RH

I managed to get an exceptional deal (and I mean literal pennies on the dollar) for a brand new PS5 Blu-Ray Edition from someone who didn't know how to use discs with the system and said the "drive didn't read". I did my research and they were wrong and I think they used it as an excuse to make a return and I managed to get this through the retailer. I have set this up, loaded and played Astro Boy from DLC and Sonic Frontiers from disc. Both games, and the controller work 100% fine. I wiped the unit so now it's otherwise 100% new and comes with everything but the box. It has cables, the one controller, and the two manuals and the PS5 stand. To be clear, what this bundle is for is: Sony PlayStation 5 -Blu-Ray Edition Sonic Frontiers - Opened Spiderman: Miles Morales - SEALED Asking $375 for the lot. I bought this as a small part of a LARGE lot of almost 100 new, modern titles that are almost all entirely sealed. I'll be posting more photos later, but I'd like to use this PS5 to recoup much of the costs. That said, as a deal for VGSers, if someone wants to make an offer, feel free. I can let this go for a good price if anyone's interested. If I don't get any takers in the next couple of days, it's going to eBay. Also, I'll add photos of the games and add them to this post at some point. Overwhelmingly, most are Switch titles, but I probably have about 10/15 other X-Box Series X, X-Box One, PS4 and PS5 titles. Some of them Triple-A's, so check back on that too.

Exactly. Regarding your last part, though, it didn't prevent companies from trying to hide behind really great and imaginative art! It might not have made a game good for a review, but if you have a killer box art, there was a reasonable chance you'd sell more than a few copies of your game.

Ha, right when the pandemic was in full swing, we were doing grocery pick-ups at Food Lion and every time, they had a bag filled with trial items. I have no clue how or why this was organized, but it was and it lasted for about 6 months. Every time in the little bag was a Red Bull, which no one in our house drinks. By the end of the promotion we probably had about 20 Red Bulls in the top of our cabinet. Eventually my wife just put them on FB Marketplace a Free with Pick-up. I did try one, which was my first time ever, it wasn't bad but I wasn't a fan. No shame to those that like it but, honestly, I didn't get the appeal. I wish they'd bring back Sobe Dragon Fruit (or something like that), though. That was my drink jam.

I'm going to go with the N64 personally, even if I was 15 when they came out. I wonder how much one of those kiosks go for?

Ah, thanks for that info regarding where the "mass" of these late sales on eBay came from. One of the main questions I had was that all of a sudden over the past 2 years or so, almost every single game on the market on eBay has come from the St. Andrews Blockbuster, since you can identify the shop from the game number. I'm assuming when this experiment ended, someone at St. Andrews must have ended up with the lot of 50 or so, sat on them for ages and then ended up hawking them to a game company. Jeez, I wish I could have known that before any were sold. It would have been an info gold mine to have pictures of all of those carts.

If I had just $100 to spend, I always browse the NES tapes for ones in good shape I don't have that are $10 or less. If nothing catches my eye, I head over to the N64 area and then last the PS1/PS2 section. Of course, I am trying to get a full set of Game Gear games but to this day I've not found anything uncommon in the 4 shops I have around me so, even though I'd prefer to put it all in Game Gear, that's just not gonna happen.

I think what he meant by "your local spot" is your local game store... unless your store also sells groceries. That's both cool and a hard-to-accept pivot for game stores to make it these days. Still, seeing groceries would be a better experience to me than seeing all those Pop Vinyls littering stores these days.

I agree with @Sumez comments but to it more simply, there's a difference between a game that kids can enjoy playing vs. a game designed specifically to appeal to little children, and I'm not knocking older fans either. When my son and daughter were both under the age of 5, we enjoyed playing Candyland together. If you're familiar, there's no skill at all. Role a dice, land on a square and, occasionally, you move forward or backward extra spaces. The only appeal to children is that it's "candy" theme and since it's luck-based, they can beat their parents. But then there are games like pick-up-sticks or checkers. Each is very different but a 5 year old could learn how to play them. However, skill will vary from person to person. A 5-6 yo kid who's played a lot of checkers a lot with his grand pa could probably mop the floor with an adult who's only been casually exposed to the game. A kid can learn it with a degree of mastery. Same with pick-up-sticks. It's a dead simple concept but the skills involved to be good are earned with time and young kids, maybe as young as 3 can start to get into it. You literally pick up sticks, plus getting hyper-focused to see if your opponent moves other sticks is "fun" to smaller people. So Pokemon is like Candy Land to us seasoned RPGers. Super Mario Bros is more like checkers. The analogy isn't perfect, but it gets the point across. By the time Pokemon came out, I wasn't offended by it's existence, nor did I laugh at anyone who enjoyed it for being "simple' minded. It was cool. It just wasn't for me. I had matured as an RPGer well beyond it.

I played this around 2005, I think, and I recall having the same general opinion. I struggled between giving it a 4 or a 5 and went with a 4. I also know it shouldn't matter but for some reason, sprite-based RTSs are more enjoyable to me, running in an isometric perspective. It seems like it'd be cooler in the 2000s era for any game to high quality 3D graphics but when it came to the overall experience, I preferred playing all games like this in 2D.

Regardless, Nintendo has to give the stamp of approval on these games.

Earthbound? Regardless, they stamped their name on it. I didn't know all of there RPGs were made out of house, though. Maybe Earthbound is too? There's also the Xenoblade games, though those might not entirely count since I've only tried XC2.

1211.

Well, I know this will be a hot take but other than the Paper Mario games, Nintendo can't seem to make an RPG that I neither enjoy or feel isn't uninspired. Even for the Paper Mario series, the appeal is largely playing an RPG in the Mario universe. If it were some other generic theme, I wouldn't enjoy it. I'm not saying RPGs have to be complex to be good but, eh... Nintendo needs to do a bit more work in their storytelling for me to really get pulled into their RPGs. The ironic thing is that some series like Metroid tell fantastic stories and those games have used little to no dialog to get the point across.

Yeah, I had the same general experience but as with most British humour, to me most of it isn't funny until about the second or third viewing. The first time I saw it, I thought it was dumb and then didn't get it. Then I heard people quote it just in general and a few months later people were watching it again. I had more chuckles that time. The next year on another viewing, I found it more enjoyable by a wide margin. I wouldn't say it's the best comedy ever, and I've probably not seen it in over a decade, but it was definitely fun to watch more than a few times. Regardless, that first viewing felt rough and I just didn't get it.

Corn mash is good for catching pigs too, apparantly.

I've not been much of an indie/homebrew guy for the NES but I have to say Full Quiet has looked amazing to me and I definitely am tempted to buy one.

I own Metal Gear Solid, but other than 5 minutes of the original NES Metal Gear game, I've never played a Metal Gear game. They are high on my list though. I definitely need to get the PS2 titles before they get too insanely priced with time. I feel like all of those games would be right up my alley.

I’d wait, cause otherwise the rest of us will steal the win! lol I think I have a strong educated guess on 3 of them.

Generally, I'd agree but considering that I have over 1,400 games and "collecting" is often more than just playing, that's why I'm in the camp of wanting something like a sealed Blue Thunder VHS tape. There are certainly a lot of games I'd like to play one day that I don't own and, yes, I am the gamer who prefers to play on OG games and hardware when that's an option, however, with over 1,400 games, you don't really need more games to play cause if I did, I was doing something wrong when I acquired all of those games because if most of those games don't have an enjoyable purpose, why did I buy them in the first place. I mean, my shelves might be about 15% "filler" because I pick up cheap, excellent condition stuff when I find it at thrift shops, or if I buy a lot of games and Madden 19xx is in it, I'll likely keep it because no one wants to buy it but, still, the other 80-85% of my library are very-playable games. If I have 5 left to get, it's going to be rarer stuff that I find to be really cool for a purpose. It's not so much about acquiring "value" but there's a reason why NWC carts are valuable and it's not just because it's rare. It's because the NWC was probably the coolest gaming "thing" to ever have and owning one of the related carts is about the awesomest thing you could collect, other than maybe a verified original NES and/or PVM they used in the competition. Even with something like that, though, it's not as immediately recognizable for what it was.

No, your interpretation is correct in what I was attending. To my knowledge, the first Pokemon game I ever played was the original and that was about 2-3 years ago for a couple of hours. I felt it was time to try and give it an honest try. I think the reason why there might be a high-number of retro-gamers that have never touched it becuase in general, if you are about my age or younger, you saw that this was a "kids" game and didn't see much interest in it. I mean, Nintendo made a lot of game, but IMHO, Pokemon was the last, great series Nintendo created that was 100% geared towards children. Since their older fans from the NES days were mostly pushing 20, we didn't have an interest in playing this game, at all, so playing it now is more of a historical curiousity. And no shame towards anyone 40+ for liking Pokemon. I'm just saying, back in 1999-2000, if someone was playing Pokemon, they were probably 15 years old or younger, and "15" is being generous. EDIT @Sumez Oddly enough, when FortNite first came out and was starting to get traction, I didn't know anything about it culturally speaking. I downloaded it, gave it a try, sort of saw the appeal but it seemed like a game that'd have a flash-in-the-pan moment of popularity and would then blow away. Man was I wrong.

Interesting call out. Had I asked this question just 2-3 years ago, I too would have been in the "never played a Pokemon game" camp too. I gave it a try a little while ago (and posted about it in one thread) and I just couldn't see the appeal. I mean, I was about 40 at the time and I get that it wasn't made for me, but even back then in 1999, I didn't see the appeal, even though I was just a few years older than the target demographic. I think Pokemon excelled at introducing a younger generation to RPGs with a novel goal of collecting versus grinding. I guess I could see the appeal of that to someone who's possibly never touched an RPG. However, as someone who'd played countless RPGs at that point, it just seemed too simple. But there's still something about it that makes me want to give it another go. Pokemon Snap! might be more to my liking, though. I kind of like the idea of hunting and photographing animals rather than catching them and grinding them for battle.

I'm trying to recoup some funds from my last (awesome!) purchase I made from you. I'd like that Zelda for a conditional upgrade of mine, but I need to sell a few things firs to build up those Paypal funds. Anyway, let me know if you sell it elsewhere. I won't ask you hold it for me, but I wanted to let you know, I am interested. Regardless of if I get it or not, GLWS. Your prices have seemed reasonable to me and I'm a cheapskate.

Can you stream those old cartoons anywhere, in full? I have a Super Mario Bros DVD but it doesn't have the live action bumpers with Lou Albano, nor is it the complete series. Anyway, it'd be cool to all stream and discuss episodes around the same time. I couldn't find a... legal site to stream Captain N but The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! is available on Tubi for free, and I think if you have Prime, you can possibly get it over there ad free.

I've wanted to take my complete GB set to Antiques Roadshow if/when it was in my area but I wanted to wait until about 2028, after the 40th anniversary of the GB.