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Messages - hexen

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Modern Video Games / Re: Pokemon Presents 02/27/24
« on: February 27, 2024, 04:06:43 pm »
Hopefully they are not so deep in development already there isn't time left to steal a few of PalWorld's good ideas! It already kind of feels like an improved Legends: Arceus in style and stuff like the good animations and having Pals actually have work to do is something I could see fitting in with the theme of urbanizing Lumiose. Besides, turnabout is fair play and if Palworld "took inspiration" from Pokemon designs, no reason Pokemon can't "take inspiration" from some of Palworld's best game systems!

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I joined VG collect in 2020, when my original collection-database-site retrocollect went down.

Damn, RetroCollect went down? It's buried in my long post but I started there so it did have some importance to me. That is a shame, I wasn't there long because back in the day (maybe this changed in the near decade) it was focused on UK collectors so it kinda sucked for American collections.

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I like this kind of thing.

History, start in the mid 2000s and joining VGcollect in 2011

I'd always been interested in gaming since playing Super Mario world when I was 4 or 5 at a daycare center. That daycare is where I got in most of my gaming as my brother and I begged my dad to get us an SNES. He didn't want to, but he did happen to have something in the closet from his younger days... an Intellivison that he let us use that really was what started my interest in retro games. At school my friends would talk about games on the SNES and Genesis which was completely different from my experience of playing Frog Bog, Night Stalker and Astrosmash. I hate myself for the fact my dad kept all the games and system with pristine boxes but us kids didn't consider that and just mishandled and destroyed all the fragile cardboard and only cared about the practical items which luckily I still have to this day. I inherited a lot from my dad, in many ways to be elaborated later, because he would also go to the flea market every week and occasionally come back with new Intellivision games.

Eventually we got Gameboys and finally the coveted SNES by the time the N64 was out, which we chose over it. Throughout the years I made attempts at getting into older systems via early emulation on the family Windows 95 and even buying an NES at a friend's garage sale... which I sadly returned because we couldn't get it to work being ignorant of the proper method of cleaning back then and this particular situation for sure didn't effect me at all. I moved on through childhood upgrading to the newest systems occasionally. By the time I entered high school I met Byron who had managed to already have some collection despite our young age, lack of money being a big reason I couldn't. This would change in a tragic way.

Early in my sophomore year my dad extremely suddenly died in a just few days from some kind of infection they couldn't pin down in time. Time moved on and then in my junior year I started to receive small chunks of inheritance to the degree of about $500 a month and that is when I started collecting proper. I was pretty reckless as a young man with money for the first time is not unlikely to be, but because of the stupid rise of the retro game market in modern times I would make a huge profit nowadays if I ever wanted to sell. The one system that had always evaded me was the NES so that is what I started collecting for. I snapped up every well known game and some "rare" ones judged by internet sources and still cringe at seeing stuff like Bubble Bobble 2 for $50 in 2006 and passing it up because I thought it was too much, if fucking only. I was doing this all on eBay as I had limited car access.

When I graduated in 2007 I started getting out more in my dads old truck and when I was out with Byron we would occasionally stop at garage sales and then we came up with the idea to go out Friday mornings to garage sales and thrift stores and that became the start of 5 or 6 years of doing this weekly. As we did, and our collections grew, we started thinking about tracking our collections - but how? We searched around online earlier with nothing good leading me to just take a picture of each individual item and put it on a photobucket as a tracker. Eventually we found a site called RetroCollect we started using but it was heavily UK based and not great for US tracking. However, we got friendly with a user on the site name NightowlJRM who just happened to tell us about a new site he was using - VGCollect!

When we joined the site was in it's exciting start-up phase where it was buzzing with activity and would frequently talk with Matt & Co. with the other early users for suggestions to improve the site. It's a shame almost all those old users and admins are half a decade or more removed, but I've got weird leftover souvenirs like Scott following me from back then. Well, we had our site to track collections and I was personally putting lots of effort into updating the databse and my passion for collecting was high! On to the bright future!

Present day

Well, the future wasn't so bright for me or my collecting hobby. Around 2014 I had the worst parts of my life one after the other which badly hurt my passion for collecting but the other side of the bad coin was setting in even before then and would have driven me out even if I was on cloud 9 - modern retro game collecting over-saturation. Now, I started collecting seriously in 2006 which was a mythical dreamland golden age so amazing I wouldn't believe it ever existed if I couldn't physically look at my collection. Every Friday we would make amazing finds for pennies and that sets expectations. By 2012ish I was already sure it was over for collecting. Flea markets that used to sell boxes of games for $5 to get rid of them were now selling Combat for Atari for $100 thinking it was some valuable treasure handcrafted by DaVinci. The money I was spending on gas to traverse our spots was becoming not worth it for our returns.

More and more disheartened and frothing with rage at resellers the worst year of my life in late 2014 broke the camels back and I stopped actively hunting for games in the wild. To this day the last piece of retro tech I bought for my collection was a bundle of NES games from our own Soera in 2017. I still like the idea of collecting things, but it's not the same as the old days. I collect Amiibo to which I have a full collection as of now, and I do enjoy collecting Switch games as many sites exist to print indie games I love that would otherwise have no physical release. The thrill of the chase is gone due to being priced out of that wild hunting. Today's prices make pessimistic view of 2014 seems sunny in comparison. I once had aspirations of a 100% complete NES collection which would actually have been possible with my meager means had I picked the right games to buy with hindsight, but now the remaining 5% I still need would probably outprice the 95% I have several times over.

It's all a big shame. The past is price locked to all but the most wealthy or irresponsible and the future is digital slavery where you don't even own games you buy on online platforms, I don't even track Steam and digital games I own here because that is about the same to me as counting games I pirated in terms of ownership. My playlist just hit Little Dark Age and I think that's the perfect song to end my rant here.

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Off Topic / Re: Tetris Movie (Hype Or Unripe?) Apple TV+
« on: February 25, 2023, 07:12:30 am »
Could be good. However, there is already a gold standard in the form of Gaming Historian's Tetris documentary which is one of my favorite documentaries both in presentation and the story itself. It'll probably have way more facts because of it's format which I prefer over docu-movies that re-enact events.

5
General / Re: Strictly Limited Games is a %$@#ing JOKE!
« on: January 13, 2023, 04:51:15 pm »
From what I know they are in pretty dire straights and likely do not put the proper funding into having a proper staff to deal with all the problems, there was also that recent firing already mentioned which was a bad PR move at an already bad time. I'll admit that I have bought 14 orders from them since the release of their first Switch game and have never had any issues outside of their iconic slow fulfillment... heck, they even sent me that 5-year coin that customers more prolific than I had much trouble getting so I am probably on the higher end of customer satisfaction. Still, they've always been kinda scummy - even in the past they cancelled all a guy's orders for complaining about them on Twitter.

All I can say is they probably have a death clock already ticking for the next few years... they've exhausted most good games with no physical release and are now mainly re-releasing old games to the point it's been over a year anything has interested me on top of customer dissatisfaction such as this.


I'm stupid, completely different producer. They need to stop all being similarly named with 3 letter initials.

6
Modern Video Games / Re: Nintendo Direct 9.13.22 thoughts?
« on: September 13, 2022, 11:36:23 am »
So many farming games that will be redundant when they fall well short of Stardew Valley's quality and content quantity. Like seriously, there were 5 or 6 in the direct which is ridiculous. It's a solved genre basically... nobody but another indie dev is ever going to have the passion to even try to match Concerned Ape and outdo Stardew Valley which I'd put my chips on never happening.

Pikmin 4 is at least a big 1st party, though not one I personally care about. I'm almost never impressed by Directs and today was no exception, they are usually just dumping grounds for mid-ware no one cares about.

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Right at the start of LRG's Switch line I bought their first game because I wanted it (Thimbleweed Park) and for the next few games I thought "Eh, I'm here at the beginning might as well keep up a full set". However, when it became apparent the speed at which they were releasing titles was way more frequent than I expected, I dropped that practice real fast. Since then I have ordered a decent amount of games, but only the ones I actually wanted to play and that has been my philosophy with these physical releasers. While some of the games I bought ended up pretty pricey (looking at you Shantae and the Pirate's Curse) that hardly matters to me since I bought them to own and not re-sell.

While the practice of having Best Buy runs doesn't bother me too much, I can say that I would hate to buy the jacked-up LRG version with shipping when I could get it cheaper in person at Best Buy later. I can sympathize with the FOMO collectors who get jabaited, especially when they stopped advertising the possibility of Best Buy runs which is scummy, but it's also in my nature to hold contempt for their type.

So far the Best Buy deal has only helped me as I didn't know what Blasphemous was when LRG first released it, and was able to get the BB cheap version later. There are also interesting anomalies like the BB Celeste being more valuable than the LRG version... luckily I just wanted the game. I'm apparently in LRG's good graces as they sent me the 5 year coin when many other much bigger buyers were excluded from, but I've heard stories how they are very bitchy and ban-happy over criticism.

All in all, LRG is for sure worse than when they started and have strayed from their original mission statement, but as someone who is just getting games I want because I hate digital's lack of ownership the occasional purchase from them is not something I consider too bad. It helps that they've been releasing less and less things I care about so my purchases are less frequent.

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Off Topic / VGcollect nostalgia
« on: April 23, 2022, 07:55:44 pm »
A few days back I decided to just take a rare look at my profile and I realized that not only did I pass my 10 year anniversary on the site, it was already closer to 11 than 10. Really got me thinking back to VGcollect's early days and the general difference in life, and how I've had this account for 1/3rd of it.

I started looking up some of the old regulars from that time, and sadly (but not unexpectedly because of the amount of time) the majority haven't been active in many years. It really was an interesting time when I was wishing for a good collection tracker that wasn't sub-par with options that an acquaintance from another, lesser tracker site named Nightowljrm (also long inactive) brought VGcollect to my attention. That first year or two of frantically scanning every item I had to do my part of filling in the database while Matt & Scott were super active in building the site's features was a time. I was never as active as then, and have been very minimally posting in the forums over the years... so a big shout out to the regulars, especially the 2011-2012 OGs who are still about!

It's sad that as time went on the over-saturation of the hobby basically priced me out of it and drove me to less site activity. Heck, the last time I added anything that wasn't a Switch game or Amiibo was in 2016... a time I already considered too expensive. I filled the remaining gaps in my GBA/DS/Gamecube Pokemon collection and between then and now all I bought has at least doubled in price and in one case increased about 8x... which just shows the problem all too well. The ridiculous increase in my collection's value is theoretically nice, but I would much prefer to still be able to expand it than sit on it. Sometimes it's utter stagnation makes me consider selling, but there are too many memories in the experience of acquiring it. I sometimes wonder if this is also why other OGs have been gone for years, but a decade is also a long time and taste changes.

Anyway, old man reminiscing aside, it's been interesting to watch the site and it's prominent forum users change over time. I didn't even notice the new feature where your collection shows the cartridge pic if you have your item marked as cart only and that is pushing my autism to wanting to go through and mark all my games correctly (so many years ago if I only had the cart I checked nothing, and that still shows the box image) as well as fill in the database gaps that now cause games that didn't used to to show up as the dreaded "no image" box. I appreciate the work the devs are still doing - big thanks to Jason in particular, as well as those who chisel away at perfecting the database item accuracy.

That's probably enough boomer rambling on the topic for now. I'd love to hear other OG perspectives and that of newer members. I'll stick around in the background as long as VGcollect exists even if I never again obtain another NES or SNES game and maybe in another 10 years I'll complain about Wii shovelware going for thousands in another nostalgia post. Until then, I'll see you guys around now and then!

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General / What where the best deals you foolishly passed on?
« on: February 02, 2022, 06:23:38 pm »
Though I have been pretty inactive in collection for several years the recent shoot up in prices has led me to looking at modern prices of some things to see where they are at. It was when I was looking at PS2 game prices when I saw that Haunting Grounds is now several hundred dollars. This made me think back to the past when I saw it for my only ever time in the wild at a little antique mall flea market for less than $10 and for some reason didn't buy it despite being interested. I really have no idea why I didn't as I was really into building my PS2 collection at the time. On the topic of pricey PS2 games I also saw Rule of Rose several times and despite it being one of the most expensive PS2 games now I didn't know what it was so there was no realistic chance I would have bought it (unless it was like $1) unlike Haunting Grounds which I was actually interested in.

In the past when Byron and I used to go out every Friday for years this is what we dubbed paying a "stupid tax", missing out on something and having to pay more when you actually did buy it. Even in the day this happened a lot to me... some examples include all the Mega Man X games (specifically X2 and X3) for $20-30, a copy of E.V.O. for $25 and a CIB Castlevania: Bloodlines for $15 all being things I ended up buying for many times more than the chances I had to get them for cheap.

Either through hindsight price increase or straight in the moment missing out, what are some chances you guys had to pick something up for a bargain and for whatever reason you passed on the deal?

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Most people talk of Goodwill like it was the GS of thrift stores. Goodwill never yielded squat for me, even back in the good ole days. Just no games there, ever. There must have been a game collector who worked in the back. Salvation Army on the other hand, did yield stuff.

Honestly, though I found a lot of good stuff at Goodwill over something like 5-7 years, indivual games where not all that common. In terms of loose games it was one of the worst for the 10 or so places I visited weekly. In terms of consoles, especially boxed ones, they where on the upper end... perhaps even #1. Of course they are different in every state and even city and the idea of an employee scooping things up is always something to be paranoid about.

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Quite a few in the old days... as many have said the golden age that ended many years ago was crazy.

One of the most high priced indivual items is probably when I bought a CIB Copy of Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel at a place called Entertain-mart for less than $10. Good thing I had played it a lot at my daycare as a child so I had reason to pick it up as I had no idea it was so oddly expensive.

I also picked up a copy of Dragon Fighter on NES for something like $20 at Movie Trading Co. (Vintage Stock) which is another one I am shocked to see how much it is now. I obtained tons of NES games for $5-10 dollars there that are now worth hundreds... what a great place it was in the past. Up until like 2014, they charged the same price for CIB games as they did loose ones... man I miss that.

Half Price Books used to be a truly great resource, before becoming a terrible one. Some highlights include picking up Gunstar Heroes CIB for like $5 (there where also a ton of other Genesis games I picked up that day) and it had a final hurrah after I had already considered it dying when I got Soul Blazer for less than $10.

Goodwill is another terrible case in that it used to be great... glad others in the thread have gone over it's sad decline. I got many game systems for great prices. CIB Donkey Kong N64 for like $20, Pokemon N64 + Controller for $10ish, a Game Gear in a carrying case with 20 or so games for $20.

Man, I miss when this was not just possible but somewhat frequent...

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Ah, the benefits of having physical copies of the originals so you don't have to give greedy companies money for crappy cash-grab remakes. The whole idea is silly to begin with, anyone above super normie standards can just boot up a PS2 emulator and play all these games with enhancements over even the original with hobbyist enhancements. Remasters are the most hilarious wastes of money, especially with the standards of companies these days.

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Damn, would have loved to get every one of those Switch games. Alas, they are all shown as out of stock at any WalMart near me but that's not surprising with those low prices.

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Carl's Jr's has become a light novel called "I can't believe this burger mascot has come to life and now spends all day eating hamburgers on my couch!"'

Taco Bell has also become Kaiwaii. You need to take your logo redesigns to some Japanese companies!

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Off Topic / Re: Jurassic Park, Back to The Future or Indiana Jones?
« on: August 31, 2021, 10:44:25 pm »
Also going to have to go with Back to the Future. Indiana Jones is next up, and then Jurassic Park. Not to insult any of them because they are all classic adventure films.

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