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Yes, this is exactly what I’m talking about! Programmers making the game suddenly go into high difficulty mode without you expecting it. Sometimes it’s very subtle which is why I had to question myself on many occasions whether I’m just overthinking it but this video helps to explain a lot! It’s not quite the same as levels progressively getting harder and the AI being more challenging, because that’s something you’d expect the programmers to do with most games.

I know for sure this discussion topic and the fatigue factor are entirely separate issues. With your point, it’s more the game being a constant and you being a diminishing factor (fatigue kicking in). With what I’m trying to address, it’s more you being a relative constant, and the game suddenly sneaks you with an uppercut and then reverting to its typical game mode (and your scores/performance will revert back to its usual standard).

I guess I’m referring more the intentional cheating the programmer puts in, but the sort of unexpected plays where it seems out of the blue without telling you. With Geometry Wars 2 in my example, the stage is for 3 minutes with you trying to blast every enemy ship as much as you can. There is no difficulty setting, just you and the time limit. So with my gaming experience on this stage, I usually can get an average of 20 to 40 million points. Then at random times, I get about 8 million points and it seems suddenly a different difficulty. Then for the next 20 minutes I would go back to my average scoring range again. I think your Mario Party 3 example seems to fit the theme of this discussion. Basically at any stage you feel like “damn, this game is suddenly cheating its ass off!”, and then the next few minutes it plays fair again.

Oops, I stuffed up! Can a mod please transfer this thread to the Gauntlet section?

Sometimes I feel cheated when playing video games. The cheating seems beyond the simple hit detection error and bad/sloppy programming. It’s like a whole other level of cheat mode where at times I feel the game is playing me rather than I’m playing it. Does anyone know what I’m getting at? Or is it just me going insane/senile through all the years of pixel staring and witnessing one too many glitches? My game example is Geometry Wars 2. I can get pretty decent scores on this one, and at one time, I had broken through the top 500 on the online leaderboard on one of its stages. However, there would be random times where I got beat up by the ships bad and hardly any bonuses crop up. It really feels like every so often, the game sets a new difficulty setting without notifying me! Anyone have any similar experiences with this paranoid/philosophical take on gaming?

This topic question has never really crossed my mind, and I feel it really doesn’t matter in the whole scheme of things. Because.. When I play games, the challenge is one contributing factor to the entertainment. The “fun factor” is ultimately what I want, and has several ingredients in each stage/segments: - atmosphere created by the graphics and sounds - level of creativeness - the balance of difficulty in the environments/bosses (too little/too much = bad) - other? So as long as the overall content in a stage is great, I don’t really mind if the final stage is hardest or easier than the prior stages. Taking Zelda Wind Waker and Mario Galaxy as my examples in games I’ve completed fully. I honestly can’t remember which dungeons/castles were the hardest, but I will give both a 10 for their overall entertainment value.

I feel the issue should really about Nintendo (or the original producer of the game) jumping in and do a service to their fans who have a hunger for the prototype experience. It doesn’t have to be present day, but at least sometime in the future. Particularly when the prototype owner doesn’t want anyone else to own their copy or experience their prototype version. Really, Nintendo should have the final say in the copyright of the gaming experience, not the prototype owner. There seems to always be a grey area whether in gaming or collecting, that ethics become obligatory murky. This is likely one of those instances.

I tend to use a lot of random words and dry humour, which sometimes can backfire spectacularly. However, I think you should place less emphasis on the word “wasted” and focus more on the usage of “blood, sweat, and tears”. The context being, there’s a lot of time, passion and dedication spent on one’s collection. The question then becomes, if you put in the hard yards to build your inventory and you enjoy what you do, then whatever the monetary value becomes, why the need to feel guilt? I personally think guilt should only come in play when you’re not fulfilling other life’s necessities. Otherwise, a hobby is a hobby, as far as I’m concerned.

You’ve completely missed the context of what was being said. People judging you from merely the value of your games, ain’t worth your time because they don’t know the amount of energy and time that has been “wasted” on the accumulation process of your collection. I also believe this plays a large part of why a lot of us resist a sellout. Even if one day we become millionaires and can buy up a ton more games, how easy would it be to re-accumulate what had been sold off? (Answer: not very easy)

Good casual read! Just a suggestion, maybe take a pic of your guitar collection or the zombie DVD collection. Would be a neat touch, and might add to the forum collector’s atmosphere. I personally love seeing a unique collection or subsets in picture format, so I guess this is also a general suggestion for any future featured monthly member.

I just remembered laughing a lot when playing Monkey Island, so if there were any death scenes, would likely be a funny one! I wish I could remember more but I haven’t completed a full length game for around 15 years now.

I feel there’s a lot of people who seem to miss the point in valuating their collection. It isn’t just a numbers calculation. How many hours did you spend time doing the bidding, the bartering, the begging, the cussing and then the buying? How many kilometres did you travel to obtain all those damn plastics and cardboards?! Now with all that in mind, how do you objectively calculate all those blood, sweat and tears that was wasted on them games? So what if you might end up with a profit at the end of the day? The chances are, you worked your ass off for that numbers gain!

The deaths in this franchise are sort of expected for a gruesome fighting genre. Although there’s a heap of variations of death sequences over the years. I can see this thread is more to do with games that have death scenes that are totally unpredictable. Secret of Monkey Island might be a candidate, but I can’t remember much of it now.

Guys, this is the dodgy bootleg version, Mega Manx.

The way I look at it, if you have genuine passion in your items and the time spent in obtaining your collection, then there’s no real price you can put on it. It’s your hard earned money in exchange for something you love. No explanation needed, no guilt needed. If, on the other hand, you have important bills or necessary things that needs to be paid but you keep buying more games, then that’s a life choice that needs to be reconsidered.

Yeah, but did you ever contemplated putting her up for an eBay listing?

Just saw this clip on Streets of Rage: Now I can see clearly why I loved this franchise so much back in the 90s. Great funk music giving this fighting series the edge in atmosphere like no other. Also, the fella in the video has serious skills to be able to listen to the music and immediately able to transfer it to the keys on a piano.

High end SM64 isn’t going to be anywhere near as rare as the high end older collectibles with well established population reports. More of the high grade SM64 will likely come out in the coming years. Even if not many more come out, you’d have to have passionate collectors willing to spend over a million bucks for a game for it to be genuinely worth that much. Organic growth is what you want to see in a market, not sudden jacked-up prices and then a sudden drop off.

I don’t think the market is crashing in the real sense. More likely the market manipulators are going into hiding or lying low, with all the spotlight currently shining on the games market. So prices are more “normalizing” rather than “crashing”.

Racing games were never really my thing back then but I can’t deny the multiplayer was what made me appreciate Mario Kart. Genuine innovation with balanced mechanics makes this game as iconic as any, I’d say.

I never said anything about being noble. I used the word “legit” graded collector, as in ones who were passionate about it before the pandemic craze. A lot of them go about their hobby without being too over the top. It’s unfortunately the loud mouths and the big egos that are commonly seen to represent the sealed/graded collecting community, which I honestly feel is a public misconception.

Congrats @Gloves! The display looks neat and compact. Love seeing newly bought homes and shelving/display projects. I’m also looking to find a bigger home for early next year to have a proper gaming setup and a display room. Threads like this help to spur me on, so keep it up!

“Plenty” was reference to plenty of VGA listed examples via eBay Europe/UK, not reference to plenty sold on eBay. To each their own on personal preferences to collect. I never come on here to push the agenda of hyping up graded games, just I like to talk about random gaming topics.

A lot of graded games are sold or traded in private. This was how I often obtained them for my collection. People would be connected via sealed gaming forums or Facebook etc. People often put in their lower-tier stuff on eBay and the rarer stuff are often kept or dealt with in private. Basically if you truly want the grails with graded stuff, you got to find connections, not look on eBay listings only.

For those initial wave of big spenders from the WATA/HA era, I would probably agree. It was all about the e-peen and hype-fest. Only they actually don’t represent what graded collecting is really about. The public have been fooled into thinking that it’s just for idiots wanting to splash their cash all over the internet. A lot of long term legit graded collectors I know are very insightful on this hobby, and aren’t interested in overspending by 100x market value.