sp1nz

Well I go for CIB European sets with Australian exclusives on certain platforms and usually try to go for a version with English text on box/covers if it exists (I won't claim to necessarily truly have full sets or be close to them as there could be weird imports and games that I don't know of). Here are the CIB sets that I have or plan on finishing (for European with Australian exclusives) in random order: Mega Drive - 5 games missing Super Nintendo - full set (well without Starwing Competition manual and certificate) Game Boy - box full set with couple of manuals and one cart missing (half-ish of SCN set) Neo Geo Pocket - 1 game missing Neo Geo Pocket Color - 1 game missing Pokémon Mini - 1 game missing N-Gage - full set with mostly German copies cause I got them for cheap 3DS - missing over 100 games but I'll get there Master System - 75 games missing Vita - missing 90 games (I'll also own Limited Run Games Vita full set when Super Meat Boy is fulfilled, although one game is from eBay, so I guess I won't be getting Revenge of the Bird King , not exactly sure how strict LRG is about that bonus game though, so fingers crossed) On most other platforms I've tried to pick out the interesting games from the mix and not likely to go for any "full" sets. As for series... oh boy. I collect so damn many series but I'm rarely caught up with all games in any one series. I still consider series collecting as one of the most fun and rewarding aspects of game collecting. I even like variant collecting for some specific series or specific releases but am not so balls to the wall about it generally.

I'll just refer to my old post:

I still plan to collect the games but I lost my enthusiasm at X/Y. They did so much wrong after the great Black/White generation I had played just before starting X/Y generation. I started with Pokémon Blue when it released (I was 11 years old), watched the cartoon series often, owned a bunch of cards and the first Pokémon movie etc. More detailed post in how I view the generations I played: Maybe nicest way I can put it is that they went from 90s kiddie games to 2010s kiddie games, always for children but there is a large gap between the type of player these represent, thus the former either finds it way too casual, even if it was always quite casual or has gotten bored with the barely evolving formula. Still the jump from Black/White to X/Y was one of the biggest changes to the formula yet but it went to a different direction than where my taste was.

Xbox One library was bad and stayed bad, PS4 was weak at start but has grown tremendously over the years and I love collecting for it now. I have near zero excitement for both PS5 and Xbox Series X/S from physical software standpoint at this time. I'll get a PS5 eventually but will likely be buying games with laser focus. I don't think it has to do with me aging as much as every new console being more and more like a small PC with no personality of their own - high retail prices, low availability and generic AAA slop offerings don't help with building excitement either.

ShantAugust arrivals + books from this month:

DOOM and DOOM II are both quintessential FPSes in my eyes. DOOM (2016) is great too but I prefer the original 2 for having a laser focus on gameplay; no dialogues, no upgrade menus, no journal entries etc. The original DOOM still makes me RIP AND TEAR with glee. DOOM is the bees knees compared to other build engine games and many more advanced FPS games out there. Been playing the first two DOOMs on and off for over 25 years and I ain't gonna stop. 10/10 for the OG and 8/10 for the modern variety.

I've ragged on graded games ever since they've been a thing but I've always also said that everyone is free to collect however they want. I won't give much respect to people who view their collection as mere future dollar signs though. I own quite a few sealed games just from buying them at retail and not getting around to playing them but I've opened a lot too. Sometimes I buy a game sealed because the price is so close to a CIB that I might as well get it complete and minty. The most expensive sealed game I've opened is a sticker sealed PAL Primal Rage for 32X, which I had bought for 1000£. These days opening sealed games feels iffy even though I'm not a selling type because people put insane premium on a plastic wrap on a game; a component meant for the garbage. People appreciate the virginal aspect of games too much compared to a mint CIB. Interestingly enough in most cases I would keep sealed blister packs untouched - heck I might even consider grading sealed games if the companies were better... or maybe I'll just open them and sniff the brand new smell... or I do nothing at all. Couple thoughts on population reports: The need for them is ultimately not about prices but transparency and trust in the market. They will be inaccurate due to cross grading and re-slabbing. They don't offer much to old hat sealed collectors. It's not a problem if some games seem more rare or more common than they actually are.

Indeed. There are thousands of DOS/Windows games alone, some of which are totally unknown even to hardcore collectors. In case they are known, no one is able to find a physical copy of some of them to show and/or preserve. To me it is one of the more exciting aspects of PC collecting but even if you come across something truly rare you might not know it at the time. Even some games popular in certain regions or countries sometimes have tough as nails to find physical releases. I had an eBay saved search for Supaplex (for DOS but had it just as "Supaplex" for a wider net; I saw a few Amiga ones pop up but not a common occurrence for that platform either) for years (maybe 2 in the end) and hadn't even seen image of the box before. I managed to get a re-release(?) Classic denotion "small" box 3.5 inch floppy disk DOS version of it. Checked eBay now due to thinking about it and I saw a 5.25 inch floppy disk DOS big box version for the first time. Similar thing with Star Goose, I had a search up for months at least and got a weird blister pack 5.25 floppy disk DOS release of it in the end. I'm not that knowledgeable of the PC offerings and what is or isn't rare but on average it's a minefield for obscurities. Couple cool threads about stuff like that: https://hg101.proboards.com/thread/11191/lost-rare-unkown-games-general https://hg101.proboards.com/thread/10484/search-garage-bad-dream-adventure

My game of the year for 2019. It's just super fun to learn about the ins and outs of the cards and relics and how they synergize against the enemies and bosses. Every character is very different from each other with their unique card pools and there are so many ways to build your deck and slap ass. Risks and rewards feel real and the game balance is great - of course there are overpowered setups and things but if you don't spoil yourself on the optimal strategies (like I didn't) then it should feel rather fair on the average run. The audiovisual side is done well and the full run length feels perfect. The game even has modding but I haven't tried any mods yet. After you beat the game you can challenge it again with Ascension levels (up to 20 per character) that pump up the difficulty and the game even tracks your every run in concise results pages. I think I made most of my decks way too big but I had fun with that way of playing. Took me 191 hours to get 100% achievements on Steam. Ascension 20 victory with Defect was a pain and took dozens of hours of my time (victory run results image in spoiler):

"They limit under-18s to playing for one hour a day - 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. - on only Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, according to the Xinhua state news agency." It's not even just 3 hours a week but 3 weekend days with 1 hour to play on each. Start a new modern game with a forced tutorial, oh bye bye x-yy minutes of the weekend's daily allowance. Start an online competitive game, oh queue took me x-yy min, oh damn I gotta dip before the match ends. I hope they are not banking on having good eSports teams in the future 1. Games teach skills that are not apparent to the parents, maybe 1h a day on 3 days can garner some of that but also how will you even like games when you are cut off when things get fun or interesting. Gaming addiction is a real thing but you would do better with rewarding playtime from good behaviour / completed tasks / school success than having a strict limiter on everyone I'd say. I wouldn't call much of China's shenanigans good for their society, maybe it's good for their money making but super bad for their mental health. Probably hard to grow up to be a game fan or maybe you become a true addict as an adult for being limited to a "taste" as a kid. Probably overall bad for China's game development industry, for new talent and current sales. 2. If I could bank the time for the future I might not play on some weeks to get a better session on some others. 1h a day is nothing, I'd be pissed to be forced to adhere to such a short play session by design - of course I have 1h sessions and shorter too but it's really not much to dig deep into anything. 3. I would probably be playing the most critically acclaimed games there are but on the other hand I might feel salty when the sessions are cut short thus diminishing the experience. I would probably never be playing competitive games. It doesn't feel like there'd be much feel good in that kind of system.

+ ...reading through the endless new pages; this is the real controversy that caught my eye! I'm sorry, please continue.

Never played many flight games but I did beat Rogue Squadron on PC at some relative's house when I was a youngin. I enjoyed it a lot during that playthrough but I have no idea how it would hold up today in its genre or overall. I fondly remember lassoing some walkers in a snow level. Maybe nostalgic 7-8 and realistic 6-7, so I'll just slap it with a 7.

What if plastic wrapping on video games is trash

Full disclosure: I don't have skin in the graded sealed market or care who wins or loses there but might as well give some opinions, since I dislike how the market has grown in such a "fake" way. Collecting to me has always been all about passion for the medium and none about the money and I'll still state that collect/invest in whatever way you please folks - but I'll still show my disdain for perceived shady tactics, even if my perception too can be wrong. Plays a bit like this: "We are the grading company that graded this game and our insider circle of "experts" and/or "buyers" value this item (that they also sometimes carry) at this arbitrarily high number compared to past data. Wow! Also our private population reports confirm to us that this is pretty rare game in this condition. Double wow!" It's not even that the valuations can't be correct but it's about a lot of trust and the market got there in a sprint due to all of the "shenanigans" Deniz accelerated too. I think it's fine to cast doubt on collaborators in the video too but I watched some recent Reserved Investments video and I think he claimed to have ran a gaming store in the past and most of the sealed stuff he still owns is old stock from those times. He has openly stated in many videos that he is a player behind the scenes in the video game speculation side of things too, while thinking the current market is bonkers. He has said that the market is prime target to sell into right now and you should take the wins instead of gambling long term etc. He definitely doesn't look the part of video game enthusiast but he does seem to have long lived gaming experience if he talks the truth. Not saying these as direct quotes and I might even misremember things but it's bad optics to me when people place apparent misattributions on the rare guy who tries to educate the public about collectibles / investing / not jumping on crazy trains if you don't have money to lose, while also being someone who bears to gain from not sharing such information (maybe there are ulterior motives or shady things behind Reserved Investments too, heck if I know or care, just seems like I get information for free and people antagonize him for pissing in their cereal or whatever). Still of course Karl's video would have been better with more angles to it and he wasn't completely objective and impartial actor in this particular video with or without them. Fractional investing is something I would call pure speculating / investing and not collecting, so I would say it's a prime vehicle for pumping. At least I wouldn't think I owned something that I owned a fraction off, even if technically it could be part of my collection on paper. Market manipulation does not necessarily mean illegal actions but growing a market through clueless big pockets and big in-the-know market players can create a fake perception and drive up value of the items in question, so my problem is with the FOMOing people on the demand side that perpetuate the craziness that they've been made to think of as normal or are gambling on as an investment. Still it's almost inevitable that a market growing line of attack happens in a collectible category at some point - how effective and long lasting that is, is a different story. Not saying video games shouldn't be valuable or couldn't rise to high levels over time. Also video games or any collectibles are not a god given right to anyone for any amount of money, so if things are too expensive don't take part in the market. If video game market is in the kind of bubble comparable to 80s coins then that would mean that some of the big short term investors and long time investors win a lot but the overall market might drop hard and level out after the bubble pops (a horse beaten to death speculative statement for sure) instead of rising organically and steadily, so it's like forcing the max price out of your investments posthaste without caring about the consequences on the overall market. In the organic growth scenario old and new long term investors could be bigger winners but of course even being alive after the next x or yy years is not a guarantee. Of course how it will go can't be known for certain. If none of this happened who knows if things would've ended any better anyway.

I'm not sure about what age ratings everything got exactly and there was a time before ratings but here goes in A-Z order in spoiler because the list is a bit long: ...and probably some others.

Sonic the Hedgehog was my first game and my first clear at 4 years old.

Well it's obvious that TV standards don't apply to handhelds with their own screens. Heck PAL collecting is misattribution / cherry picking even in European TV console context, since so many countries globally use PAL beyond Europe and Australia. Many European and Australian collectors just use the PAL term to mean "European(+Australian)" games, since it's their TV standard. So calling European(+Australian) games (especially handheld ones) "PAL" is not factually correct but a culturally risen naming scheme among collectors. I'm sure that some people who use it don't know what PAL even means but I would wager that a lot of them do. I doubt you can beat it out of the collectors by always correcting it and going on a tirade about how it's wrong use of the term in any case. Even pricecharting does this: https://www.pricecharting.com/console/pal-gameboy Just my 2cents on that matter. Now for a TMI of my own: There was a time in South Korea when a lot of new old stock of Sonic Classics for Samsung Super Gam*Boy/Super Aladdin Boy/Super Aladdin Boy II aka Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was discovered. These games had a HiCom version of a game box, so a ton of Korean collectors swapped out their damaged but game specific original boxes with embossing of 삼성 or Samsung inside the boxes for a brand spanking new HiCom boxes. So if you want fully original copies of some Samsung 16-bit goodness be careful of the plain HiCom cases for stuff that didn't come with it. The Sonic Classics is also pretty much the only game you can call common for the system due to new old stock find and the timing of it. Yoinked this picture of a HiCom case from an eBay listing: For Samsung cases the 삼성 or Samsung emboss would be in the middle of the left side near the spine.

July arrivals:

Managed to get a Super Meat Boy Vita CE in the first batch. Glad I went for the CE cause it sold out slower. They had to ration their last Vita carts for their last releases, there was no way to make any of the last releases a big print run or pre-order anymore.

Game Boy version of The Battle of Olympus has at least -UKV (United Kingdom), -NOE (Germany) and -ITA (Italy) release in the European region. So no, it's not UK exclusive. Like 1-5 complete -UKV copies appear per year on eBay from what I've seen, since I've been tracking it as a potential buyer. Carts are not really common but not too rare either, they're worth around 20-40£.

Uhm wouldn't the functionality of all floppy / circuit board / card based games be destroyed by the EMP too? So the parts of your collection that would be generally even be valuable would tank into worthless paperweights for the masses. For disc based games the systems are still fried, so the value of games would plummet there too. So my vote is big no but not necessarily for the value of the items (higher or lower) but the value of the function. Many people always wish games were worth as little as possible, so they could get everything they want for peanuts but I personally don't think collecting would be that interesting, if nothing was of value - but on the other hand games have some value to me even as paperweights due to the artworks/manuals/memories associated. In case games, systems, monitors and your home electricity network would be magically exempt from the global EMP effects then I still expect people to not give a damn about value of games due to the catastrophic effects on daily life. Modern world is too dependent on electronics and electric networks, so it'll make you think more in terms of how will you even get food to eat than trading any luxury items or having even time to enjoy them. EDIT: Okay I guess the modus operandi for EMP is that it's a temporary effect but sometimes it can have permanent effects too. So refer to my last paragraph before this edit.

I'll be honest I did think for some reason it was referencing the Super Mario 64 even though the discussion just before was about Stadium Events. The Stadium Events is still HA+non-payment (so far), so the video timestamp fits it in that way. Moral of the story is to not trust that every transaction goes through and some games might even get "buried". I would still imagine some seller will make noise about it in case it happens, unless you are bound by some legal documents with HA.

This part is pretty scary. Pat claims that he has a source that mentions in case of non-payment HA will offer to second highest bidder, then the third and so forth and if "no one" steps up to pay then HA might just hide the item because non-payments being reported in news would really hurt HA. Earlier Ian or Pat mentions that the main thing that matters for the interested parties in a sale like this is that the news have been made - well I imagine beyond the seller themselves, while they can profit of other sales due to the news, losing the big bucks of a record sale to non-payer would suck in any case. Controlling the perception of folks via shady tactics is really really powerful stuff and very unfortunate when it works. Just in general in life's many avenues.

Anecdotal evidence from my steam feed: I think 3 of my friends potentially fit the initial 90 minute window and 6 friends + me came way after that. 137 people on my friends list. Worth mentioning that people can cancel the reservation at any time but I imagine they will pay for it unless something comes in the way. Steam is not going to really profit off of the system pricing itself but are focusing on external aspects. Also it doesn't seem like they fear other companies jumping into the market in their wake but are embracing it - of course it's easier to think this way when you're first to market but it's definitely about more than just selling a system. Couple relevant quotes with some filler word redactions: "For us it's really how does the press react and what are they saying about it, what are they saying about it a year later. What's the perception - what are gamers saying - what are their reactions, what are our partners saying; are the kinds of things that are most helpful to us because our assumption is - these are long-term decisions that we're making about how we can contribute to the health and the vitality of this ecosystem and we're always gonna be successful as long as that's continuing to happen." "So our view is, if we're doing this right then we're gonna be selling these in millions of units and it's clearly gonna be establishing a product category that ourselves and other pc manufacturers are gonna be able to participate in." Yeah but Switch is also underpowered compared to PS4, so getting a PS4 tier handheld should be just fine with many people including me, like how're you going to make handheld PS5 at any reasonable price point when PS5 is not even that old. These are more legitimate concerns, which I share. Anyway I'm not expecting perfection and I'm probably going to play way more indies than any AAA titles to begin with, so there should be enough cool compatible stuff I can enjoy playing in handheld mode. Also looking forward to using it for RetroArch with RetroAchievements.

Pretty hyped about this. I'm a big fan of the Steam platform and the price is very fair for a high spec Linux tablet alone, so I put a reservation on the 512GB model but there is a small chance that I will cancel it before the launch.