DarkKobold

On 4/15/2024 at 4:13 PM, Ankos said:

I don't think I have a clear top five in my head but I came up with a few carts that might make it into that for me

Zook Z: A very fun Taiwan original for Gameboy. It's sort of a hybrid of classic Megaman and Megaman X. It was the first unlicensed Gameboy game I found ever since I decided to make that my main category for collecting

Top Secret: Gowin is my favorite company for Taiwan originals. Their first seven games were ones they bought the rights to, and some (all?) of those had versions released by companies prior to Gowin getting the rights. This is one of those pre-Gowin versions, so it is pretty old, and I view it as representing a sort of starting point for Taiwanese Gameboy games

English Crouching Tiger: This was the last Gowin game known to get an English release. It's also one of the last Taiwan originals to have a USA release planned (not sure if it ever got out the door here though, the US company selling it just had it listed for pre-order). Top Secret works for a good starting point, while this one makes for a good ending point for unlicensed Gameboy games

 

 

I love the Zook Hero games. I never managed to get my hands on originals, just bootlegs of bootlegs, which is honestly quite ironic. Are any of the Gowin games worth playing? I see them from time to time, but have never pulled the trigger. 

Any idea if we're ever gonna see an Action 54 cart? Seems like it's been coming soon forever. 

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  

3 hours ago, Mega Tank said:

What gets me is people removing blockbuster and rental store stickers. To each their own, but there's people that appreciate those too, look around before removing them!

 

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. 

5 hours ago, RH said:

I mean, take even that “why no? Gold Zelda rare?” joke.  If it’s a really young kid, that could explain the bad grammar.  Annoying but let’s give it a pass to start.  However, you can give a canned answer of “because all original cartridges were gold, and a lot of people bought it, so it’s common but it does look cool.  The grey carts came out much later.  They aren’t rare but are less common.”

 

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.

19 hours ago, Hammerfestus said:

Oh don’t be so cantankerous.  You were a new guy once too you know.  When someone is new they are going to have no idea where to look or what is a reliable source of information.  You also have to take into account that someone with no background in game collecting is not going to even consider that their question or topic is going to have already been discussed into the ground.

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. 

30 minutes ago, xelement5x said:

I think now a person has so many options to find content (for good or for ill) that forum etiquette is no longer a thing in many places.  I don't think any person is intentionally trying to discourage a new participant, but the disposability of discussion with platforms like Facebook or Twitter makes really good conversations much harder to have.

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. 

On 3/20/2024 at 9:17 PM, DefaultGen said:

I’ve backed away from most collecting communities (just cutting back internet usage in general) but I don’t see much negativity towards other collectors except on Reddit where people circle like wolves if you stray outside the dank Goodwill pickups and only collecting to play hivemind.

The top post right now is a guy who got sent the wrong game from Wata and literally half the comments are just calling OP an idiot, lol. Terrible place.

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. 

6 minutes ago, a3quit4s said:

Gotta make you happy that dude is banned now and his title is raging lunatic haha

edit: his profile bio is also epically written by the mod that banned him. It’s….the greatest story ever told

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. 

1 hour ago, Gentlegamer said:

My friends at pcenginefx were based. This is the correct response to such.

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. 

12 hours ago, TDIRunner said:

I 100% agree.  My involvement with that site was very limited, and I was more of a lurker than a poster.  Over 5 years, I probably had around 300 posts.  I saw lots of newcomers get pushed out, but I was able to tip toe my way around to site and avoid most of the hostility.  I actually made a bit of a game with it.  I attempted to see how long I could go without triggering anyone.  I only made one mistake in my time there.  In a thread about Legos of all things, in a lapse of judgement, I mentioned that all of my Lego sets from my childhood had been keep in their original boxes, and I never combined my sets together into one large bin of Legos.  Oh boy, was that a mistake.  I honestly don't remember who, but one of the long time members really let me know how shitty it was of me to treat my Legos like that.  

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. 

4 hours ago, TDIRunner said:

One possible exception is new collectors who are actively causing harm to the community.  I specifically remember a thread at the old PC Engine forums (before it imploded) about a new collector who had a long introduction explaining how he had started at zero and purchased about 95% of the US TG16 set over the course of about 6 months.  He then explained that once he realized that he would never be able to own every game in the set, he immediately decided to sell his collection and wanted to unload it on the forum for top dollar.  That forum was already well known for being fairly hostile towards new collectors, but they really went off on this guy.  I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little entertained by the backlash.  

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. 

2 hours ago, ikk said:

I couldn't disagree more, nothing wrong with setting a limit for yourself that makes sense for your budget no matter how long you've been collecting and there's plenty of great games out there that can be found for under $70. You don't have to chase rare/expensive stuff to be a collector.

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. 

1 hour ago, wongojack said:

I rarely post on Reddit, but I do participate in many groups that are classic-gaming centric on Facebook.  They have the same problem as Reddit where the info is all transient and nobody really establishes the on-line connection that frequent posters on a forum site have.  It's good for "How do I hook this up to my TV," but bad for "I've failed at an AV mod can you help?"  And there are plenty of hurt feelings in the comments.

 

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. 

56 minutes ago, RegularGuyGamer said:

About a decade ago, I felt the hobby was overly hostile towards new collectors and dismissive of inquiries from those new to the hobby. Has the tide changed? Any new collectors feel particularly welcomed into the hobby?

I don't go on collecting social media groups and stay away from the collecting Reddit pages, so I really don't know. It seems like VGSers are welcoming. Anyone admittedly dunk on new comers?

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. 

16 hours ago, RH said:

Looking at the eBay post again, and it sounds like it’s implying that you need a modded PS1 to play burnt CDs.

Yeah, if someone cracked the security and/or made a CD burner and discs that could work with it, that’s be amazing. I can’t recall exactly how the security on it worked though.  It might not be crackable.

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. 

On 3/13/2024 at 2:02 PM, RH said:

So wait, have they actually cracked the CD security on the PS1?!

Yes, this is more Chinese crap but maybe these means there will be a way to make easy game copies to play back-ups, rather than $100+ disc games! 

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. 

On 3/7/2024 at 10:30 AM, spacepup said:

I don't really like classifying myself or others as pioneers or followers.  What I can say that is somewhat related I suppose, is that I have a variety of niche interests which have led me to collecting and preserving content that maybe isn't as popular or mainstream.  I have a lot of different interests and I enjoy preserving items that are likely to be lost to time or less documented.  There are benefits in some cases, as often these items aren't ridiculously expensive, compared to super popular NES carts, for example. 

There is absolutely nothing wrong at all with collecting popular stuff or even hopping on bandwagons - really it's whatever makes you happy.  I suppose I do a little of both, but lately a lot of my purchases have been quirky Japanese or international items that most people don't know much about.

However, the thought of calling myself a 'pioneer' feels weird and a bit self-indulgent for me personally, so I can't think of myself that way.  But I would definitely classify myself as having some pretty niche / ecclectic interests at this point.

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. 

8 hours ago, Ankos said:

How would you answer this?

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.) 

On 2/26/2024 at 3:25 PM, a3quit4s said:

This whole thing is pretty much NintendoAges fault for keeping track of variants and whatnot. Fucking GoCollect Jeff and the Carolina collection and all that. It’s all connected I’ll tell you what 

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?

On 2/2/2024 at 2:46 PM, the_wizard_666 said:

Honestly, I'm surprised it didn't go higher.  Though the number of idiots people who pretend unlicensed games don't exist would explain that.

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.

5 hours ago, JamesRobot said:

Never heard of it.

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

Do, do, do do do do
Do, do, do do do do

4 minutes ago, T-Pac said:

@DarkKobold I know people like to hate on the packaging for SMS games, but that looks soooo nice all-together as a set.

How did you approach games released in different formats for different regions?
(Just dipped my toes into the Master System myself, and I had to get a German copy of Transbot since the US release was exclusively in card format and I only have a cartridge-reader.)

[T-Pac]

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. 

22 hours ago, DefaultGen said:

Collectors are so dumb. The consoles version of this game shot up 3x in price because of this. Was anyone buying digital versions of Spec Ops: The Line on PS3? Are those digital stores even still up? The PC version, the version that was actually just delisted, is still available for $15 brand new physically. Insanity.

This is the perfect situation to not panic. A game was delisted... and physical copies were already available for low prices on every platform! It's like buying up a DVD because it got removed from Netflix.

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

3 hours ago, final fight cd said:

So this legit has not been on eBay in 7 years? Is that info accurate?  If so, crazy!

Also, if true, how could somebody think it appropriate to use the term “rare” for both this and, let’s say, little Samson.  They obviously are worlds apart in terms of availability.

People also call Earthbound rare or "RAR3 OMG L@@K!!" 

There's no accounting for taste.