Oobgarm

I'd say the sheen/finish of the label and the level of color saturation would be the first things I'd check. An extremely glossy label would likely be a repro giveaway (folks on ebay sell ones like these for a few bucks each). If the label is a bit darker or oversaturated color-wise, that could be a sign too. I'd wager that most consumer-grade printers aren't going to be able to hit the quality of the originals. Text that isn't super sharp (especially the small type) would warrant further inspection. One other (perhaps a bit more obvious) thing to keep in mind would be the condition of the label vs the cart. If the label is super clean and other facets of the cart show signs of age or wear, that could be a potential red flag as well. Not all cart labels are created equal though - even 3rd party one can differ in quality by publisher and release date.

I have one of those - it was a sell sheet distributed to retailers.

Hey buddy, good to see you on here!

That's the same philosophy I use on my 2600 collection. At least with the large publishers this defined set is obtainable. Label variants in the Sears and Atari libraries definitely make it fun to do. Nothing obscenely expensive and mostly available while hunting in the wild, yet just enough challenge with a handful of titles to keep it interesting. If I have to go after a "complete set" as defined by "every retail release for a system in a given territory", I'd still go after a US NES licensed set, sans Stadium Events. I got close once many years ago and moved on from it. But seeing now that I'm close to having half the library again through casual purchases over the years, I'd like to think it would motivate me to keep going.

And I don't think I'd have even known about it without you guys and your podcast being my entertainment while commuting, so thank you!

Same thing on desktop. Must be some bugs present after getting it all back working again from the outage late last week. I see some others mentioned it above, so at least it's a known thing and it's been forwarded along.

Hello all. I haven't been around game forums much since the late aughts, was very active on the Digitpress forums back then. It'll be a challenge to add forums back into my daily Internet routines, hopefully I can get the habit to stick. I like what I see here. My original foray into collecting was NES in the late 90's. I was close to a set of carts back then, mainly missing unlicensed and SE of course. I never expected to really stick to collecting and sold a large chunk of it off before 2000 hit. Of course most of us can all lament silly choices like that with the knowledge we have now. I worked for FuncoLand/Gamestop for close to a decade, so that was my main driving force to collect. I was around games all the time back then. I've kinda meandered on since, grabbing things that caught my interest - hoping to have time to play all of the cool games but never actually having time to dedicate to them of course. I've never been much of a set collector otherwise, as time/money/space have pretty much dictated that I steer clear of such an endeavor. Not as heavy of a collector as I used to be, as I'm doing the single parent thing these days and don't have as much time for it, but I do find that there are times the pendulum swings pretty heavily towards this hobby and I get those collecting desires I once had. I'm still a fan of NES (back to collecting for it again), also have a fair number of Atari 2600, Famicom, PS2, and Xbox 360 titles. Sitting at over 3,500 physical titles at the moment. Could very easily be a much higher number without all of the sales I've done over the years, but only a few serious regrets among them all. I have most of those regrets in the form of an old cash trade-in receipt from FuncoLand from 1999 (Snow Bros. and Rescue Rangers 2 for less than $10 cash each? Ugh) I have a few heavies on different systems, like Snatcher, Burning Rangers, and Rule of Rose. Lots of desirables and mid-tier stuff in there, too. Fairly well-rounded, I suppose. Just recently moved into a new house, so I've been working at getting things organized to my liking - and realizing that I have a ton more gaming-related stuff than I realized. Even still, I'm always adding to the pile, so I'd imagine these forums will facilitate that.

Have to figure that prices had been inching up for a while, and the quarantine did influence higher prices - lots of bored folks at home needing activities to pass time. And since nostalgia helps level off the anxiety we've all been going through, prices jumped as more decided to go the classic games route to fill that need. The Collector's Quest podcast had a recent episode where they discussed this very phenomenon. Pokemon, Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man, Silent Hill - all well-known franchises that a bump makes sense. Wii Sports is a great example too, as well as typical fare like Mario games (though not as drastic of a change). Nightmare on Elm Street and Skyblazer are the exceptions, as they were well on their way up before things hit.