fcgamer

Send them to South Africa, then he can receive them after about 18 months or so :D

Loser

Mine arrived yesterday, won't open until Christmas day or possibly Christmas Eve.

Yeah I think of @JVOSSas the GB guy, basically I'm the reverse in thinking and situation to @Hammerfestus

When I initially started reading down through the games, I started becoming quite curious as I had noticed the pattern of most of the games mentioned being Western-developed. I also find the whole thing to be fascinating. On a different note, I have an Argentinian gaming buddy (remember some of these NES exclusives were bootlegged as Famiclone carts back then) who LOVES some of these games, as well as the Japanese games. I remember he was ranting and raving over Darkman one time, IIRC, I barely got two minutes into it before shutting the thing down. It seems maybe there was a bit of a middle ground there in terms of expectation, though its just one example.

My mind is blown! I didn't even think about that when I was typing the post above, but you're right, those all were games that had Japanese ties.

@ThePhleo is also the Sachen guy @Tyree_Cooper is HK Asian version games

@drxandyis the Xbox guy, followed by @OptOut @OptOutis the N64 guy @Tanookiis the multicart guy

This adventure started sometime towards the beginning of 2020; I believe I was on holiday at Disneyworld visiting my parents and brother, and I had just negotiated a deal for a large set of Gamate games. I also managed to set up a trade with a guy from South Africa, Gary, for a Famicom game called van der Merwe en Boetie. This game is a South African exclusive, a hack of the original Super Mario Bros. with some South African cartoon characters in it. Fortunately for me, although my contact was a big gamer, he was more interested in Sega Mega Drive games than Famicom or Famiclone stuff, so we quickly hashed out a trade, a Sega shooter (Thunder Force III, IIRC - it was definitely CIB) for the van der Merwe game. I also threw in several other games as a bonus, including a local Taiwanese Sega shooter, and he followed suit with some other Famiclone carts. We both mailed off our part of the trade at the end of February, right before the COVID-19 situation really started to kick off worldwide, what a relief...or not. As Covid started impacting supply chains and flights, it quickly became realized that both of our parcels might be delayed. Gary finally received his that summer, around June or July I believe, but mine never arrived. As the months lingered on, an inquiry was placed at the South African post office, but little information was to be gained. Eventually, the tracking code expired, and what little glimmer of light to be had quickly began to dim. The question that Gary and I had was whether the parcel had made it through customs and onto a boat / plane bound for Taiwan, or whether it never made it out of South Africa due to the Covid situation. Was the parcel sitting in a dusty warehouse somewhere in Taiwan, in customs, or in South Africa, in customs? There was honestly no way of knowing how far the parcel actually made it, and although it was a hard pill to swallow, as I figured I wouldn't be likely to find another one of these cartridges so fast, I just learned to accept it and got on with my life. Ironically enough, this is one of literally four parcels that had been lost in the mail. The first package I lost was a 3 1/4 disk set containing the PC Bible Adventures game, which I had bought back in the early 2000s. Never showed up, I think the guy ripped me off, lol. The second and third parcels were this one as well as one from South America, which got held up in South American customs due to Covid-19; it was later returned to the sender, who mailed it back to me a few months back, so it was recovered. Finally, I ordered a homebrew game from Japan, and I had to give a romanized address (no idea why since Japanese can understand Chinese characters). The guy read the address wrong, and delivered it to a furniture shop a few blocks away. It was eventually recovered too, though I still have no idea why no one did anything, seeing that a random package for a foreign guy just appeared at their shop. Well, anyways, I had a nice surprise a few weeks back. After 600 days of waiting, something finally showed up

Well it underwent several configurations and ideas, with a lot of work being done on all of them. Eventually I scaled it back to just the unlicensed and bootleg stuff, since there were already other books dedicated to the official stuff (which I'm not as interested in), but even at that the book was huge - maybe a thousand pages or so. After looking for some way to actually release it without charging several $$$ a volume or sacrificing quality, it ended up getting indefinitely shelved. Ironically enough, a few other friends had been asking me about the book more recently, and thanks to Amazon's self-publishing tools, I am looking into reviving the project. It's on my short list, and I even brought the old drafts over to my new notebook about a week ago, so I hope by 2022 we do see something appear

I honestly get tired of the whole "unlicensed games suck" gag, and even the added "aside from Tengen and Camerica" bit doesn't really help much. Sure, it's fun to keep believing the lies that Nintendo told us in our youth about their seal of quality, but it has been disproven time and time again with such games as Videomation being licensed on the NES and unlicensed on the Famicom, a few of the Tengen titles, etc. We should be looking at this "unlicensed feeling" a bit differently, I think, and after some thought, I noticed some patterns that back up what that "feeling" actually is. The end results might surprise you, so keep reading for it. I first gathered a list of companies and games that people on here mentioned as having "the feeling" - I excluded my own picks. The list I divided as follows: Companies: THQ LJN Mindscape Infocom Software Toolworks Games: Narc Color a Dinosaur Aladdin Lion King Conan Swamp Thing Rocky and Bullwinkle Last Starfighter X-Men Wayne's World James Bond Jr - best Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Karate Kid (I actually like this one...) Back to the Future (and have Stockholm Syndrome towards this) Xenophobe Cliffhanger WWF games Crash Test Dummies - music Caveman Games Where's Waldo Day Dreamin Davey Bad Street Brawler Outliers: Commando Metal Gear (poor translations) Ninja Crusaders Now I noticed a few things immediately about these choices, which hold true from all but the outliers, namely that: A) These were all never officially released on the Famicom. Most of them were released as (period) bootleg Famiclone carts though for regions such as South America, Taiwan, Central / Eastern Europe, etc) B) The companies producing these games were all Western companies. Now let's look at the unlicensed companies / developers. A few unlicensed games had been published / developed by Japanese developers, though most of these games were developed in other parts of Asia, primarily Taiwan (and in later years, China), as well as Russia. Then there's another large group of companies coming from the West, i.e. Codemasters, Color Dreams (their in-house stuff), AGCI, Active Enterprise, etc. So what the "unlicensed feeling" actually is, is... the feeling and spirit of NES / Famicom games that were not developed by Japanese developers. Notice how the NES-exclusives Talespin and Darkwing Duck didn't make the list? You essentially have Western developers making games in a market where 95% (or whatever the actual figure is) of games are made by Japanese developers, so of course there is going to be a different "feel" to them, and it makes sense that the feeling would be quite similar to the games that Western unlicensed developers would be making because - well, they'd share similar values, thoughts, education, gameplay opinions, etc. Finally, to touch once more on the Taiwanese / Chinese unlicensed games that everyone loves to rip on as being garbage. There's tons of good stuff out there, and even from the Sachen catalogue, a lot of the Mahjong varieties are fun, if you actually take the time to learn to play the game properly. It's sort of like saying Japanese RPGs all suck, since you can't read them.

Wait, Intex, I know that company, they do inflatable swimming pool rings and shit

For the package from Taiwan, tracking always gets screwed up when it hits the States, since Taiwan was removed from the global postal organisation or whatever.

Nope.

We're in Taiwan bro, it's the land of cheap shit. Take a collection Here, I can't say I'll match it but I'll definitely contribute a large share, let's do it

I rarely even visit the clubs. I'm tech impaired

Do you want the gun or just a gun?

Didn't use it, not sure what makes it better than the buy sell trade forum

Let me know if you want to source cheap trophies for the event, I'll see if I can help.

A few weeks ago I bought 45+ bananas. I murdered them all. Started some banana wine. Of course it's not ready to properly drink, I'll have a sample maybe next week I also started a 20L batch of Frankfurt-style apple wine (ebbylvoi), though it was from juice cartons, apples are expensive here and are mostly just shit Washington apples.

That looks delicious.

Due to the threshold, I'm out. I'll sell some things on local auction sites, and take trades for anything else. I don't have a PayPal account as ten years ago a competitor got tired of me undercutting him with my sales, so he reported me for selling pirates games (the stuff I was selling were originals though), and that was that. Since then people just pay my mom's account, and she transfers into my account. No way I'm going to add complications to my parents' taxes over 5k or whatever I sell in a year. I don't mind paying taxes, I'm working to publish a book on Amazon, and I will be paying taxes on that; however, having to conjure up receipts for items you bought at a flea market or purchased fifteen years ago, that's unreasonable, and I do take issue with that.

It's the price of having an American citizenship, it's irrelevant if you are residing in or out of the country.

I'll double check when I placed my order, and I might try messaging them then. I'm not as concerned about PB, as it's Kickstarter, but the others I just worry they were delivered and then ended up not signed for or sent to the wrong address or something, some very weird situations the past year or so with the post office, shitty employers at my work, etc.

Okay everyone, I've just finished talking with my brother and due to Christmas and all, we won't launch until next year after all, first quarter. Things had been delayed some as my brother was sick for a spell (luckily not covid). Thanks for the interest though, we're quite excited to see this one through to the end