VGCollectaholic

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9 minutes ago, MiamiSlice said:

Jigsaw puzzle variant of Zack & Wiki for $25

https://www.ebay.com/itm/304951631498?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=r3ZVvgtFSIW&sssrc=2349624&ssuid=_w4Ja4vNRs-&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

Thanks!  I snagged it.

3 hours ago, Gloves said:

I prefer consistency and steelbooks fly in the face of that, so I tend to avoid them. 

This is one of the reasons I wish US PS2 cover art followed the European look - I'm always jealous when I see European collector shelves, I love the uniformity of the all the white spines and black text.  

On 3/2/2022 at 4:58 PM, DefaultGen said:

Overpaid for this exact signed Kojima thing I wanted. I wanted a solo Kojima autograph on the MGS4 LE (either Japanese or American). It's a top 10 game ever for me and the version with the cool art! There were a couple MGS4 launch events where he signed these, but a lot of games were signed by multiple people... and I'm a picky picky collector.

 

Oh man, I'm glad you snagged that.  I had that in my eBay cart for so long and kept wavering on pulling the trigger.  Congrats!  

Sorry for the delayed reply.  Work's been a bear this week.  I've posted my pics to my webserver:

http://retro-gaming.com/images/sega_genesis/Sega Genesis New Leaf - Cart Compare.png 

http://retro-gaming.com/images/sega_genesis/Sega Genesis New Leaf - Board Compare.png

@DefaultGen has a set.

Here are the pics of my copies, @RH.  

Edit: Wow... for some reason the upload looks like it's really shrinking and compressing the images (and poorly so).  Let me know if it looks like garbage on your end too.

I've got one of each New Leaf and Blue & Green w/ labels (both New Leaf and Blue have Jungle Book, green has nothing).  I'll snap some pics and report back here sometime this week.

Added this rarity to my collection a while back to complete my RCA Studio II set and finally received my custom acrylic cases for it.

A bit of background for those unfamiliar:

The RCA Studio II was released in 1977 - the second programmable game console ever released (following the Fairchild VES by just a few months). It’s life would be short-lived as the Atari VCS was released later that same year and it’s technology blew the doors off the Studio II.

In its 2 years on the market, RCA only officially released 10 games for it, and all 10 are relatively easy to find and pretty cheap to boot (mainly because there are about 4 of us who collect for it lol).

The exception to that “cheap and easy” bit is TV Bingo… the 11th game in the Studio II library. To my knowledge, there are only 2 copies still known to exist.

TV Bingo was developed in 1979… just as the Studio II was being discontinued by RCA. As a result, the game was either 1) not released or 2) released in an extremely limited localized region here in the Northeast. (My personal belief is that the former is the most likely case, because of this next paragraph.)

Both known copies of TV Bingo were discovered in estate cleanouts within 45 minutes of Deptford, New Jersey - which is where RCA's manufacturing facility for the Studio II line was located. The first copy discovered came out of a West Berlin, NJ basement and the second copy (this one) was found in a Tabernacle, NJ attic — both homes were owned by former RCA employees. In fact, both copies were actually discovered by the same estate cleanout business.  Luckily the owner of the business knew a local game collector (Jason aka NJRetro) who clued him in to what this was.

From what I’ve learned thus far, I believe that only 50 copies of TV Bingo were produced before RCA pulled the plug on the Studio II line. Given the tiny production run and the fact that the only two copies I know to still exist were both found in homes of former RCA employees, I have to believe it’s likely that TV Bingo never made it to official “released” status, despite the game being completed and produced in full retail packaging.

It included a set of branded Bingo cards & a pouch of red Bingo markers. This particular copy had 3 extra sets of cards & and extra manual.

1 minute ago, drxandy said:

Steel battalion protector holy crap great idea, could I bug you for the size on that?

Sure thing - that one is the most expensive one that I've purchased so far, as you'd expect given its ginormous size (and I needed two - one for my green button variant and one for my blue button variant).   I'll find the measurements when I get home.  I recall they were around $120 each.   [Also, I see that right now CGA's custom acrylics page is currently "temporarily unavailable".] 

On 2/2/2022 at 10:17 AM, drxandy said:

I am looking for protection for cardboard sleeved discs like 

And other demos.

Oh, I'd love to find a source for these too.  SO many applicable uses for a size like that. 

I'd also like to find a protector for a standard sized jewel case with a cardboard slipcover (e.g. US CD-i, 3DO adult titles, etc). 

On 1/6/2022 at 5:02 PM, TheGameCollector said:

I've only bought from videogameboxprotectors.com since the beginning. Does anyone know who started making these protectors first?

VideoGameBoxProtectors.com was the first one, I believe.  I just checked my e-mail history and it looks like my first order from VGBP was 10 years ago to the day - Feb 3, 2012.   Jim was my go-to for years back then.   

When Dan launched RetroProtection I gave them a try and preferred his fit on almost everything and he's been my primary go-to ever since and I only use others for sizes Dan doesn't stock.

For odd older niche sizes, I use Mortoff Games.  He carries things like Oddyssey2 (including the big box Master Strategy Series), Atari 7800 Absolute big boxes, Jaguar CD, RCA Studio II, and more.   The one downside (IMO) on these are that they are generally thinner than I prefer.  I personally think, for non-acrylics, RetroProtection's 12mil thickness provide a perfect combination of structural stability while not adding too much girth.   But I love that Mortoff stocks sizes nobody else does to help the community.

For standard size acrylics (NES, SNES/N64, etc), I generally use KollectorProtector.  Super-high quality, fantastic shipping protection, perfect fits, and the price is really competitive with some of the more budget acrylics out there.  His Black Friday BOGO sales are especially amazing if you can wait.

For a lot of my random items that have unique sizes (PS1 10 Million Edition console/controller/memory card, Wii U Nintendo NYC Limited Editions, Bingo on RCA Studio II, Power Glove, Steel Battalion, etc) I measure things out and order custom acrylics from CGA.  I've never had a sizing issue yet (I always re-measure each measurement three times to be sure) and you can add optional UV protection as well.  It's certainly more costly than the PET protectors, but if you are thinking about acrylic for something anyway, going custom is not meaningfully more expensive than one of the stock sizes that CGA carries.

Wow, really nicely done!  The finished product looks fantastic.  What a transformation!

2 hours ago, Nintendo Historian said:

I saw several NTSC copies on eBay awhile back ..The “GameKing “out of Kentucky had a CIB copy for sale for $10K ..

Thanks for the heads up on GameKing.  I think I found their FB page.  I'll have to reach out and see if they still have it available.   I did see those recent ones on eBay, but they've all had more condition issues than I'd like.   There was a nice one on eBay about a year back that sat there for quite a while and then disappeared just as I decided to pull the trigger on it.

Bump

I've purchased from @ViKiNg before and he is super to deal with.  His shipping is lightning quick, despite coming from Russia and when he says something is mint, it really is gorgeous. 

9 hours ago, Chaos Control said:

Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on the rarity of some of the other longbox titles, such as ACT College Search 92, CDi Music Book, Sailing, Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe, etc? When I was putting together the full set those were particularly hard to come by.

I think all of those are some of the harder to find longboxes.   Out of that list, I found Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe to be the least scarce, but that could just be timing of when I was collecting the bulk of my CD-i collection.  CD-i Music Book was the last one from that list that I ended up finding.  Before I found my copy I had never even seen a picture of it.

As far as longboxes go, I would also add to that list Private Lessons: Rock Guitar, More Dark Fables from Aesop, and the longbox variant of Berenstain Bears.  (I'm still trying to upgrade to sealed copies on those last two.)

Some of the standard jewel case variants of games that primarily were released in longbox form are quite hard to come by too - Laser Lords and Richard Scarry's Best Neighborhood Disc Ever both come to mind, but there are others.   It's crazy how much of the library was released in both longbox and standard jewel case variants here in the US.

I've actually found some of the late-release slip covered jewel case releases to be the most elusive (like Mother Nature: Baby Animal Tales, which I finally just found last year).

The Web-i set is the grail though.

On 4/8/2021 at 4:09 AM, DefaultGen said:

The underbidder was our own VGCollectaholic, who basically typed in a random number, which is how I imagine prices are set for many items like this, lol. He was indeed mostly interested in the sampler. He has a CIB Food of France already.

LOL I just stumbled upon this thread while searching for something else. 

Yeah, I was the underbidder on that lot.  I was bidding for the sampler, which is one of the few US CD-i items I don't have.  The Food of France would have been a nice bonus though, lol.

My Food of France is sealed as well.  It's nice to see it getting some recognition for its rarity.

9 hours ago, neodolphino said:

@VGCollectaholic @BouncekDeLemos

I may order parts for another small run of Haradius Zero (and GGGG for that matter).  I'm keeping an eye on interest.  Stay tuned...

That would be awesome!

It's in "Great" condition.  Aka "I cut the box all to hell and jammed it into this longbox jewel case for you".  

@DefaultGen

bump

7 minutes ago, 3rdStrongestMole said:

Still there when I went in today... thanks to their silly hours is it actually a fun game? Cause I'm playing it tonight...

Congrats!   I enjoyed it.

17 hours ago, docile tapeworm said:

any $ i havent spent on video games i like, in the last 10 years, has been a mistake.

 100% this.  I'm trying to knock out the last 35 NES games I have left for the licensed North American CIB set and it's been an absolute $#!+ show.  

51 minutes ago, BouncekDeLemos said:

Got mine in!

I gotta say, beautiful presentation on this. I'm a sucker for titles with alliteration, but I'm even a bigger sucker for craftsmanship. You guys did a tremendous job!

Missed out on Haradius Zero (If there's ever a second batch, I'd love to join in if I could), but I might even go for the special offer that comes with GGGG (Not sure if I should say what it is, but if anyone's curious, buy GGGG! lol)
 

Mine arrived yesterday too and I couldn't agree more with literally everything you said above (including the Haradius Zero point lol).   Thanks for the great work on this!

It's been a mixed bag for me.  I've never had any issues with any of the hundreds of packages I've gotten from Europe or Japan (mostly sealed stuff).   But stuff other parts of the world have been much higher risk for me. 

I've ordered a bunch of stuff from South America (Columbia, Argentina, Venezuela) and almost all of those packages have been opened and inspected by customs.  They sliced open a bunch of sealed Atari 2600 games (Mario, ET, and a bunch of other key titles that had been in absolutely flawless condition) and utterly destroyed them - boxes cut wide open with box cutter.   But then the last package I got from Caracas was opened and inspected and nothing was damaged and all games were still sealed.  Total crapshoot.

I recently had a couple packages from Taiwan and Korea opened and inspected as well, but thankfully no damage on those (they weren't sealed items though).

Off-topic international shipping story below.  Tossing it in a spoiler tag since it's not really on-topic but I figured I'd share:

Just wanted to post a ringing endorsement for @Fryer64.  I snagged the StarFox Super Weekend cart from him and the transaction was smooth and easy all around.  Great dude and highly recommended.