RH

I felt that was the awesomest part of the whole experience. That, and hearing crickets and bull frogs act like it was late in the evening, but it was actually the middle of the day. When that happened I just looked at my wife with an “Aha!” Moment and I told her that it was no wonder people hundreds and thousands of years ago were freaked out by it. The sky goes dark and everything acts like it’s late at night for 5 minutes!

Yesterday I wondered why Carmen Sandiego was so hard, then I read the requirements. So, eh, why does this one have to be 100%ed rather than just beaten by capturing Carmen? I’m not saying these goals have to be easy but that did sound a bit unnecessary. (Full disclosure, I have never played this game.)

I don’t think so. The GG has a lesser resolution but they can have more colors on the screen. They have the same CPU and can run each others ROMs but the result is not the same. Close, but not the same. Still, I was aware they were the same game and possibly even the same ROM, so I was willing to accept either as the answer. I couldn’t accept SNES or Genesis because those were different games.

Technically it’s the Game Gear version but since they play the same, I was willing to also accept SMS, so you win this round Mr. Gloves.

Neither answer is correct, but you’re on the right path.

Starsky’s bored. Here’s all but some dialog. This should be a dead give away. Remember I’m looking for game name and system.

It depends on where you go. Yes, there's a lot of toxicity over there, but mods for subs can do a decent job of creating walled gardens. I don't know enough about FB to know if you can do that with any type of community page you create, but I do know that unlike Reddit, if you join FB, you get all of the baggage that comes with it, peppered around whatever you're doing. At least, according to my wife.

Physical you say... well my interests has piqued a bit! I don't buy much DLC, unless it's an old game that you can find anywhere for a few bucks.

Brother, you have no idea how well I can identify. I'm not looking up to dig up the past, my I was waaaaaay at the bottom of the social totem pole in Middle School.

Exactly. Same here. I only used LinkedIn because as a developer, you're not going to get work when you need a new gig otherwise. Yes, there are alternatives. Old friends: Emails, go out for coffee when you're in town or just call them Selling stuff: Here, Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, Etsy... there are other avenues. Niche Communities: There are other sites like this place for other communities, plus sites like Reddit can be hit-or-miss but can do alright. This is, in my opinion, probably the greatest "strength" of Facebook but I also find it also the least necessary. I'm fine "hanging out" and discussing my hobby here. I don't need a new venue for that. Legos, as an example, have several sites and places as well. If it's a common hobby, there's usually a hobby website dedicated to providing a place for it's community to connect. Politics: Lol, who want's that?! Well, if you do, there are tons of places. X, Mastedon, Truth Social, Rumble... pick and lane (or three) and there's an avenue for you.

Looks like the "VTG NINTENDO NES SUPER MARIO SANTA XMAS PEPSI LRG STORE DISPLAY GAME BOY TETRIS" market has exploded.

I had a FB account back when everyone migrated from MySpace. I kept it for, maybe, a year and deleted it, never too return. A few years ago, my wife had a business given too her that was local marketing company. I helped some with the ad campaigns and such for the companies associated account. The interface is terrible, I don't think searching old material is easy, and the whole thing is just designed to keep having people hit that feeder bar. I was glad when my wife gave up the company a year later. I know people want to be social and, much like eBay, it's hard to kill a behemoth of synergy like that, but I just don't know why people put up with it. It's like a place that no one loves (except, maybe, influencers who are pulling in $100k a month from the place) and, yet, no one leaves.

I was expecting something more akin to this:

Ok, next hint isn't going to be another expanded photo, but some details. This title had a very wide release across several consoles.

Yeah, the last one in 2017, my family was ready with our glasses and we drove an hour and a half away to a town called Bravard, NC. The skies were mostly clear and, I kid you not, about 1 minute before totality, a cloud covered the sun... and then about 2 minutes after the eclipse it passed by!

I can agree that it's 100% speculation but the conclusions I have come from working in manufacturing and working with QA departments. Numbers don't just get stamped for no reason so when we see patterns arise and we know the purpose of most of this type of behavior in manufacturing, there's a lot we can assume and probably be 95% correct but, still, being very-likely correct is not a fact. That said, anyone know anyone who is Japanese and knows there equivalent of LinkedIn? I would LOVE to find an employee that would know about this. Howard use to frequent Nintendo Age. I wonder if he'd know but I doubt he's accessible now like he use to be.

Well there's a flip-side to that coin. I still consider myself "new" to this crowd because I joined Nintendo Age in 2016! When you have been collecting games for so long that you could remember getting a Stadium Events for $300 and just about any other sealed title for no more than $200, it's hard to believe these jaw-dropping prices because for so long, there might have been a few collectors around with deep pockets, there were never people around that could consistently drop higher-five-figure amounts on anything. You kind of get sticker-shock when you see that much money floating around a hobby that hasn't been that way for the prior 20 years. I imagine that's the shock because even I feel that way from doing this for about 8 years now.

I don't think it's because it's "safe", per se. I don't vote hoping to pick the one everyone else will pick so that my personal brackets look good, I vote for the games I like. But the thing is that even around here with a bunch of well-seasoned gamers, there are many of us who are primarily familiar with the most-popular titles for the system. I loved the Genesis as a kid but I didn't play many titles back then. I've subsequently given several a try since then and the one I've gone back too the most sense being an adult is honestly Zero-Wing. Of course I first discovered it when the "All Your Base" meme-craze hit in the late-90s but when I downloaded the ROM back then, I really enjoyed it and when I got into retro-gaming around 2016, it was a game I'd find to play and now that it's on the NSO, it's by far my most-played Genesis title. I wanted Zero Wing to do a bit better but the fact is, many of you are shmup fans and others aren't so much. That was a set back. Then there are of you that are serious about your shmups and this doesn't compete with the top-shelf titles. You all would want one of those to be king of the list, but you're also kind of in the minority against the whole. The same is true for many of these other titles that I've only heard in passing and sense Genesis game play is generally a mid-priority of mine, games like Splatterhouse or Rocket Knight are probably never going to get played for more than 5 minutes. So.... we all vote off of our experience and what we know is that we all loved Sonic 2. I will say I am surprised, though. Sonic 2 is great but IMHO, Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles are peak-Sonic so I would have though those games would have made it further. That said, I don't feel we're voting a "safe" vote. We're just voting what we know and enjoy vs. something we've heard of, but is new to us. The only way to get around this is to require that "if you vote, you have to have put X hours in the game". There are some games I had zero-experience with and I had to YouTube search. Those games just don't have a chance. I don't have time to play them so my opinions are based on 10 seconds of game play. 30 seconds tops, if it catches my attention.

I could never really get into any sports on TV except for "Extreme Sports" in the 90s (man, watching Tony Hawk pull off the first 1080 live was insane!!!) and I always felt golf was the most boring sport eeeeeever, until I actually tried it, fell in love with it and I learned why those guys on TV were/are insanely good at what they do. I would watch golf a lot just because I was so incredibly incapable compared to what they were doing, I was legitimately impressed. Over the past 20 years of marriage, my wife and I have had opportunities to go to various sports games for free or cheap and I have to say the experience is 1,000x better to be in an arena. The food, the energy, the fan service--all of that makes it an experience that is worth going too and it helps you get into the game. I just can't do that at home. Oh, I forgot, there is also one big exception every 2 years--the Olympics. I've been a BIG Olympics nerd for as long as I can remember. I don't know why. Maybe it's because you have a chance to bounce around 20 different sports, often to sports you never see or care about otherwise, and it's fun to pull for your home country and/or under dogs that do well. And last, my wife found Banana Ball about 18 months ago. She became obsessed with it and we watched every game on YouTube last year. This year, she's toned down the viewing because we really hope to get tickets in the lottery for when they come to Greenville, SC, and she doesn't want to wear-out the experience before we get to go there. Still, getting Banana Ball tickets is really tough, unless you're willing to scalp, which we probably won't do... probably. I have a way of making her dreams come true.

The more I've tried to think about this, I'm not 100% sure this is just a facility code. A while ago, I speculated that this is more likely a production line number. I would say it was a print run number, but we also know that there are a few numbers we keep seeing again and again, across several games like "21" and "23" but there are also noticeable gaps and other numbers I don't recall ever seeing. I can't quite say what this number exactly is but I'm pretty sure it's tied to a facility + something else. Part of it's reference point is likely an assembly, or final assembly, line. Imagine you have a factory capable of assembling the individual components of Game Boy game parts. However, since they were expecting to mass produce a lot of different games, maybe Nintendo had 5x GB production lines, each capable of making, say, 10,000 games a day. That'd give Nintendo the ability to produce 50,000 games a day. This is just a hunch. Setting up assembly factories takes a lot of work and money. It's easier to add a new line in one location for additional output than creating a new facility, however, we know that Nintendo definitely did that for the SNES in Mexico and, they had some stuff manufactured in China from time to time. Whatever the two digit code is, I find it fascinating, and very thorough, that this code also represents a ROM revision on the cartridge. If there is no letter after the two-digits, this is the first version of the game. If they had to patch the game due to some breaking bug, or possibly copyright change or for whatever reason, they put an "A" at the end of the code. If they needed to make another change, it was incremented to a "B", and so on. This method of using these two-digits plus a letter to mark the facility/line plus revision was common from the NES era up through the DS and maybe 3DS era. Switch cartridges, however, do not have any such stamps on their labels. But what this tells us is that the full production process for cartridges happened at one time, on likely one line for ALL Nintendo cartridge games. Going back to the assumed controller machine, the probably had a machine where they could load a game ROM, enter a game code (something like "DMG-TM"), enter a revision "empty, "A", B", etc.) and then the system would get to work, flashing the ROM chips, putting the PCBs into the cartridge shells, screwing it shut, stamping the facility/line + optional ROM revision code on the label and then sticking this on the cart. It might not have happened this way, but for accurate, quality control, I'm assuming these RAM chips were being flashed as part of the same assembly process as the sticker stamping and labeling. Maybe not, but to assure accuracy, I bet it was. I only point this out the say too two things. This is definitely part of the lot-code marking info Nintendo would use for lot tracking because they've always had a high standard of manufacturing quality. The fact that games like Tetris, which was a VERY high volume game, has probably 5-6 different stamps for a same label variant, I'm willing to assume Nintendo had at least 5 production lines available. Switching games was probably a matter of loading game data via floppies into a controller machine, changing out the label rolls, pushing the start button and boom, the line goes from printing Tetris games to printing Baseball games, etc. Another point to note, and this goes beyond just the cartridges, but at least for Game Boy, Nintendo did not fully assemble the games and packaging at the production facilities for the cartridges. I know this because several years ago, I was able to speak to a guy who when he was a kid, his dad was a courier/delivery person for Nintendo. Through some miss-shuffle, this guy had 3x boxes, each with about 80x cartridges of F-1 Racing. The boxes had typical font-stamping and all of the carts in one box he had cracked open looked perfect and mint, so there was no way he was faking it. I tried to buy one of the boxes off of him but he wasn't interested in selling. The idea was, Nintendo of Japan would ship out the games to their respective regions in cartridge-only form, in their plastic dust shells, and then local packaging would assemble the boxes/manuals/etc. This makes sense because that printed material would add a lot of unnecessary volume to shipping, so shipping just the cartridges from Japan to the UK or Japan to Washington state would have made sense. I know that's a lot of rambling but the TL;DR is that there's a lot about the manufacturing process we don't know about any game Nintendo made, but there are tell-tale details that give us some clues into the process. That 2-digit code hasn't been 100% solved but we've at least figured out it's tied to manufacturing and we at least know that if there's a letter present, you have a later ROM version of the game.

Thanks for posting this! I, too, have been on a similar hunt for specific details for a prototype device that was made for the Genesis called New Leaf (or Game Factory) cartridges which were the earliest iteration of flash cartridges which Blockbuster Video would use to load games and rent out. There’s a lot more information out there on that business venture but other than an obituary for one of the executives for the New Leaf company, I’ve found no one who’s worked on this project. I point it out because even though this device/cartridge for the Minnesota Lottery is quite different, myself and others around here appreciate the effort to find the niche details. Another thing you can try is to go and talk to engineering and see if they’ve kept historical archives. They may not know about this project, but they might be able to rummage through some filing cabinets and find drawings for schematics or other design documents. Ask nicely… and they might let you keep them!

No, it is not.

Sorry, but no.

Wow! This might even be a more spicier, hotter take around here than "Mario 2 is NOT a REAL Mario game!"

Here’s the bigger image.