PII

Just a few off the top: HTF - Hard To Find IIRC - If I Remember Correctly CIC - Complete In Case

N64 is still the only console I've ever bought the day it came out. I know it's not realistically possible, but I remember feeling like I had discovered a never-ending cure for boredom with Mario64. It showed everyone who was paying attention what a 3D game should be. Considering how new the technology was it's really something to point out the fact that this game was very nearly flawless. The only issue I recall was an occasional tidbit with the camera that never really was a serious problem for me. I can remember the nay-sayers (gaming magazines mostly) pointing out that the N64 was going to have very few titles available at release. Well, when the pack-in is Mario64 it doesn't matter if there are NO other games available. I also remember that a friend of mine had purchased a PS1 and tomb raider around the same time, then invited me and some others over to see it. No one else present had seen an N64 yet and they were all like "whooaaaah." To me it looked like I was looking through a pair of mesh screens constantly moving around and the character movement was super slow and clunky looking. I'm not trying to rag on the ps1, I eventually came to enjoy it as well -just pointing out the difference between Mario64 and the rest of the competition is all. I remember being amazed by the flying and the swimming and the slides and the surfboard-turtleshells and every little "human" maneuver that I could make Mario do. I kind of hate to say it, but I think it probably eclipsed the impact (relatively speaking) of seeing Super Mario Bros. 1 for the first time. Heck, it eclipsed literally everything that came before it, everything contemporary and a whole lot of stuff that came after it.

Destination Earthstar is done; finally. It's also quite possibly the biggest pain in the arse that I've ever slotted into a Nintendo or any console for that matter. The space stages are really easy once you know what you're doing, but the shmup portion is just relentlessly punishing in the last stage or two if you allow your weapon upgrades to deteriorate due to excessive deaths. Imagine trying to steer a spaceship through an eel's ass while simultaneously dealing with being chased/attacked from all sides and you'll have some idea...

A year ago there was still a steady flow of gg stuff available on line, but it has tapered to a drip, drip ... drip....

Here're shots of the circuit board for the Goonies II White Seal 5-Screw Cart. It's got that layout where one of the two main chips is rotated 90˚ rather than being inline - Not sure if that indicates anything or not. I've noticed some games have this variation in addition to the usual inline layout, R.C. Pro-Am, to name another real quick.. If I understand date codes, then the first two numbers are the year of release and the 2nd two indicate the week in that given year. Please correct me if that's incorrect.

Second and 3rd Gen. All the way. That's the shit that'll start your new life as a Piranha in the kiddie pool. 4th Gen. after that, Then 5th. I dabble in everything after that.

Possibly the best Hitchcock Film in my opinion, although it's been ages since I've seen it. It's great front to back, but I've always been especially partial to Vertigo, in part because of that scene in the woods with the tree rings ("Here I was born and here I died, it was but a moment for you...") that was used in 12 Monkeys. Yeah, those two; and rear window...

Vote For Your Favorite... Super C-men Arkista's Ding-a-ling Bump 'n' Hump Milon's Secret Asshole Asshole of Deceit Danny Sullivan's In Heat Double Penetration Strike Fuck Hunt Dusty Diamond's Porn-Star Soft Balls Mighty Bomb Jack-Off Blaster Master-Bates Sword Master-Bates II Panty Raid On Bungeling Bay Romance Of The Three Swing-doms Snake's Revenge... In Bed Vice Project Poon Wurm: Journey To The Center Of Your Mom Times Of Whore Not sure I wanna find out how many of these things I can think up once I journey outside of the NES library... FunFact: Solomon's Key has always been a perverted reference...

Clue Is Solved. I Did it on Sleuth setting. Aside from the ability to get a game of clue in without having anyone else around to join in, I'd have to say my favorite part is the main piece of music that sounds like it came out of Chrono Trigger. I kept expecting to see Ozzy snooping around. I also caught a dash of "Shadow's Theme" from Final Fantasy III...

I had to take a little break from destination earthstar in the name of both sanity and bodily integrity, but I do intend to finish it, hopefully soon... Let me be the first say "Welcome Aboard!" I don't believe that there are any such unwritten rules, but I'm guessing whoever is the least drunk after the ball drop at 00.00 Jan. 1st has the best crack at getting to whatever it is they'd most like to play...

Do your Track & Field II's have White/Oval Seals or Black/Circle ??? ...Security Screws or Flatheads ??

I picked up this POPILS Variant the other day to add to my Japanese copy, "Magical Puzzle Popils" - Arguably the best game on the game gear and exclusive IIRC. I'm currently wondering if there will be any differences in game play or presentation, guessing not but who knows?

@_Brink_ You seem to have the first Track & Field game pictured, rather than Track & Field II.

¡ lololol ! My favorite was when he defibrillated the fish & chips by rubbing two smart phones together ! Also, my extended family has been aware of that tomato sauce can on the stove top hack for nearly half a century as someone once performed the identical maneuver, except it was a can of pork & beans that dripped off the ceiling into everyone's waiting mouths. We call it, "The Fantastic, Bombastic Mother Bird Approach."

I think we might need some yet more and better photos here at some point. Maybe in the next day or two I'll be able to get to it...

I received a copy of Castlevania The Holy Relics Hack for NES yesterday and played through it. Graphics and level designs are cool and the music is great - a mix of New + Old Classics. It has a unique gameplay feature of needing to find a key in order to exit each stage of each level. IIRC the original plan for Castlevania titled "Vampire Killer", had some feature like this. When each boss is beaten you receive a "Holy Relic" rather than a mysterious orb. It has a mega-man-style-level select and after selecting you can choose which relic to enable for the level but I never figured out just what any of these relics do. My only criticism really is that it's not challenging enough. I liked that the final bosses were actually different from the usual, the first was a giant spider rather than a bat and actually more difficult so after that I was expecting bosses to be pretty hard but alas, they were way too easy, even the reaper. One other cool feature was that at the end it gives a little readout of how many of those secret emerging treasures you found. Make that two criticisms: It didn't seem to have a hard mode the second time around. An all around good hack though.

I'm partial to this one.

Yes, I do. I hadn't wanted to post it previously due to it's weird on weird nature, but the topic at hand here got me thinking otherwise. Here're some additional shots.

I've wondered about this just a bit and figured that if they were released as some kind of demo/kiosk item then it might make sense for them to turn up predominantly around the largest urban areas ie. New York, Chicago, L.A. as those would be the first choices to demo something in order for it to reach the most possible consumers. On that note one of the 5-Screws that I've acquired came from someone in the Chicago area, for whatever that's worth... Things may be about to get a bit "through the looking glass" here. I have something like that and once again I'm not going to make any claims. This copy of Goonies II 5-Screw w/no back label, security screws and White Oval Seal on the front turned up on Ebay in early 2019. It was from a seller called "mouseman140" and I think it was originally posted for $150 w/"factory mismatch" in the title. I thought it looked suspect and certainly wasn't going to dive in. I remember a couple of price drops like 120 and 100 maybe and then I kind of forgot about it for awhile. When I randomly checked again one day the price was down to a song and dance so I figured what the heck and grabbed it. This was in early March 2019. Shortly thereafter I noticed that some folks on NA were talking about this very item, most of whom seemed to find it suspect, mostly due to the state of the front label. I thought there was a possibility that it could be legit as someone having torn the label by starting at the top would then have had to remove what was left starting again from the bottom. The problem I see is that the "remaining torn portion" (white part) would have had to have gone through removal and reapplication without getting so much as a wrinkle in it. It is quite thin and would have been especially supple during removal. To give an idea, upon close up inspection there are apparent grey blotches on the white torn portion that are actually just spots where the grey shell casing can be seen through it. There is another point to be made for possible legitimacy that I noticed upon further inspection of the cartridge, but I'd rather not mention it in a public forum as I'd hate to give the wrong person any nefarious inspiration. At any rate I still regard this one as highly suspect for the one simple reason that it is a singular anomaly within an anomaly. On a related note I occasionally wonder if R.C. Pro-Am might prove to be the key to all of this at some point as it too is an anomaly within an anomaly, however it is not singular and is a well established occurrence. Recently, somewhere online I saw a photo of a 5-Screw R.C. Pro-Am that had a back label. I'm not sure if I have a snap shot of it or not, I'd have to sort through some folders. At one time I thought maybe that one could possibly have been a "normal" 5-screw as it came out in early 1988, is not Konami/Ultra; and the fact that I used to recurringly happen onto someone commenting online that they own a 5-Screw R.C. Pro-Am that they'd had since childhood. The last anomaly within this particular anomaly-field that I know of is that copy of Track & Field II 5-Screw that has a circular black seal on it and was originally documented on NA.

Correct. Personally I doubt that the two are originally connected. If anyone can prove otherwise, I'm all ears.

It's a natural presumption to make based on the economics of production. Do you really want to have to produce/purchase another (big round number, say 1000) shell casings in order to accommodate 3 circuit boards because the count is off or do you want the numbers to line up and not have to spend that extra $$$? If the back label markings that you're referring to are the usually stamped and rarely printed numbers in the upper left corner then, the last I heard was that those are thought to be assembly line numbers. The date codes I referred to are on the Circuit Board's Chips.

I may as well throw down my own theory on these. All I am claiming here is a theory. I've suspected for some time now that these oddball Konami/Ultra 5-Screws might represent one or more brief phases in between "prototype" and "everything else that was mass printed for public consumption." I figure that at some point in a game's production someone has to make a decision to throw a switch and print 1000 or 25,000 (or some other big round number) boards and that the company would also have pallets of shell casings, each containing an equal or otherwise divisible number of said shell casings. I also figure that whoever is responsible would want a given run of printed boards to match up with a given pallet or number of pallets of shell casings; just figure, 1000 circuit boards printed matching up with a pallet of 1000 shell casings for example. I also figure that once the prototype(s) have been thoroughly tested and deemed ready, that it would make sense to "mass print" One, or A Few, Or Several circuit boards, give one to each head of development and have them test these out to make sure that nothing was lost, glitched or otherwise buggered up in translation. So I think maybe these started as in-house circuit boards which were placed inside old left over 5-Screw Shells so as not to booger-up the counts for Mass production. I go on to figure, that if there were then a problem in translation, development teams would go back to the prototypes, do whatever they figure necessary, and then repeat the process until all is deemed well. This could possibly account for the variance (so far) in numbers of found 5-Screw Cartridges for a given game relative to another (For example - 1 Tiny Toon Adventures and several Silent Services [so far.] ) I keep on figuring, by thinking, hmm what to do with these random Extra 5-Screw Carts now that everything's ready to go. Why not call up heads of regional distribution (say - one in New York, one in L.A., One in Chicago etc.) and see if they know anybody in the biz who'd like to purchase (for a pretty penny) an advanced copy for display/play in a store kiosk a month or three before the rest of the games ship in order to give the kiddies a reason to drop by and see what's knew, give it a whirl and part with some cash before leaving to go tell all their friends about the cool new game that such and such store has playable before release. Once the Mass Shipments go out and sell there's not much reason to keep displaying the game so eventually it gets sold as well. I do not believe that any of these ever had a box or manual. If this theory would ever turn out to be correct it would raise the possibility of functional differences between these carts and the rest of their brothers and sisters; and possibly between themselves as well (for a given game.) If that last part sounds unreasonable, I'll remind that Castlevania 3-Screw and Castlevania 5-Screw are functionally different. It's not quite the same thing, I know, but still I think its worth pointing out that a 5 screw Castlevania is program 0 and a 3-screw is program 1 (Rev-A) after a particular bug was fixed. If you're not familiar, that particular bug resulted in a crash, usually due to excessive on-screen sprites. Personally this has happened to me while playing the 5-screw during the corridor preceding the Grim Reaper (lots of enemy sprites), while fighting the Reaper (lots of Scythes/sub weapons flying around) and oddly, just before entering Dracula's Chamber at the end where nothing is happening. Perhaps time will tell. At this point it seems reasonable to suggest that maybe there is someone among us who'd like to school the rest of us on how to make sense of the date codes that are printed on each game's chips. Any takers? I would be an avid listener. Finally, I'll suggest one last related possibility that I think is reasonable, simple and almost entirely without mystique of any kind: The numbers of printed Circuit Boards and pallets of shell casings ought to line up. Circuit boards are presumably tested and shell casings are perhaps checked for flaws, cracks etc. Maybe they end up with 1000 tested working circuit boards and one broken shell casing. Don't want to mess up the count so just go and grab one of those old 5-Screw Shell Casings, seal up the extra board and ship it out with the rest. Somebody ends up with a rare variant. The only problem I see with this is that (thus far) no one seems to have claimed to have acquired one of these back in the hey-day in a box w/a manual from a store, just like usual except it was a 5-Screw. Maybe someone will open a sealed copy some day and find one, but I kind of doubt it. Maybe the corresponding 3-Screws w/out back labels will show up some day, who knows. It's a theory.

Exactly right. One of the factors that weighs heavily against these renegade 5-Screws being refurbs is the fact that not even one has been found for a game like Blades of Steel, which was an extremely popular game (that came out in North America in December of 1988). If games like "ski or die" or "base wars" have 3 found copies (I'm going off of the old NA Listing here), then it stands to reason that a game as numerous as blades of steel would have at least one found copy by now. I'm not saying it isn't out there, just that it really ought to have been found by now, if not a while ago; same goes for the "post-1991" games on this list having no known 3-Screw copies that are missing a back label...

lol, with gusto!

These are the remaining Undiscovered Likely to have a 5-Screw Carts (1991 and earlier) and the Undiscovered Unlikely to have a 5 Screw carts (1992 - 1994), respectively.