DarkKobold

I have to say - I remember far more regrets of not buying than of buying in the past decade. Sure, I've overspent, gotten fake games off YAJ, and other mistakes, but those feel like they come out in the wash of the deals I've gotten. However, the deals I've passed up haunt me, as some of those feel out of reach now, or just absurd compared to what I had the opportunity to buy them at. That is what keeps me up at night.

Show me your top five favorite items in your collection. It doesn't need to be your most valuable, just the things you treasure most deeply. As an added challenge, make sure to put all five in the same single photo! It's always fun to show off, and maybe you posted it so long ago, so it doesn't fit in a pick-up thread. This is meant to be nothing more than fun, so don't take it too serious. I'm not good at counting, so if you post six or seven favorites, I won't be able to count that high

Oh man, I hate rental store/price stickers etc. I care about the history of Super Mario Bros 1. How it was created, who designed the levels, the music, and etc. I don't care about the history of any one copy of SMB1. It's one of the reasons I absolutely despise provenance. I give negative shits about who held a game before me. Drives me insane, tbh. I mostly used the bad grammar to illustrate a point. Bad grammar can be irritating, so by making the thread name intentionally bad, you should see it as something you want to scroll past. Essentially it was meant to highlight the fact that if you don't like noobs, just ignore them.

The thing that gets me is that you're never forced to read or participate in threads. When you see a thread titled "Why come gold Zelda NES? Is Rare?" you can scroll right past it. It's being treated like it's some sort of obligation to read and contribute to every forum post, whereas ignoring and moving on with your life is always possible.

I honestly think it's wrong to think anything is different from a decade ago, other than dwindling attendance at forums. Flame wars were very much a thing since forums existed. The concept of Eternal September for hating on newbies has been around since 1993. Forums are very much a result of their moderation - For example, the SomethingAwful forums were insanely strict on any sort of negativity. The forums were massively popular, so for anyone to be noticed, they'd have to post a lot and most of it was in this sacchrine sweet, overly flowery posting style. It was gross to read, tbh, because it was clearly complimentary for the sake of attention to the one posting it, not to the content they were responding to.

The timing on this post is beautiful: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/1bkydpr/which_one_of_you_bid_on_this/ I swear the /r/gamecollecting subreddit should be called /r/whiningaboutsealedgames. I remember when I joined NA, I thought all the sealed game collecting was dumb... But I ignored it. Now, with /r/gc/, every single post whining about the price of sealed games goes straight to the top, despite the fact that it has no effect on the price of a beat-up loose copy of Earthbound. I get it, everyone is frustrated with rising prices, but using WATA as a whipping boy for the entire video game collectors market is beyond absurd.

NO! That's on the duplicate forum from the admin who went apeshit. He straight out lies and makes up stories. Do NOT go to his new site, instead go to pcenginefans.com, that's where the majority of the community went. If your IP Address is from Utah, you'll get a face full of bestiality if you visit his site, specifically because he hates me so much. His particular clone site of the original PCEngineFX is dead because he alienated so much of the community. In fact, most of the long time community members have their own insane ranting screed on that site. Note, that particular person (we'll call him nutterpants) was given admin privileges by the founder, Aaron Nanto. Nanto went AWOL, and then came back to a burned down forum thanks to that particular lunatic. He tried to regain the forum, and removed the admin privileges of nutterpants and banned him from the forums. However, in true lunatic fashion, nutterpants decided to install a backdoor into the website prior to his own removal, and then managed to ban Nanto from his own site. Nanto was able to regain control at some point, but it really shows the level of insanity the community was dealing with. It's a fascinating story how that particular admin, nutterpants, destroyed the community.

No, they weren't. You are an example of the toxic mindset of that forum that thankfully went away. I was hoping you would too. All you ever do is create forum accounts, and shout "collectard" at anyone who dares to collect video games. At one point, if you googled that word, you came up with like 18 different forum accounts of GentleGamer where your main contribution was to shout that word, without offering even one iota of valuable contribution. They weren't "based," they were just judgmental assholes who had ideas on how everyone else should live. Grow up, and let people live the way they want. I went and found the thread in question. It's sad, because that particular member was respected in that community at that time, but honestly is the most annoying, fedora-tipping, dumb-opinion-wielding people to grace the gaming hobby. I have countless examples of that individual spouting off dumb opinions to appear as an elitist hipster. Yelling at someone for how they play with LEGO is about as dumb as you can get. It's a toy, it is meant to be played with however the person who purchases it wants to play with it. At one point, I wanted to show off my TAS speedruns. I got a very similar response of "How dare you play video games this way? You're supposed to play them normally!" It was beyond frustratingly stupid. It's a toy, how you get joy from it is your own dammed business. I may have a bit of residual anger from the old days of that forum.

That entire forum was insanely toxic to new collectors and newer fans of the TG16. Many of the old timers tried to chase me off because I had the audacity to claim that increasing demand was due to more people entering the market, and not due to an evil conspiracy of eBay sellers trying to raise prices. A lot of the people who tried to chase me off have long since left the scene, while I've created homebrew for the TG16.

I think this is absolutely 100% correct, and I didn't mean this to be judgmental, just observational. I doubt your method is the "norm." I think the longer someone has been collecting, the more likely it is they have every game under $70 they want. This means that most collectors thresholds increase over time. There's absolutely space in collecting communities for every type of collector, including the ones that only want games under a certain threshold... in fact, I think it's fair to say all of us have a threshold, it's just that, over time, you get every game you want, so most longer-term collectors have a threshold higher than $70 for a single game. Thus, for a community that is mostly newbie collectors, I'd assume their threshold is lower, because they have yet to acquire every game under that threshold.

I think the transient nature of all hobby content is a major loss. If you look at something like the Arcade hobby, the ability to repair stuff is a fundamental part of the hobby, but there's no chance to get an actual conversation going about a difficult repair on something like reddit, instagram or facebook. Not to mention, searching facebook for posts is laughably bad. When KLOV shutters it's doors, a lifetime of knowledge will be lost.

I feel like Reddit in particular is pretty newbie centric. The majority of people say things like "I wouldn't spend more than $70 on a game!" which feels like a very newbie centric mentality. Any decently rare, fun game is gonna be over $100 at this point. The worst part of Reddit is more the myopic version of collecting that most new people have. WATA is garbage, but they all watched the Karl Jobst video, and just say "sealed collectors are evil" rather than "WATA is evil." Also, they'll claim literally any post these days is "fake for karma." The worst is when I see someone post a haul I wouldn't have even gotten excited for in 2015 as fake. Reddit itself lends itself towards newbie content. There's only so many pictures of Earthbound and Conker's Bad Fur Day you can look at. There's no depth to reddit, it's all just transient content, meant to draw your attention for short bouts.

https://wololo.net/2012/12/10/how-ps1-security-works/ I believe it's less about cracking, and more about finding a pressing facility that will work with you to put these things on a disc that can't be done by CD burning. You'd need a pretty competent facility, but these are things that could be, in theory, added to a glass master before a pressing. The wobble track on the Sega Saturn is the same - you'd just need some company willing to go the extra mile when they create your disc. Seeing as homebrew is a niche part of a niche hobby, this is going to be a difficult to sell this project to a company with these skills. AFAIK, there's 10s to 100s of pressing facilities, but no one has yet to reach out to pressing facilities to figure out if they'd press PS1 or Saturn games. It's a ton of leg work to get a bunch of rejections, asking if you're committing piracy, etc.

This would be huge for the PS1 homebrew scene. I might actually try and make a PS1 homebrew. I'm sad this thread devolved into how do you abbreviate Playstation, because if this is true, then this has far wider implications than shitty Chinese piracy.

I pretty much agree with this. I am trying to finish the set of MSX Laserdiscs. I am not "following" anyone, because I don't know anyone who has gone for this set before. However, I highly, highly doubt that I'm the first person ever to say "I should get all these." It's not some novel concept, buying games you want for something you define as a set. Calling it a pioneer feels like self-indulgent tripe. Another example: I went for the US SMS + Euro Exclusives SMS set. That's a completely made up concept, where I defined the rules. Did someone else do that before me? Who knows, and who cares? I set out a personal goal, I finished that goal. I don't give a shit if I'm the first or the 50th to do that. Even when I started on an NES set, it wasn't because I saw other people doing it... It's because I said "Oh hey, I could like.... own all the NES games." It wasn't a bandwagon, I hadn't seen anyone else do it when I started, it was just me having an idea that hundreds of other people had before me. It doesn't make me a follower, just by 2010 I was late to the party, lol.

Normally, I try and knock out the top end first when building a set, so there's usually only a few mid-range uncommons left to go. Saturn was that way, to the point I can't even remember what my last 5 Saturn games were. They weren't memorable. For Dreamcast, I definitely went the DefaultGen style. I had like 5-6 $20-30 games, and I paid full price without even trying to find dealz. For SNES and NES, I had 1 higher-tier rare as my last game (Super Turrican 2 and Bonk), but prior to those I also went on a buying spree. Sega Master System, a seller posted mint Buggy Run and Championship Hockey for "acceptable" prices, so I just threw money at that, stupidly. Buggy Run I could have gotten cheaper later, but Hockey went up another $200 every time I saw it. Win some, lose some, I guess. Sega CD was more of a trickle near the end. I had a complete Sega CD collection except Chuck f'ing Rock for nearly a year. I just wasn't seeing it for a price and condition I liked. Also, when it comes to that super high-tier rare, like Magical Chase, DinoPark Tycoon 3DO, or Outback Joey, I'll move on from that set instead of paying multiple thousands of dollars on a single game. REBEL on Super A'can really was out of the norm for me, typically I'll just skip the highest rare, and move on to the next set.

You've only got 5 games left to complete your X set. Maybe it's a CIB Gameboy collection, maybe it's every Battletoads game ever made, or maybe it's a supergrafx set (which means you have zero supergrafx games). What do you do? Do you start throwing money around like it ain't no thang? Do you get frustrated? Do you advertising what you need on forums, twitter, instagram and onlyfans? How do you go about life when you're so close to a goal? (I made this thread partially in jest, because I got excited thinking this is what the other thread was about.)

I'm sure others have said it - but I believe the purchase of NintendoAge was specifically to get rid of all of that data, and disband the experts. WATA didn't have as much knowledge as they said, (See them grading a PCEWorks Dracula X). They were going to fuck up when they started shotgun grading as much as they could in their pump and dump, so why not shut down the biggest, most useful source of information?

I don't know, the fact that this is literally just a sticker over the Caltron 6-in-1 label makes it a variant more than part of the set. It's an interesting part of NES history, but if you have Caltron 6-in-1 in your collection, having this adds nothing other than a trophy to the collection.

You've never heard of Alvin, Simon or Theodore? Do, do, do do do do Do, do, do do do do

Absolutely, 100% agree, SMS sets look amazing when you rainbow sort them. (As a spoiler, I do a ton of rainbow sorting in my collection.) I really dislike when people mix the few off-color boxes into the set. In fact, I made sure to use PAL boxes for Bomber Raid, Galaxy Force, Rampage and Cyborg Hunter, because they're the correct colors for the shelf! I have duplicate US versions for everything but the poorly colored Red US Rampage. Also, I did not care about getting US UPCs for the 4 imported PAL games. Originally, I just went cart-only on everything, so PAL versions for all the US cards. Then, I gave in, and went ahead and got the US cards as well. Also, as silly as it is, I got Heavyweight Champ, James Buster Douglas, and George Foreman KO Boxing, despite them all being the same game with different titles. Same with Great Soccer and World Soccer, those are the same game, but confusingly Great Soccer (card version) is a completely different game. Finally, there's some things you could say I'm missing, depending on how you define the Euro-exclusive set. There's the Hang On card version, which was mostly a console pack-in, but a very rare boxed version exists, and is insanely expensive for what amounts to a piece of paper inside a case. Next, I'm missing the esportes gamebox, which is a 3-in-1 version of other games I already own, but technically was a European release, only available in Portugal. I'd like to get these, but they're not a priority in my collecting. I did make sure to get Sapo Xule in the purple box Portugal format, as opposed to the Brazillian Tectoy version. As this post demonstrates, I could babble endlessly about what counts towards a set, and what shouldn't.

Shit, I panicked and just bought 50 copies...

People also call Earthbound rare or "RAR3 OMG L@@K!!" There's no accounting for taste.

It's also one of those games. If two people with deep pockets feel they need to own it, the sky is the limit. Pricecharting is actually valuable for one purpose here - it shows that there hasn't been one available for ~7 years on eBay. Someone with money but without contacts to find rare stuff is gonna bid through the roof on this, because this might be their last chance this decade.

I bought it from the guy in Italy who had multiple copies. I just checked eBay, It appears he finally ran out. He must have found a pretty good stash somewhere. He did it the best way possible if you want to unload a rare game you have 30 copies of. He wouldn't negotiate a single dime off, he'd only list one at a time, he wouldn't tell you how many he had left, and he would usually wait 1-3 weeks before posting another one. He might have gone months with out a sale, but sometimes, when he'd list one, the pure FOMO would rule out, and someone would buy it immediately, which meant waiting weeks to find out if he had any left. The FOMO definitely caught up with me, and I bought it at full price. That stung, but... FOMO.