The God’s Must be Crazy!

The Original Flintstones for $440?

Now I know for sure that the video game God’s have gone completely insane… JJgames.com was charging $440USD for the Flintstones:  Rescue of Dino and Hoppy several weeks ago!  The game usually sells for no more than $20, and that’s pushing it as the title isn’t rare, and isn’t that good!

I’d like to say that JJgames got it wrong, and realized their error in that it wasn’t Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, but here we have the reduced price of $90USD for the same game a few weeks later?!  I’ve ordered from these guys before as if you really scan their website there occasionally is a deal to be had… but 99% of the time I feel that they way overcharge… that being said they’ve been around for a long time, and if they are getting their asking price, more power to them!  In fact I no longer see this game on their website… does anyone want my copy of the original Flintstones for an unreasonable price?!

This is a screen shot from Lukiegames.com.  Again I’ve ordered from them before several years ago, but seeing as I only need rare titles for my NES collection I doubt I’ll be doing business with them again.  In the above picture, you can see that they are charging $276.47USD for Bubble Bobble 2.  This is actually a semi-reasonable price considering that it usually goes for around $300USD according to my collectors app, and videogamepricecharting.com.  I sent them a request to check the condition of the label, and they replied that they wouldn’t bother.  I requested again and told them that this isn’t a $5 game we are talking about… and was still rejected (reading between the lines I can infer that it isn’t even worth their effort)?!  WTF?!  Do they not care about customer service even for higher priced items?!  I want to be wined and dined for this kind of cash!

When I was in Miami several years ago I asked if I could see the Lukie Games warehouse, and was told that it wasn’t possible.  Here I am 1,500Km away from home, and they still wouldn’t accommodate me?!  It’s not a difficult decision to cut them off from my business and recommendations!  Suck it Lukie Games!

The trend on retro game prices still seems to be declining though… I can wait for my $400 copy of Little Samson!

Nintendo Joe

Waiting for the Big Score!

First of all, I promise that I won’t mention the NFL in this post.  Even though I love it, and NFL Sundays are my favorite day of the week, I realize that many of you don’t share the same passion.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, my friend Pat the NES Punk predicts that the prices of rare NES games are going to come drastically down.  This is good news because there is no way I’m paying what they want for these few titles.  I also agree with Pat when he says that Little Samson isn’t nearly as “rare” as people claim it is.  I see it at almost every game swap that I go to, and never once have I ever seen a sale.  This tells me that people aren’t interested.  I mean according to Video Game Price Charting, the game goes for over $1400CAN… and JJgames.com is charging $1785US, give me a break dude!  Pat predicts the game will go down to around the $400 mark.  I’m still not happy (and maybe never will be), but at least I don’t have to sell both kidneys to purchase it!  So yeah,  I’m going to hold out for the most expensive games… even if I have to wait several years.  My collection thus far is awesome, and will have to do for the foreseeable future.  I still look forward to going to game swaps and stores, however I will not be bringing in wads of cash.  My soul is for sale though if that means anything to you!

My over the air PVR came in the mail the other day. It is a Mediasonic Homeworx model and cost $80CAN after shipping.  This is just the basic model, but from what I can tell the only thing that separates it from the much more expensive version is that it can’t record more than one show at once.  Who cares as I hardly watch network TV anyways!  It took me a while to set up as the instructions for how to record were very poor.  However thanks to my nerd skills and a couple of beers I was able to figure it out.  I can now watch regular TV on a slight delay and skip the commercials!  I didn’t think it could be done, but Judge Judy just got even better!  Give ’em hell Judith!

The other day I was picking up a package from the post office, and when I got back into my car, this teenage punk started staring at me like he wanted to fight.  He started staring at me… I mean right bloody at me!  Now I’m not one for violence, but at the end of the day I’m just another bloke with a pool cue… (this line was inspired by Francis Begbie from the movie Trainspotting and has been made appropriate for family viewers… the real version is much better though!).  Anyways we traded glares and went on our separate ways.  I don’t think I project the image of as tough guy who wants to fight, but then again I have Scottish/Irish in my blood so who knows?!  I can honestly say that in my 43 years of life, I’ve been lucky enough to never have gotten into a real fight in my personal life (karate doesn’t count as it is controlled).  I just can’t help but wonder why this kid wanted to have anything to do with me?  Teenage angst I suppose.  Anyways it gave me a good rush!

I’m getting pretty tired of YouTube commercials… especially now that they are doubling up in hopes of getting paid subscribers!  That being said, I have released my latest update on an edit to a film that I feel makes it far superior to the original.  My thing is this… Star Wars:  The Last Jedi in my opinion was the absolute WORST of the franchise… even Phantom Menace was better.  This was just pure crap, so what I did was edit out all the bad parts, and although my version is much shorter, I do believe it is superior!  If Disney is looking for some redirection, the Sega Dude and I are ready to quit our jobs and come on over to give you a hand on saving the franchise!

Until next time,

Nintendo Joe

Earn up to $1,500!!

I earned nearly $1,500 the other day just from doing some general research!  Basically I totalled how much the remaining NES games would cost me on pricecharting.com and compared it to the prices listed on the iPhone app puregaming.org.  It turns out that price charting list my remaining games at $1,500 cheaper than the app!  My wife will be so pleased at what I have earned for her!  The grand total for all the remaining NES games is still at a hefty $8,878.  However when you break it down into twenty four easy payments of $370, this baby will be complete in two years!  That’s if I pay retail (I won’t)… so the savings just keep adding up, and our mortgage will be payed off in no time!

This game was actually sold to me by a follower of this blog.  Apparently he was helping a friend sell his games for very reasonable prices.  Unfortunately this was the only game out of the bunch that I needed for my collection.  It’s actually a really bad game… at least I’m fan of NES games.  I think the graphics are cheap, and the game play involves a lot of staring at the same screen over and over again… not my cup of tea, but to each their own.

This is a game that I’ve been looking for for a while.  It doesn’t turn up that often, and when it does it sells for over $40.  However I knew the guy and offered him my extra copy of North vs. South as a straight up trade.  In the end, he did better than I did in the trade, but I was okay with that as it saved me from selling the game on Kijiji.  You’ll notice that the label is a little damaged in the top right corner.  This was a bit of an oversight, but alas it is a sports game that I’ll never play… plus I’ll tuck it neatly into a universal game case where it will never see the light of day again.  That or until my wife gets mad at me and sells my collection.

These next three games were partially traded for at the video game swap in Guelph ON.  In return this vendor took my Mario Party 7 for the Game Cube, and Radiant Dawn for the Wii which I picked up a couple of years ago at a yard sale for $4.  I was hoping that he would also take my extra Kickmaster, but unfortunately he already had a copy for sale.  So I had to pony up a small sum of cash to make the trade fair.  I’ve never seen Ghost Lion before so I was excited to see this.

As usual, I get a little stupid when I go to these game swaps, and this one in Guelph was no exception.  I had asked about the Terra Cresta game, but the dealer accidentally pulled out the wrong game… Prince of Persia which I already own.  However I was caught up in all the excitement and didn’t notice.  Fortunately I took the dealers card which had his cell phone number on it and texted him if he would swap the games through the mail.  He was a very honest chap, and express posted Terra Cresta to me right away.  In turn, I posted him the Prince of Persia game back so all was settled.  It actually cost me more to ship the game that I would have thought, but it was only 35 cents extra to express post it.  Unfortunately this guy is a private dealer and doesn’t have a website or social media for me to plug, however if you ever run across Brodie’s Gaming 101, he’s an honest dude!

Well the good news is (at least for collectors) is that it seems as though the price of retro video games has peaked, and is on a slow downward trend.  For example, the most expensive copy of Snow Brothers went for $350…granted this was at a retail store and I would never have paid that ridiculous amount, the $188 the game lists for on pricecharting.com feels a lot better… and is hopefully a sign of things to come. In fact, with only three exceptions did puregaming.org list my remaining games at a buck or two more than pricecharting.com.. I love my games, but damn, even at the updated values some of them are so expensive!

Nintendo Joe