can go for cheap.

I've been working with AI a lot these past several months. I honestly don't think it's going to replace as many jobs as everyone hopes, at least not as fast or in ways they expect. We've seen a remarkable pace of capability increase in the past year alone and it makes it feel like we might be on the cusp of singularity. But I don't think that's the case. If you dig into the history of OpenAI and the current AI movement, we've largely gotten hear because Sam Altman and his original crew basically said, if we dump a lot of money and resources into LLM generation, we can get a lot better results that we see today. In other words, there was a major psychological tipping point that was initiated by OpenAI, they produced remarkable results and then the floodgates of companies investing in their own initiatives kicked off. This resulted in AI being the next, big hot investment. ChatGPT-4 is amazing. It's helps me a lot with my work and where I use to always research tough engineering questions on StackOverflow, I now entirely ask ChatGPT questions and I get results. Fast. It outputs code I need and it can explain it. However, it's not perfect. Some times the models output strange, additions to code that don't make sense from a mental processing stand point but usually when that happens I can see what the LLM was pulling together and I can modify it to work for my needs. But I digress. The problem is that we've scaled out the tech to our current, max capabilities. Models like ChatGPT-4, Claude-3 and others are massive and require to be run massive GPU servers. Significant advancements are taking place to shrink the size of LLMs so they can be ran on desktops but I think what we're going to see is that we're about to hit an AI cap. Specifically, what this cap will equate too are nominal increases in AI capability year-over-year. This is because for the models and the outputs to improve, we're going to need more processing power and GPUs generally get better at a Moore's Law pace. We've not hit that cap yet. Nvidia in particular has made some major re-designs of GPUs to be specialize for LLM learning and generation. Taylor-making the hardware for LLM generation greatly increases the capability of the GPUs but they are still using the same amount of power and the transistors are still the same size that are in the traditional GPUs that have been used so far. My point is, by doing a full-chip redesign, we are likely to see something like a 10x increase in processing performance (if I recall correctly), per GPU unit, however, that's a one-time 10x increase. That's very significant, but not scalable year over year. After that, GPU (or what's actually called TPU) performance will only grow nominally at Moore's Law pace, at best. I'm not a naysayer of this technology and I fully embrace it. However, I don't think we're on the cusp of some form of super-intelligent AI that's about to rocket to the stratosphere and takes over all work. I think we're on a massive-ramp up where the results from the efforts are about to match the technical capabilities of the equipment we have today, however, I have no clue when we'll catch up to what's technologically feasible. Regardless, this stuff is expensive to implement and a lot of big tech companies are investing billions at a loss, in the hopes of finding that perfect AI product that will not only be super-lucrative but will change the world. Personally, I think they are over-investing. Regardless, I think we'll probably hit a major growth cap in 6 to 18 months, shooting from the hip. ALL THAT TO SAY and TL;DR in response to your question: I'm not worried much. I think the fields that could have the biggest impact in the near future is honestly artists. With the capabilities we have today already, still images at high resolution are of remarkable quality. Results from Sora are impressive, but they are not perfect and it's obvious to tell that you're looking at AI generated video. Also, those videos are low resolution so scaling up impressive 1080p footage to a resolution real studios would want to use (8k?) is going to take a lot more power to produce than we have, while also yielding perfect results. Anything we get today will likely need human, post-processing to work in serious video production environments. Regarding technical fields, I think these LLMs will only enhance our work. You can have all the LLMs working together to build code but real engineers will be needed for troubleshooting and they must know and understand their code when it needs nuance to be fixed. That takes experience. LLMs can do a lot, but they are not magic. I think the tech field has more life in it than we may thing, and the CEO of NVidia may hope, but it will (and already has) have to evolve a bit. Other fields like doctors and the medical researchers will be safe too. I think we are way to many years away from accepting AI doctors because people want the human expertise and touch. Machines and LLMs can make mistakes. People can too, and there's a reasonable chance that LLM-doctors could quickly become more proficient at diagnosing and prescribing solutions to diseases and aliments than human-doctors, but people are more accepting of a human making a mistake, versus a machine making a mistake that ends up hurting or killing people. In short, psychology of the doctor-patient relationship will keep them relevant. And last, lawyers will always be people. Why? Because lawyers make the laws and they'll be damned if the won't pass laws that protect them. Lawyers and law-makers are often one-in-the-same, so be sure that politicians will also pass whatever laws they need too to protect themselves and the special interests. Ok, yes, I've rambled a lot. Thanks for reading that, if you did. But I agree with Gloves. I'm encouraging my kids, especially my son, to get into skilled labor work. For one, he's remarkably good at it. He just knows how stuff works. He's diagnosed broken things in our house and I've told him "No, that's probably not possible and how would you know that any way?!" only to take something apart and doggonit, he's right and he then explains how the item probably broke, and how he knew it was the problem. Now, I'm pretty good at that as an engineer but he's amazing and he's 10. He's like Anakin Solo from Legends. As the current skilled labor, Boomer labor market is coming to an end, I think he'll be at a good place to get a well paying job as some form of mechanic or repair man and, probably, will start his own business. For him, I think the future looks very bright.