I enjoy messing around with numbers and stats, and I recently found a great new project that would combine doing that with game collecting. I had a lot of fun doing it, so I decided to share the results.
Not long ago, I passed the 500-cart mark in my NES collection. As of this writing, I am currently up to 526. This is about the point where it's said that NES collecting gets a lot more difficult. Hard-to-find, expensive titles become all that's left, and while that's rather exciting in its own right, it's an interesting and sometimes frustrating turning point. In my case, I couldn't help but wonder - is that really the case? Are there really just expensive games from here on out? Did I miss some common titles without realizing it? I came up with a good way to find out.
I somewhat arbitrarily decided to go with the list and rarity guide on NintendoAge for this, though any thorough list would certainly work just fine. That list puts the 'complete' NES set at 768 games and rates each game's rarity on a scale from 1 to 10. The 'complete set' total doesn't seem to be universally agreed upon, but this list seems to be as good as any to me. I then split NintendoAge's list up by rarity and counted the number of games at each level. I then checked my collection against each of those to determine where the games I'm missing fall within the different rarities. The results weren't too far from what I expected but still quite interesting:
I knew I didn't have much (any, really) of the really high-end rarities but a decent number of semi-rare titles. As expected, the percentage keeps going up as the rarity goes down, including no missing titles in the 2 or 1 range. Not a lot of surprises, really.
It wasn't a total waste, though. The most interesting information I found was the higher-than-expected totals of 3's and 4's I didn't have. There are 43 games between the two, including quite a few games I've seen and passed on dozens of times. I've somehow never picked up Rocket Ranger, All-Pro Basketball, Yo Noid or Digger T Rock after all these years. In those instances, I think that I simply assumed I'd bought them a long time ago and never gave it a second thought.
Thanks to all this number-crunching, I've learned that I can likely reach 550 without as much trouble as I'd feared. 600 and beyond will be quite the challenge, but I'm feeling up for it. If your NES collection is in this range, I recommend taking stock by rarity to see what easy finds you may have missed.
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Looks like I'm not the only OCD number-crunching type 'round these parts.
I'm gettin' inspired to put together my own tables of stats on my personal collection...
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As an interesting price-point, try cross-referencing it with the "Used Price" (read: mostly cart only) at JJGames's PriceCharting (http://videogames.pricecharting.com/) for each game to get an idea of how much the rest of your collection can be expected to run.
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That's probably my next project. I'm a bit afraid of what that total is going to look like, but it would be an interesting thing to find out. I can't help but wonder how much higher the Little Samson and Ducktales 2-type things are going to go.
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I might actually give this a go. I've got about 100 games left to get, but I've already crossed off quite a few in the 8-10 categories. Could be educational!
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That is pretty cool.
There are still a decent number of mid ranged rarities for you at least 
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It looks like you still have some nice opportunities left. It's a tough road, but stick with it. Definitely some interesting stats.
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I want to do this.
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The kinda crappy part about doing this is that to get these numbers I had to check each game manually. A couple more spreadsheet formulas would do a lot of the total counting, but you'd still need to mark off which games you have. I'm looking into adding this sort of thing, though...if I do, I'll be sure to share it here and/or on the forums.
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I would think a little Access database could generate this for you with less work. Import your collection from a CSV, copy and paste to create one for the pricing info. I haven't looked at the NA rarity listing, but if it's in a table you could do the same.
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That's not a bad idea. I looked into it a bit more and it turns out you can export just about everything you'd need for something like that directly from NintendoAge. They even have a field for 'price', but it doesn't seem to have any actual price info in it. I'll have to keep an eye on that, though...didn't NA partner with pricecharting.com on something recently?
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I did this with my n64 collection and found I had missed a R1 game! Donkey Kong 64.
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