2017 was a very weird year for me. I was in a funk for much of the year and not really enjoying any of the things that I used to love so much. I wasn't happy running my game store, I didn't want to air guitar to my favorite bands, I wasn't exercising or eating healthy like I typically do, I wasn't watching cool sci-fi movies or TV shows, I wasn't reading any new comics, I wasn't socializing much if at all most months, and for the first time I can ever remember I didn't really have a desire to play games when I had the chance. It was a lame year and 2018 started off just as depressing. Early in 2018 though I was able to get control of my mind once again and make some important changes in my life that made me start to appreciate things again and see the joy in all the things I used to love so very much.
Continue reading The Joy of Gaming
As some of you may know I've been slowly gathering licensed NES carts over the last several years working towards my goal of a cart only licensed set. When I first started getting into collecting NES games it was because I scored a lot of around 50 games on ebay for a low price back in something like 2005-6ish. It amazed me how many interesting games I hadnt even heard of.
The collecting bug took hold and I scoured ebay for a similar lot, but with different games. After several months I ended up with about 100 games, for around $100, and a new found passion. Going to school, getting married, and having a son put a bit of a strain on my finances shortly after. I was still very interested in pursuing new games for a variety of systems, but with a special interest in the NES.
After looking around online for more info on these games I stumbled across racketboy, and through them, rfgeneration. Learned tons of tips on finding games both locally and online that fit my budget made my interest in collecting explode even further. Every day on the way to work would involve a quick stop at local pawn/resell/thrift stores and my saturday morning eaten up by relentless garage sale-ing.
Because of the poor area I live in for picking up games I decided to learn to supplement my local finds with some online purchases and trades. Ebay had been getting less and less appealing as I honed my new penny-pinching skills over the last couple years. Buy/Sell/Trade forums became a great resource and I owe thanks to dozens of members from sites like racketboy, rfgeneration, nintendoage, and gametz. These forums supplied me with cost effective, reliable, trustworthy and equally passionite gamers and collectors to deal with. Much more satisfying than buying from a faceless ebay seller on all fronts.
So you may be wondering whats promting my wave of nostalgia and praise to these communities. Well its thanks to conversing and dealing with the fantastic people across these forums, and feeling that I'm a part of a community, that helped lead me to the conclusion that I need to dive right in and work hard towards completing a goal thats important and enjoyable to me. With that in mind I've been snatching up the generally obscure NES titles over that last couple years. The ones that are generally in most peoples last 10-20 games. I've picked up already: Flintstones 2, Little Samson, Bubble Bobble 2, Snow Bros, Power Blade 2, Bonk's Adventure, Duck Tales 2, Chip n Dale 2, Panic Restaurant, Zombie Nation, Fire n Ice, Contra Force and others. Most of the games left were obtainable withing a certain amount of time with the one obvious exception.....Stadium Events. After dicsussing it with my wife and spending the last several years being quite frugal we were finally in a situation where I could justify the expense.
So in short I just want to thank all of you for assisting me in the formation of my conclusion that is ok, even rational, to spend a large sum of money on a game that I can not only buy a variant of for less than $10 any day of the week, but play for free through a computer. I really appreciat it guys!!!! Should be smooth sailing from here on....
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