Hobbies Game Collecting Thread

[Plague von Karma]

Are most fire emblem games super expensive? I only own Path of Radiance, and judging from all the previous posts, it seems that most fire emblem games that came before it are even more costly. What is this "Nintendo Power and proper version?"

Many are, yes, and the ones that do end up that way usually become among the most expensive games on the system. During 2007-2012 Fire Emblem was in a "dark age" and the games released kept being understocked, and because of how much of a cult hit the series is now the prices have ballooned.

To name the expensive monsters;

• Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones (GBA) - ~£130 CiB
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (GCN) - ~£150 CiB, considered to be among the rarest games on the GameCube
• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (Wii) - ~£85 CiB
• Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem (DS) - ~£60 CiB, price has been steadily increasing for the past year
• Fire Emblem Fates Limited Edition (3DS) - ~£450 CiB, only way to get the third story on a cartridge

The rest are really inexpensive though. I think "Fire Emblem", the first we got in the west, is hiking in price though.

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So, to answer your question about Thracia...it has three releases: the Nintendo Power flash cartridge, the Deluxe Pack, and the "retail" release. Each of them have their own backgrounds and pricing.

Here's the flash cartridge, which could store up to 7 blocks of games. Some took more than others. If you took one of these to a writer kiosk in some stores, you could download games to them and put stickers over the numbered squares. Fire Emblem Thracia 776 was one of many games distributed in this way. The cartridges themselves are pretty inexpensive overall. There were Game Boy and SNES versions, and you can find the games here. Some of them are lost media, if I recall correctly. This is long and far the most common release of the game, which is why you see so many with reproduced boxes. You can get these for like £20, they're actually really common because of how popular Fire Emblem was over there. This is the edition I own. You could argue that Thracia just sold the cartridges...

During this period, a Deluxe Pack was also released, which featured a preloaded Nintendo Power cartridge. These go for enormous amounts of money that you may as well just spend on a Virtual Boy or something. It's absolutely magnificent though, like, look at those plushies and stuff! You've probably seen a few of these on the market if you've searched up the games before. These go for about £350-£400 in my experience but I've seen them go for way more. It's one of the holy grails of SNES collecting in my opinion.

Because of its popularity, Thracia received a full retail release in 2000 during the last days of the SNES, which has a few version differences that Blazade alluded to earlier. Because of it being among the last games released on the system, it's very expensive. Here's an image of one such release that I found on eBay, the listing is here if you're interested too. This costs about £150 from my searches.

 

[Candy Corn]

Wooooah that's pretty cool actually. I forgot about the little kiosk download thing. Had no idea a weird FE game was on there. Kinda makes me want to buy one of these versions. They seem interesting. Is the game any good? And do the rare versions have NA releases? That makes me wonder if if there are any custom made physical carts of Legend of Zelda and the Ancient Stone Tablets.

 

[Plague von Karma]

Wooooah that's pretty cool actually. I forgot about the little kiosk download thing. Had no idea a weird FE game was on there. Kinda makes me want to buy one of these versions. They seem interesting. Is the game any good? And do the rare versions have NA releases? That makes me wonder if if there are any custom made physical carts of Legend of Zelda and the Ancient Stone Tablets.

Thracia has a fan translation but otherwise no English release; tons of repro carts though. The rest do, though, and the prices I gave were specifically for those versions.

I've seen some Satellaview physical repro carts for Zelda out there before but they're very expensive.

 

[Candy Corn]

So my original gameboy's screen overlay has fallen off. The glue that is used to keep it on is so old and crusty that it just fell off lol Does anyone know the proper way I can go about repairing this? What glue to use, or whatever else I could use instead of glue?

 

[Plague von Karma]

So my original gameboy's screen overlay has fallen off. The glue that is used to keep it on is so old and crusty that it just fell off lol Does anyone know the proper way I can go about repairing this? What glue to use, or whatever else I could use instead of glue?

You can get self-adhesive lenses on eBay for basically nothing these days. Hell, you can even get them in different colours if you're into that! I've personally used superglue and the like to fix my original one a few years ago, but that's, well, quite a permanent solution...

Similarly, you can get replacement battery covers and stuff that fit super well. Here's my Game Boy Pocket, which I ordered a replacement cover for a few days ago. It cost less than £1! Unfortunately, it wasn't quite the right colour, but anything is better than me forgetting to remove the batteries when I store it and seeing acid leak out or something.

Custom Game Boy stuff is just insane in general, really. You can get even get shells replicating limited edition versions for less than £20. The GBA is the best by far for that, though.

 

[Plague von Karma]

After quite the time sink - we're talking about a year of gradual purchases - my misc SNES games now have repro boxes. I do want to put them somewhere different, but for now they'll sit on my shelf. The guy who does them for me even went and found the boxart for Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss and made a perfect replica, and it's of the same quality as what everything else is. It's so good. You can hardly tell the difference between the mint condition boxes and the reproductions too, it's just what I was going for when starting out!

Since not every SNES game I own is there, here's my spreadsheet page, only unboxed stuff is the Super Game Boy adapter which is a different beast.

There's no manuals, but it's not really a concern for me, the main thing was giving these cartridges something to sit in that isn't my drawer. Besides, uh, the cost of replica manuals is pretty scary--

I'll likely get my N64 stuff sorted next. Everything else is in significantly smaller numbers than my SNES collection, so it'll likely all get sorted semi-quickly.

 

[Plague von Karma]

The plot thickens with Wata Games, keep your eyes open for scams!

 

[Plague von Karma]

Facebook Marketplace blessed me with something amazing. The white Zekrom/Reshiram DSi, boxed, still got a bunch of the old wrapping inside, used twice, for £100, which is way below the usual value. Wanted one of these for a very long time and I'm glad it's finally entered my collection. It didn't have the game, but I already had it, so it feels like a nice reunion.

Here it is in action!

 

[Plague von Karma]

Wata Games is finally getting its legal comeuppance, facing a class-action lawsuit for market manipulation. For those who didn't follow Karl Jobst's videos on the subject, this mysterious company got into a partnership with Heritage Auctions oddly early into its lifespan. It graded sealed video games unusually highly, which led to a lot of price speculation and is why video game prices have been rocketing up. They did deny the allegations of manipulation but didn't really refute any of the (absolutely stacked) evidence against them. For a more detailed article, go here.

I tracked down the filing itself, which took quite a while. Case number is 8:22-cv-00967-DOC-KES; you can find the filing here, but you'll need to make an account to view the full thing. I don't know if there's a better place to view it or not.

Here's a tweet with screenshots containing some of the important information;

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1524513920135798784

Here are Karl Jobst's videos, which do an incredible job summarising everything prior to these events.

Someone did make a rebuttal recently;

He does bring a few good points up: the evidence of shill bidding is actually not that high, which is the smoking gun in any manipulation case. There is some pretty bad history of the people running it, though. 15:24 is where an actual real point comes up though, where the guy shows Jobst being interviewed about the video, though I have not seen the context and thus don't know how Jobst's views actually changed. It shows Jobst realising how the collecting side of things actually works, which is nice, but not much else.

However, he seems to be arguing for distrust rather than actually refuting the main points Jobst brings up, such as how he takes the point regarding interviews out of context. He seems to be arguing from a fallacious point of view at quite a few points. I will also note the suspicious timing, as this was produced months after Jobst's videos came out; they're timed just a few weeks prior to the lawsuit being filed. Take that as you will.

 

[Plague von Karma]

The Wata Games lawsuit hasn't had any big developments, but my collection sure has!

After over a decade of aspiring to get one, I finally have a Game Boy Player in my collection, all hooked up and ready to go. This is essentially the "successor" to the SNES's Super Game Boy and the N64's unreleased Wide Boy add-ons, only it's compatible with Game Boy Advance games. This makes it much easier for me to stream GBA stuff off hardware and also means I don't have to deal with stuff like batteries randomly dying. GBA SPs are pretty, erm, known for that...

Normally you have to get the boot disc separately for these things, as they're both extremely rare on their own. However, I managed to get both at the same time, bundled for £190. For Game Boy Player standards, that's really damn cheap. It works and everything and shows no signs of slowing down, so I'll likely be making use of this quite a bit down the line! The GameCube has amazing games as-is and now its library got 300% bigger!

Here it is hooked up, with my Sapphire next to it and PMD Red Rescue plugged in. I guess that doesn't leave room for thought on what I want to stream eh?

 

[Blazade]

The Wata Games lawsuit hasn't had any big developments, but my collection sure has!

After over a decade of aspiring to get one, I finally have a Game Boy Player in my collection, all hooked up and ready to go. This is essentially the "successor" to the SNES's Super Game Boy and the N64's unreleased Wide Boy add-ons, only it's compatible with Game Boy Advance games. This makes it much easier for me to stream GBA stuff off hardware and also means I don't have to deal with stuff like batteries randomly dying. GBA SPs are pretty, erm, known for that...

Normally you have to get the boot disc separately for these things, as they're both extremely rare on their own. However, I managed to get both at the same time, bundled for £190. For Game Boy Player standards, that's really damn cheap. It works and everything and shows no signs of slowing down, so I'll likely be making use of this quite a bit down the line! The GameCube has amazing games as-is and now its library got 300% bigger!

Here it is hooked up, with my Sapphire next to it and PMD Red Rescue plugged in. I guess that doesn't leave room for thought on what I want to stream eh?

10 years ago getting a gameboy player and disc for 30 bucks was one of the best purchases I've ever made in my life. So, so nice to be able to play and stream GBA games on the TV.

For others looking into this I'll say that you should look into the Game Boy Interface

https://www.gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Game_Boy_Interface

You still need the hardware, but you can bypass the need for the rarer, much more expensive disc using an action replay and an SD card. It also has the advantage of being very low latency, which I definitely notice when I'm speedrunning so it's the only thing I use now when I'm serious about grinding for records.