MiamiSlice

More fresh pickups! Been mostly focused on getting stuff through trades, trying not to spend much money. 

Got the 3DS and the pins in a trade, the 3DS just needs a charger base to be complete in box. It's in excellent shape too. Funny enough I didn't have any launch model 3DS units on hand, I used to have a black one but that was years ago. Love the aqua blue and my brother has the same model. Thank you @Silent Hill for trading with me  

Also got the worm lights in a local deal for $5 and the LEGO Mario set was like $7 on Amazon. I love Kuribo's Shoe, probably my favorite item in all of Mario lore, so I had to have the LEGO set. 

Bought my son a Digimon for his birthday and I bought one for myself as well. He's not really into it though... so I haven't even opened mine yet. I also got the Rocket League CE from @bridgemute. Found Card Shark for about $50 shipped and then one of my LRG orders finally arrived with Sol Cresta, Valis and RCG Zero. 

Another successful trade, got the Pokemon Moon Figure bundle and a nearly complete Super Puzzle Fighter II. 

Found this rough CIB of Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi for a little over $20. 

I already had a loose Nintendogs DS Lite and a nearly complete Pink Ribbon DS Lite which was just missing the tray. Managed to find the box for the Nintendos DS Lite on eBay for a really good price, then managed to find two trays from another eBay seller, so now these are both complete! With styluses, port covers, booklets, chargers, yadda yadda. 

Got Corrin P2 with the recent reprint and also finally received my FE Engage DE preorder. 

Lastly, finally decided to start a collection of Animal Crossing e-Reader cards with this Facebook Marketplace purchase. 

That's all for now!

Got the urge to put together a collection of Animal Crossing e-Reader cards. Checked Facebook Marketplace and found a lady selling a bunch in separate listing and it looked like they weren't moving too quick. I reached out and asked if she'd be willing to do a bundle and she said yes. So I paid about $52 with shipping and tax for these cards altogether. Not pictured are a couple duplicates. Not much of a steal but a little better than eBay prices. 

On 1/17/2023 at 10:39 AM, Tanooki said:

I don't want to mock anyone who grabbed this for the obvious reasons, but, anyone who decided this was a good idea, can the hardware be hacked/repurposed to have some after life use?

I'll leave it at this though, yet another perfect example why digital format only is rotten, the rug can be pulled out at any moment and there goes your investment into it.  Physical media may waste space and is more cumbersome by the nature of grabbing it, putting it in place, and starting it up vs a simple tap and go...but, it still works.

People have managed to hack the OUYA and keep it going, even finding ways around the DRM on games. But the problem with Stadia is there’s no digital media. It’s cloud streaming. So no servers means no games. Maybe the hardware can be unlocked and used as a general TV box but you may as well just get a chromecast. The only thing that is useful is the controller.

Ordered! I love this stuff. Very little info out there about it, so it's great to see this level of effort into cataloguing this history. 

Two hunts arrived today!

1. Found this on Mercari for $26.52 out the door. Seemed like something I shouldn't pass up, I think it's an uncommon game. It's not in the best shape, I need to glue the tear on the side and I think the front has some sun damage, but still seemed like a good deal!

2. A while back I got a Susan G. Komen DS Lite and more recently I got a box to go with my Nintendogs pink DS Lite but neither had the tray that goes inside the box. I've been trying to find a cheap way to get trays for a while and coming up empty, but I finally found an eBay seller with multiple boxes that seemed to have the trays! 

Just $12.85 each! I placed an order for 2 and included a message that I really needed the trays, and they came through!

Happy to report that both of these boxes have the trays now

17 hours ago, greenthunder said:

As far as I can tell the non exclusivity thing is true, just very few developers choose to have another run printed by someone else for whatever reason, whether it be the game isn't popular enough, the developers don't want to do more prints or anything in between.

I think for most developers they would be happy to do another printing if another publisher came along and was willing to do it, but these are niche games from niche developers so that's that. I think the only exception is Matt Bozon & Wayforward, they seem to have a really good relationship with LRG and don't seem to want to publish the Shantae games with anyone else. 

7 hours ago, Sumez said:

I don't understand why that is funny?

Isn't it just a good thing?

I mean aside from the fact that Fangamer is the worst company to import from, but it's still better than nothing.

Sometimes I laugh about something and no one else laughs and I just accept that I have a weird sense of humor 

2 minutes ago, Tabonga said:

I wouldn't put a lot of trust in much of what LRG  says. ^___^

Isn't that pretty much what I  said in my post?

 

If LRG said something affirmative I could see being skeptical about it. But if LRG said "we don't have exclusivity deals, we are not that kind of limited print publisher" you would assume, what? You would be so skeptical to say "I don't know LRG! Sounds fishy! I think you do have exclusivity deals and you are being coy about it!" Really? What would be the angle there? 

4 hours ago, goldenpp72 said:

I'm inclined to agree really, the reality is Nintendo values its retailer relationships a lot. It's why you don't end up with a million unsold copies occupying retailer warehouses (still no idea how Atari managed to oversell their inventory so many times, even through the Jaguar life to this day you can find new games easily from old stock). Nintendo doesn't have a magic ball to know when their products will hit and when they will miss. When the Wii launched it was hard to get, but it was coming off the huge failure of the Gamecube, where as the Wii U was easy to find and was kind of over stocked initially due to a misread of demand (there never was demand). Nintendo also isn't a mega giant that can throw around billions effortlessly as we see with many modern tech companies, so they are forced to operate within reason. 

Amiibo was a big one where people thought Nintendo was doing this tactic, but the reality is they simply conservatively stocked them having no idea how popular they would be, and while they did start extremely popular, they have mostly lost their flair in the consumer market these days. It's not always easy to know when things will hit or miss, and you have to take time to scale based on that, unless you have a slam dunk model such as releasing an iphone every year with no reason to believe it will underperform, this is just how it goes. We have to remember there was a time where Nintendo was considering partnering with Atari to produce their console in the US, and a time where companies wouldn't even stock their system at all, yet as soon as the thing blew up and people couldn't find them, 'artificial shortage they did this on purpose!' as if not every variable up to that point went against the notion of a huge hit. I think people just need something to blame rather than to understand the reason, having a massive amount of hardware remaining unsold is enough to sink a company, especially when Nintendo agreed to buy back inventory that didn't sell for a period.

I want to agree with everything you said but they have overstocked certain items that turned out to be a huge miss. One was the Animal Crossing Amiibo figures. They flooded the market with those and those sold very poorly and retailers were stuck with tons of those. Another was Star Fox Zero + Guard. They clearly thought it would sell well and it sold horribly. Retailers were having to practically give those away. Such a glut of unsold product! So no, I don't think Nintendo is always conservative about stock. They do value their retailer relationships but they clearly sometimes miscalculate and either print too many or too few of an item. 

1 minute ago, Tabonga said:

I was using the term copyright in a more generic sense.  But we will just use "rights" to cover the whole kit and kaboodle. 

On one hand you stated that LRG has no licensing agreements yet now they do. Which is it?  

And part of licensing agreements would possibly include exclusivity rights of whatever duration.

Yeah I was making mistakes in my own explanation. They have licensing agreements for everything. None of those licensing deals have exclusivity rights. That's what I was trying to explain. Any LRG game can be licensed to be printed by anyone else. That's how it has always been.

11 minutes ago, Tabonga said:

Unless they do something in the public domain they would be at risk for lawsuits which they would have no defense against.

If they did something in the public domain they'd be sued. They don't own the intellectual property for these games. They have to do licenses with the studios to do their physical runs. And those licenses are not exclusive. 

(I apologize for saying earlier that they do not have licenses. They do. They do not have exclusivity deals which is a very different thing.)

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I am guessing that they have agreements to have exclusive rights* for a set length of time.

I wonder how many other collectors believe this! It's a totally fair assumption to make, but they have said in the past they do not do this!

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Fangamer had for awhile sold just the extras for Thimbleweed Park (Limited Run's first CE release) long after Limited Run sold out of that title - which tells me Limited Run had likely subcontracted with FanGamer to make a set number of the extras.

I think they had a partnership where Limited Run ordered the physical carts but Fangamer made the CE contents. So Fangamer ended up with the extras. 

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With Brigandine there was an Asian CE, a European CE and a NA CE (Limited Run's) so I am guessing that they only had an NA license for that one.

Actually, they were the only publisher that wanted to print it in NA. That's the only reason that they had the only NA release. These are niche games and there isn't much business value in printing something if LRG is already going to print it in the same region. That is all. 

2 minutes ago, Tabonga said:

I can't imagine that there are no copyrights on switch games - so at the very least they have to pay some fees - which would be negotiated with those that do. 

My friend you are mixing completely different concepts here. Copyright is different from IP which is different from licensing which is different from exclusivity deals. They have a publishing contract with the studio that makes the game. They produce artwork that goes into the cover art and the bonus items, they own that. But they do not own the game. The copyright and IP of the game stays with the studio. Any other publisher can come along and do their own contract with the studio to release the game with different cover art, bonus items, etc. 

Likewise the soundtrack is probably shared copyright between the game studio and the music producer(s), and so on. 

35 minutes ago, Tabonga said:

It makes you wonder how long the licenses that Limited Run Games secures actually last (on average).

What licenses do you speak of? I'm really curious as to where you got the idea that LRG has any sort of licenses or exclusivity. They have stated from day 1 that they do not have any such thing. They do limited runs of games, they do not do exclusivity deals. They are not Strictly Limited Games or any other publisher that claims to do such things. There have been many instances in the past of LRG releases getting released by other publishers and getting standard retail releases, and LRG has admitted that they have no advance notice of this, that the game studios are not obligated to even disclose whether this will happen, etc. Remember Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid? Streets of Rage 4? etc. etc. There was never any licenses exclusivity. 

LMAOOOO Celeste is getting a retail release from Fangamer. ROFL LOL LMAOOOOO

28 minutes ago, OptOut said:

I was kneeling... 

LOL it's like a weird forced perspective optical illusion 

7 minutes ago, avatar! said:

I do agree the few times I contacted Nintendo customer service they were excellent. Let's face it, all huge companies such as Nintendo and Sony are inherently rather shitacular at various times. However, I was primarily focusing on Nintendo's sheer lack of interest, well, to be honest it almost seems like deliberate attempts at never ever ever having enough collector's items to fill demand. 

Metroid Dread gave me a glimmer of hope that they were doing a better job. It didn't seem impossible to get. Then I don't know what the heck happened with XC3 but there was the whole thing about the CE not even being ready to ship when the game launched and they didn't even offer it through other retailers. I just can't get over how many hours I spent trying to get it and ending up empty handed. I am holding out hope that someone will trade one with me or I can eventually get one at a decent price. We'll see. 

Just re-requesting a full Nintendo Power set charm

You can just go to the Stadia website and play with keyboard / mouse or any modern controller: https://stadia.google.com/games

You don't even need to sign up, you can do trials that are 30 minutes or more. Enough time to try everything before the service is gone. 

There's a prototype there called "Worm Game" which is what they used to test the service. It might be lost to the sands of time after today or who knows. It's not that great but it's nice to see. Otherwise there's a bunch of games you've seen on every other platform but this is a cool way to try them out for free. 

Finally a decent local haul after a long drought. $5

Finally got the letter to go with my Magical Starsign NFR... was really hurting without the letter, now the pain is gone. 

The story here is, you might recall a few months ago I posted I found a Magical Starsign NFR for ~$35 on eBay. Only thing missing was this letter: 

Well, while browsing eBay recently I realized I hadn't checked my watched listing in quite a while. So I went to look and lo and behold, I had been following some listings for months? Maybe more than a year? Which have the case, manual, and letter, but no carts, for the Children of Mana and Magical Starsign NFRs. And to be honest the prices were not bad, but these listings had been up all this time with no one biting. So I figured maybe the seller would be open to a low offer. Asking price was $79.99 for the Magical Starsign case, manual and letter, and I offered $39.99, and the seller accepted. So in I was able to complete this NFR for about $75 total and I have an extra case and manual that I might let go of. Not too bad I guess. 

On 11/24/2022 at 3:39 PM, loopie said:

we are BACK and ready to rumble!!! Found a ton of promotional material lately, including this very peculiar sticker sheet of N64 Pokemon Snap DEMO ONLY-NOT FOR RESALE labels. Looking for more info if anybody knows anything. 

Also, I started posting YouTube videos of live video game hunting for the first time in over 10 years! In my most recent episode, I pick up an insane SNES + N64 + Game Boy lot including some heavy hitters like Earthbound and its Player's Guide! Paid about 30% of market value. https://www.youtube.com/@sonia1234321 

Uhhh do you still have this stuff? Any idea what's the deal with this Chulip ad? 

That cover art is adorable and the game looks great

On 1/8/2023 at 7:52 PM, Avgn Gamer said:

I'd die for that stool, lemme know if you plan on selling it

I have to wait and see if my kids want to keep it, but if I did sell it I don't think I would ship it! Are you local? I'm in NJ. 

New pickups: 

Finally tracked down a complete copy of Final Fantasy Tactics A2, along with some other games I like to have. FF A2 is one of those games that is somehow very difficult to find in decent shape. It's probably the #1 game in the DS library that I always find dirty or damaged. This copy, too, is dirty but not as bad as most of the others I've seen.

A bunch of limited print Switch games arrived that I kinda regret ordering after all this time. I think Rain on Your Parade is the only one I'm really excited about. Also I got embr on sale and finally found Space Bust a Move at a great price. 

Got a nice deal on the SF2 Turbo guide and another issue of NF magazine arrived. 

Lastly, got a nice deal on the two Pokemon books and finally found the elusive pony stylus variant of Petz Pony Beauty Pageant!

A few successful hunts to share! All arrived today in the mail. 

1. Petz Pony Beauty Pageant with stylus! This set me back $15.93 after tax and shipping. Honestly that's a lot for what it is, I'm the only fool that wants these stupid variants. 

2. Dr Franken CIB! For $81.23! The box has a lot of wear but this is complete with the poster and reg card. Seemed like a steal of a price for how hard to find it is. I plan to clean it up a bit and trade or sell it. 

3. $35 for these two! The Pokemon Yellow guide is in great condition with all of the original stickers intact! 

That's all for now!