Massive Purge

I’ve taken a break from blogging about my collection for a while now but the action is still happening.  I’ve traded 90% of my Nintendo collection!  No more N64 (crappy system anyway), Game Cube, Wii, and all but my favorite 15 SNES games.  I just can’t collect for all the systems anymore… there just isn’t enough money pouring into my Imperial Coffers to even think of obtaining it all.  So I’m now focusing solely on NES titles. I think I have a real shot at completing the entire North American released collection. In fact the good news is that I need about 50 fewer games than I had thought. The Sega Dude forced me to compile a list of my NES needs, and the grand total came to 99 left to go. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the remaining 99 games will cost me more than the 588 I already have! Oh well, you only live once.

New acquisitions:

In this first lot of games, we traveled all the way to Guelph to go to a game show, and the only things that I bought were the titles I had already arranged with a friend beforehand. In other words I could have stayed in Toronto. I did make an offer of $300 for Contra Force and TMNT Tournament Fighters, and I’m pretty sure i could have gotten the guy to bite, but on closer inspection, there was some slight label damage. If I’m going to pay that kind of coin then it has to be mint! Anyways I finally replaced that Mario’s Time Machine that was stolen from me in California last year. My buddy gave me a good deal at $85 for it, and I am now at peace.

Next I gathered all my games… made a master list, then emailed it to the Sega Dude to see if he wanted any of it. I think he bought three SNES titles, but I don’t remember which they were.

Then I sent out the same email to the Retro Game Bros in Toronto to see if they wanted to trade for any of it.  I knew they had a lot of rarer titles and although they are a store, I also knew they would give me a good deal. The best thing I traded them was my mint copy of R-Type III for the SNES. They took about 20% of everything I was selling (most of it were the games that they thought they could sell easily).

The above games are what I traded for.  In the end it worked out to about $1,000 in trade… the best title being KickMaster. Unfortunately I already owned KickMaster for the NES and for what ever bone headed reason it was listed on my needs list?! So I have an extra copy to trade which sucks because I’ll probably end up taking a loss.

So I’m left with 70% of the games I wanted to sell/trade. The next game show that I could sell at isn’t until spring 2018 up in Barrie, Ontario and while I wasn’t in a rush to sell everything, if the right opportunity came around then I would snap it up.

So the Sega Dude and I were at the Durham Game Swap in Oshawa, Ontario a few weeks ago, and there was this game that he wanted called Pulseman. Check it out here.  Anyways the game was priced at $400… and while that is what it goes for on Ebay (rarely) it is a hard to sell game for reasons I’m sure the Sega Dude will inform you of. So he offered the guy $200 for it, and the guy wasn’t impressed at all!  Later in the show just as we were about to leave, the Sega Dude offered the guy $260, but still no deal. The vendor said he needed at least $300 cash… so the deal didn’t happen.

Fast forward a few weeks, and apparently the Sega Dude was in touch with the same vendor (who owns a store out in Belleville, Ontario… a 2.5 hour drive east of us) who said he was coming to a store in Ajax (about a 30 minute drive from us) on Thursday, and if the Sega Dude had some stuff to trade for the game, then perhaps the transaction could happen. Long story short, the Sega Dude found some things to trade that added up to around $400 in value and got the game.

But this isn’t about the Sega Dude, this is about me and my Nintendo adventures. I sent the same vendor a list of my needs, and of course he replies back that he has most of the 99 games remaining on my list, and said he would bring a bunch of them down to Ajax for a possible trade.

These were the miscellaneous games that I needed that weren’t worth a whole lot.

Getting better!

Things are looking good!

Oh ya!

It ended up that he wanted the rest of the games I was selling, but of course on some games he was offering too little. So I pulled some of the higher end titles and the above is what we ended up trading for.  Dragon fighter is by far my most expensive game at $400. The grand total came to $1,850 in trade. I probably could have gotten another $700 if I sold it piece by piece, but that would take up too much of my free time, plus I would have to be charming to all the Kijiji buyers that are looking to rip me off, and have to deal with strangers coming to my house. No thanks!

All in all, I traded 98% of the games I wanted to get rid of for around $3400.  I’m left with a few titles that I should have no problem selling (like that bloody extra copy of KickMaster!).

The collection is now at a whopping 607 NES games!

Nintendo Joe