Alder

One imports charm, please

I haven't had time to read much into it, but isn't the gist that they are being dumped, just not made public? The owner of the prototype is able to retrieve the ROM by request, but no one else has access to it - and that's what people are upset about? It'd be nice if there was a stipulation that the ROM would be made publicly available after like 20 years or something. But I responded to one of Frank's tweets with another suggestion. Since people sending games in for grading tend to care about value and exclusivity, a neat compromise would be to have the customer opt-in to have the prototype be made public, and in exchange the game is tagged with some "first discovery" label or something to try to capture it as a piece of history. But I'm sure publishing any data, prototype or not, is a legal can of worms they don't want to get into.

In the hallway, in what used to be a linen closet. We really need to figure out something better though. We're considering putting it in a bigger closet with a flap in the door and a divider to let us still use the top half. We have two male cats and they're pretty messy.

Congrats on the sale, it's pretty incredible (and worrying) how fast offers are coming in like that. My wife and I spent a few months house hunting for our first home, in our hometown, back in 2020. We looked at 7 or 8 before getting one, but we put a bid in on one and we lost to someone paying $10k less but in cash. It worked out in the end though. The place we're in now was around the same price but is way better. I agree about inspections, but I guess if they made the offer, it's on them. Our inspection saved us $5k towards a new roof but that's all that came out of it.

I guess it's the difference between investors and collectors. There are bound to be some windfall collectors, but no one's buying loose copies of Great Waldo Search as an "alternative asset"... unless they have a grand scheme of buying literally everything and hoarding it in a warehouse. All it takes is one billionaire to ruin it for the rest of us, lol.

Looks like you might be able to pin down the exact date, 12/12/1989: https://trademarks.justia.com/737/95/official-nintendo-73795456.html

I gotta say, I'm curious what you'd do with that information, haha. There might be a site that lists them, but if you were to hypothetically download a complete rom set, you could sort the files by size. And if you're comfortable in a terminal / command line, you could also sort them by size and get a nice list/table that you could copy and paste.

11/10. My favorite game of all time.

I'll stay fat, thanks

My takeaway from this is that limited releases are a bummer for pretty much everyone involved . This game looks great and I'd love to have supported the developer, but my budget hasn't always lined up with homebrew releases over the years - and sometimes I'm just inactive for months because life happens. I'm personally uninterested in "owning" a ROM, and while the piracy discussion has nuance on both sides (and may be inevitable), I don't want to see VGS associated with it. I greatly appreciate the work that goes into publishing physical releases, but I don't like the FOMO that comes along with limited releases, homebrew or not, and would very much prefer to support a print-on-demand model.

I don't know if it's circumstantial or not, but I started feeling this way a long time ago too when it comes to finding stuff in the wild. I am younger than some here but my broke-student-game-thrifting days were ~2008-2013. I've still gone to yard sales and thrift stores since then, but the amount of overpriced stuff has only gone up. The market is one thing - I'm talking about people at yard sales trying to sell a dirty PS1 with no cords for $50. After seeing that so much it's like, you know what, nevermind. I don't expect to find totes of games for $0.25 any more but so much stuff is priced at or above ebay asking prices that it's hardly worth looking. And I started to notice this as far back as 2012, only then it was 1 sale out of 10 that would be asking that - now it's 9 out of 10.

I lost a little bit, but I was mainly doing it for convenience. Chicken and rice never gets old for me, lol. I didn't make a point to stop snacking at home though, and I usually ate something else on the weekends. I liked not having to think about what to eat during the week though. I haven't been doing it since I've been able to work from home more but I should probably get back into a routine.

I meal prepped a bit last year, ate more or less the same thing for a few months straight. Lunch was a whole cooked chicken breast and a cup of white rice with butter. I kept different hot sauces at work and would eat the chicken with whatever I felt like that day. Then dinner was salmon and a sweet potato. Breakfast was kind of random, but usually either 2 slices of avocado toast or a banana. I baked the salmon with butter and garlic, made the rice in a rice cooker (short grain white rice), but boiled the sweet potatoes and (gasp) boiled the chicken breasts. I've cooked them all sorts of different ways but since I am eating them with sauce anyway, boiling actually gave a consistent quality with minimal effort.

I never get sick of reading this debate, lol. I think the answer is subjective, but I would make a distinction between the physical product being produced VS assembled. Similar to the Wisdom Tree stuff, there was that time when Richard Garriott found a bunch of old copies of Akalabeth, pieced them together and sold them. Does that count as original? It depends who you ask, but for me it does. But even as the owner of the IP, if he were to suddenly start printing new copies, even with new old stock floppies and printer paper, it's a bit harder to justify it as original.

Honestly, the older I get, the less necrobumps feel like necrobumps. A thread from 2012? That was like, yesterday, wasn't it? Oh, it was a decade ago... Anyway, Super Mario World for me. I still love them all though. Pilotwings is great, I beat it again last year - still don't know how the hell to fly the hang glider though.

I prefer NES Tetris over any other format.

ポシェット "pochette" comes from French for pouch, so I'd call it "Family Basic Game Pouch", basically a collection of games on tape. I think the Family Basic stuff is super cool, I've been wanting to get into it.

Title. I can't find them anywhere, but people seem to be selling other large box protectors like Wii U and Xbox. Maybe the demand just isn't there for it yet? The only one I found was here, but it's overseas and out of stock: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/313685789775

I'm not a SNES mega fan or anything either, but here's what comes to mind, though it's mostly your typical "must have" titles: F-Zero: launch title, still fun to play if you know the controls, great soundtrack, uses mode 7. Super R-Type: early 3rd party release, a calm and balanced but challenging space shooter with an absolute banger of a soundtrack. Starfox: First use of the Super FX chip, first Starfox game. Super Mario Kart: First in the series, easy to find CIB. Donkey Kong Country (1,2,3): Ticks a lot of boxes. Fun to replay, innovative soundtrack, unique graphics technology, defined the Donkey Kong series. Megaman X (1,2,3): Consistently well designed games, and the SFC versions are still affordable. Sparkster: A bit pricey, but a fun little platformer if you get a chance to play it. IMO it's the best Rocket Knight game, Konami did a great job with the SNES release. Yoshi's Island: Really shows off everything the SNES can do. I love the art style and it's just so well put together. Super deep too, 100%ing everything will take you a long time. SFC version is pretty cheap. Zelda ALttP: Best game in the world, no big deal (totally objective fact not just my opinion) Hold up, you know kanji but not hiragana/katakana? Dang, that's an enviable position to be in honestly. If you're up to it, learning katakana would at least help a lot with navigating menus and dialogue options. They're both nothing compared to kanji. It helps that games tend to use a lot of loan words.

This is my first time using combined shipping on ebay. I loaded up my cart with a bunch of things from the same seller, over 70 items. The cart automatically combines shipping and it shows a shipping fee of $25 for everything. But when I go to check out, it says "To make your checkout easier, we've grouped these items for you to purchase first". It only has the first 40 items and the shipping is still > $20. Is my only option to go through with 2 transactions and spend double the shipping I was quoted in the cart? Is it limited based on value or number of items? Is this set by the seller or by ebay?

Great find! I checked the manual too but my brain read it as ビラブト. The pyramid theme makes complete sense for ピラ to reflect that. "プト" from Egypt sounds plausible to me too. I wonder why they translated it as Birabuto then instead of Piraputo (or Pyra-something). The water theme for Muda made me think Bermuda, and it turns out the Mario wiki makes that connection as well. So I checked out Birabuto - it was a mistranslation, and was a mashup of pyramid and Egypt, like you said. Mystery solved https://www.mariowiki.com/Birabuto_Kingdom

Lol, some day I'll get around to having an actual game room. To be serious though, I really like the cassette tape idea, but I may end up just going NintendoTwizer style with loose carts on a shelf, probably with (aftermarket) dust covers, and without the index letter tabs.

Okay, my Japanese isn't that good, but I noticed that Birabuto (ビラブト) is pretty close to a conversion of "Beloved" to Katakana ~(ビーラブド), but I can't find anything online making that connection. It could just be a made up word, or a combination of words. The other kingdom names are Muda (ミューダ), Easton (イーストン), and Chai (チャイ), none of which were changed when the game was translated to English. Not sure what Muda could be (Bermuda?), but having "Easton" and "Chai" be original names makes me think the others could be loan words. A similar discussion could be had for other games, like the town of Kasuto (カスト) in Zelda II ("Cast" town). Anyone have any insight?

I really wish Minecraft was around when I was a kid. A few years ago, my cousin's kid was showing me the world he built. He was maybe 12 years old at the time, and he had a redstone circuit set up to do addition in binary. I'm like... dude, this is college level computer engineering stuff, lol. It's exactly the kind of thing I would've dove headfirst into. Mario Maker is great too. I've played it a lot, but find it really hard to publish a level since I want things to be perfect. In general I feel less creative as I get older. Kids just make something funny and move on with their lives, lol.

After becoming a dad two months ago, I've had all sorts of exciting things running through my mind. One of those is that I can't wait to start sharing my love of games. Now, I don't think there's anything necessarily special about a "first" game, but I have felt it could be a nice, poetic gesture to have a little bit of influence here. I'm curious to the parents out there, is this something you ever considered? In all likelihood it'll be spontaneous, and I'm definitely fine with him building his own interests organically. But, what are your thoughts on an ideal "first game" experience? As far as I've been told, mine was Super Mario World, but I think there are plenty of contenders. Link to the Past was pivotal for me and is still my favorite game. Super Mario Bros. still holds up and is historically significant. I've always thought it would be neat to start with some classic games before jumping into modern stuff - that may not be realistic, but imagine starting with Pong, or even Computer Space, lol.