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Awhile back Mr Shadow introduced me to http://www.pricecharting.com/
It is a website which automatically tracks prices of games from across the web. Seemingly it pulls most of it's info from ebay and amazon. I think it is fun to look at the range of prices for a particular console. I recently got a Sega Saturn and can now quickly find which games are normally the more spendy ones and which ones don't cost too much. If a person was into reselling games they could easily look up, say, the copy of Shinobi Legions they found for cheap. They would see that for the last couple of years it sells about 1 per week for $20 to $30ish.
I have been trying to complete an Odyssey^2 collection, so I have been using Price Charting to see about what I should expect to pay for certain games. The thing about the O^2 system is, its not a popular seller. Most of the games sell in the low single digits...per year.
When I decided to have a concerted effort to go after a complete O^2 collection I figured I needed a plan. I needed to keep track of what I had, what I needed and what the normal prices were.
With a freshly printed out checklist from RFGeneration, I highlighted all the games I had left to buy and proceeded to pricecharting.com. Most of the O^2 games sell for just a couple of bucks, even with the box. But a few are more costly. I expected Power Lords! and Atlantis to be near the top but a couple of them surprised me. Who knew that Demon Attack or Nimble Numbers Ned! were in the $20 range? I was pretty surprised to see that S.I.D. The Spellbinder! had been increasing in price over the last year. It never came up in my research as a expensive O^2 game. The last one to sell was at $56.
S.I.D. The Spellbinder! is not unavailable on ebay. I've seen several of them for auction or buy it now. There was a CIB copy with a buy it now for $20 which was a serious consideration. Boxed copies are nice but I'm okay with loose and with a little experience of watching ebay, I knew a cheaper loose copy would come up, regardless of pricechartings $56.
The other day I bought S.I.D. The Spellbinder!, loose, for $2.99 plus S&H. It didn't show up for a little while but you can see here the difference I made on the site:
[img width=700 height=302]http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7135/7624081110_565a66b0cb_b.jpg[/img]
So pricecharting.com isn't perfect in all situations but I still think it is pretty neat. I'm going to keep using it. I just need to keep in mind that low volume sellers may not be too accurate. Having a service like this would be of great use to a reseller, I think many of us on this site come across such great deals in our hunt we might pick up if we knew there was a good market for them at many times the price we found them for.
I'm hoping the person who paid $56 got a mint sealed copy. Unfortunately pricecharting.com doesn't keep any record of condition, which has a big affect on value. It was kinda fun to have a negative 95% affect on the value of S.I.D. The Spellbinder!
What are your thoughts of the site? Do any of you have a similar experience? Let us know!
For the most part this is just some stuff I've found in the last few weeks. All of it could just go into the "small scores" thread but I figured if it was in my blog I could feel free to post a bunch of big pictures and blabber on endlessly.
Continue reading After 20 years, I found it!
Awhile back I had started a couple of threads showing pictures of the insides of games or devices I had taken apart. Unfortunately those threads were lost in battle. See, back in early 2012 RFGeneration was in a large battle, I think it was mostly ninjas, but there may have been pirate aliens too. Some of our youngest and best threads were lost. But RFGeners stayed strong and started making new content quickly. I am doing my part by bringing back the "whats inside?" sort of pictures, this time in Blog form!
Al Unser Jr. Turbo Racing. The first copy I bought was several years ago, it seems like it was part of a larger group of games bought on one day. This has been the only NES game I have never gotten to work. No amount of cleaning, blowing, wishing or blue potion's were able to bring this cartridge to life. There was no apparent reason for this, although far from a mint example, nothing seemed to be wrong....well, there was one thing. This cart was also the only one I've had which has a rattle when shook.
Fast forward to a month ago when I found another copy of Turbo Racing. The first thing I did when I picked it up was shake it. It rattles too! How strange is that? Would it work? I really was wondering about this until I got home. At the risk of ruining the suspense this is bringing my two readers, yes, the new copy worked. But why do both carts rattle? It's never taken much of an excuse for me to open things up....
Continue reading Whats Inside - Al Unser Racing
On April 28 2012 the Cowlitz Gamers for Kids Video Game Show was held in Kelso Washington. I wanted to report back on the show to you as I believe I was the only RFGener there. A real reporter would have gotten this story out much sooner but as I have a predilection for not writing, this story is old news.
There is a bunch to read but there are pictures at the end!
Continue reading Cowlitz Gamers for Kids Show
First off, I promise there is game related stuff in this blog.
The Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, who knew it was gaming related? Home to the Spruce Goose, this is a neat place to visit.
Continue reading Guns, Airplanes and Video Games
2011 is over, I don't know if you know but it left us awhile ago. So it is time for me to play catch up with some of the stuff I bought but didn't post about earlier.
I somehow became a Spyro fan? It's confusing because I still have not played a single Spyro game yet own three of them. How does this happen? You can tell me in the comments section. I think I paid $2 for this:
[img width=700 height=525]http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6101/7016250215_0ee9dbd8c7_c.jpg[/img]
Continue reading 2011 catch up blog
Frequently I check the local craigslist for old video game stuff. Rarely do I buy anything, but sometimes good things come up. I've gotten a PS2 and games, a Neo Geo pocket color and a couple of other things, but it doesn't add up to much for all the looking I do.
Awhile back I got a pretty cool lot, the ad said it was a C64 but when we got there it turned out to be a Vic-20 and TI-99 4A with games and cords and stuff. So I've been keeping my eye out for a C64.
Today I didn't have work because of snow and happened to find a C64 listed on craigslist.
This is what I got for $30 today:
[img width=700 height=525]http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7113/6858474840_4a4334a363_c.jpg[/img]
Continue reading A Great Commodore 64 Find
 Most of you know there are several weird tricks in Super Mario Bros. One of the most famous of these is the Minus World. Did you ever wonder how to get there? I did, back in 1988. How does someone who knows of the Minus World but not how to get there figure out this trick? Write Nintendo Power of course!
In what must have been April of '88 my dad showed the family a newspaper article that changed my life. Well, maybe it wasn't really such a life altering event, but it did start me on the hobby of video games. The Oregonian (newspaper) ran a nearly full page article on Super Mario Bros. and the NES. It was bold and colorful, showing something unknown in my household, a home videogame system. I read and reread the article absorbing everything; the colorful screenshots, the promise of excitement, and the few tricks. Then my dad announced the best part of all, we were getting one!
At that time my only contact with video games was the occasional dollar in quarters my parents would give me for the few arcade machines in the local pizza place, so this was pretty exciting.
As it turned out, this was going to be a lesson in patience. My dad went to the only place in our small town to buy the NES, the local Sears. It was sold out. We'd have to order it. A horrible thing to do to a kid, to make them learn what "on backorder" means on something so awesome as Mario! Before I was putting this together I would have said we had to wait 6 months for this "backorder" thing, turns out, now that I look at the dates, it was probably more like 6 weeks.
 I remember the wait as vividly as anything in my life. In that time the only Nintendo thing of substance in my possession was that newspaper article. Read, reread, study pictures, reread, think about, wait, reread, study.... The thing that most stood out was this fabled "Minus World", I couldn't wait to get there.
Finally the day arrived. It was as totally cool as I expected, running, jumping, waving the controller like it was a Wiimote...awesomness incarnate. But where was this Minus World? I guess I thought it would be in the instructions or explained in the game or be obvious in some other way. We had only gotten the most basic system, we didn't even have Duck Hunt, just Super Mario. To me the NES WAS Super Mario.
Shortly afterward, to our surprise, something called "Nintendo Fun Club News" arrived in the mail. A 28 page magazine all about Nintendo. Nothing about the Minus World but a promise of a larger magazine, "Nintendo Power", that was going to tell me how to get to the Minus World, I knew it. We subscribed right away.
Nintendo actually sent us two copies of the first issue, one must have been automatically sent to people, on a list of owners, to entice them and one because we subscribed so early. Filled with tons of information on all these games I didn't have, it was like a huge wish list. But still no info on how to get to World -1. Didn't Nintendo read my local paper? Didn't they know they were leaving the whole world hanging? I was running out of patience, but I figured issue #2 would tell me. Back then Nintendo Power only came out every two months, lots of waiting. I think we had Metroid by the time issue 2 got to our house so I had more to occupy my mind then SMB but they still didn't answer what I really wanted to know.
Nintendo Power had a section called "Counselors' Corner" where people would write in with questions about problems they were having in games. The format was a one or two sentence question with a Nintendo Counselor giving a paragraph answer with a couple of pictures. I wrote my letter soon after issue #2 arrived. It was something like, "Dear Nintendo Power, How do you get to the Minus World in Super Mario Brothers? I like your magazine." My mom thought I should write a longer letter because two sentences seemed kind of rude. I thought it should have been longer too, but what was I going to say? "How have you been? Do you like puppies?"
Nintendo sent me a very cool response. It included a personalized, typewritten cover letter signed by a real person and three pages answering my question with two other SMB tricks. The format of the letter has always impressed me. There are pictures from the game and is written in such a way I can only think someone put these four pages together just for me.
When issue #3 (November/December 1988) came my question wasn't actually in the "Counselors' Corner" section, it was in the "Classified Information" section. The format was a little different then "Counselors' Corner", there was no question, only a synopsis along with a paragraph of info and a couple of pictures. I had thought this section was where people from Nintendo submitted hints and tricks they had found and wanted the public to know about.
 You'll notice the tip in the magazine is much shorter then what they sent to me. Also it says it is from "Agent 826", where did this come from? Is it supposed to be me? And I like how the time, point and coin count don't match up from picture 2 to 3, it is sometimes a difficult trick to pull off, obviously it took them more them one try here. Personally I don't think anyone in my family could actually get to World -1 at the time. I think we became more infatuated with the "Little Fire Mario" and "Walking through bricks" tricks.
There are scans of all this, the article which probably came out in early April of '88 in the Oregonian, the four pages of response I got from Nintendo, the cover of issue #3 (awesome shoes, I still want a pair), and page 55 of the magazine.
I have to apologize about the format of these images. If you have a slow internet connection they are very large. As they are typed pages, a newspaper article a couple of Nintendo Power pages, the scans are sized to read the text. Also the article is so physically large it wouldn't all fit on my scanner. I had to blend four images, sorry for any blurriness or odd lines.
These papers have been in my possession for 23 years. Only recently did it occur to me they would be an interest to the game collecting community (I think getting a new printer with a scanner helped spark this). Hope you enjoy!
   
-Thanks to my wife for helping with coding and pictures. thetechchef.wordpress.com
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