noahvanderhoff

Sega Saturn is one of my favourites. My hot-take is that the longbox NA Saturn cases have by far the best box art of any console, particularly on the Working Designs releases.

I will now for sure Back when I was collecting before I wouldn't unless there was something suspicious about the case/label.

Maybe doubtful in your collection, but it is highly likely there are repros on new collector's shelves without them realizing it.

Most of what I still have of my collection was purchased from about 2002-2015 timeframe, so like others said, basically all of it had appreciated significantly. However, one purchase that sticks out for me because at the time I thought I was overpaying (but just had-to-have-it) was a nearly mint CIB big-box Earthbound for $200 in 2011. My wife got mad at me for wasting money, and I felt guilty about it for a while. How the turntables..

This is a really good point.

Yea, I'm just venting Like I said, this was always a problem I'm just shocked at how many high-quality counterfeits are out there now being mass-manufactured. Used to be an NA thread for pointing out and reporting anyone even selling repros on eBay; that would be next to impossible now.

Yea, fair point. I agree with this for higher value games. It makes it really hard to find a "deal" anywhere though. You're going to have to build out the entire collection paying full market prices. Takes a bit of the fun out of it to never snag a deal in the wild or on eBay. I don't mean it has to be a 'steal', but I've always found most of my below-market value eBay finds are from "general" sellers that don't specialize specifically in video games. Locally, say there's a $20 Super Metroid listed on craigslist/kijiji. If you message them saying "show me a pic of the board" they're going to ignore you and sell it to the next person. If you take the risk and just buy it, it might be a counterfeit. It's just a risk I guess that you have to take. But with so many counterfeits out there now, at least compared to what I used to see, the risk is a lot higher. Probably lots of you have a few of them in your collections right now without even knowing it.

I've recently gotten back into collecting SNES games again after selling off nearly my whole collection in 2016 to help pay off our mortgage. Naively thought 2016 was peak value for SNES, and I could just buy everything back later if I wanted to. Well, now I have the urge to buy everything back, however, I'm looking at eBay listings and even local listings and Facebook groups. There are high-quality counterfeits EVERYWHERE. The collecting community has always been a bit split on repros, but for the most part if it's clearly labelled reproduction (especially for games that were never released, or translation patches) I've always been ok with it (ex. Timewalk Games releases). However, these are full-on COUNTERFEIT games, not reproductions, and they are done extremely well. The eBay listings don't even mention reproduction and other than the circuit board look absolutely identical. How is everyone else dealing with this? You can't ask every seller to open a snes shell and send a pic of the board, most casual sellers won't know how to do it. Only buying from sellers that will do this really limits buying options. What about local pickups? Flea-markets, yardsales, pawnshops - you can't trust any cart you see in the wild. Do I have to bring a security-bit with me everywhere I go? Even then I won't have PCB pictures for each game ready to examine. This is a much bigger hassle than it used to be and it's honestly turning me off collecting for SNES which is just really disappointing as I was excited to get back into it. Again, this isn't a new discussion, but it seems to me it's a much worse problem than it used to be, eBay obviously doesn't care as they are still getting all those sweet transactions fees on each sale.

This post cursed me as I've now had 7 cases in the last 2 days. Either Canada Post has suddenly started losing mail like crazy or scammers be scamming.

Picked up this boxed/complete backwards compatible model PS3 a couple of weeks ago. Not an amazing pickup, however, it was 100% free. Guy listed it to give away, no strings attached. I expected perhaps it didn't work, or other issues - but the thing works like a dream and is like new condition. Icing on the cake is it came with 5 games and 3 of them are still new/sealed (Bioshock 2, Doom 3 and Fallout New Vegas).

I have sold about 100 games per month the last 4 months, all shipped via lettermail. All items under $50, and I've only had 2 cases so far. One case for 'item not received' and one for 'item not as described' where a buyer said I shipped the wrong game. I think he was just confused; as the item he said he received is a game I've never owned or sold). If you're asking this question you obviously know the risk - any buyers that open any case for any reason (even my item not as described case) - eBay immediately will side with the buyer because there is no tracking number. I think I've been fairly lucky, Canada Post lettermail is very reliable.