My Retro Purchases in April 2019

So neither my blogging or my YouTubing have got off the ground again this month and I havent been taking photos of things either so once again there are going to be no pictures sorry about that I know its duller reading through lists like this without something to look at so I appologise hopefully by next month I will have at least sorted out a few pitures to make things a little more intresting.

My first retro purhases of the month happend on the 14th a complete Japanese copy of MRC racing for the N64 arrived that I had paid 2pounds for with free postage from ebay and from a small indy games store I got a complete copy of Sonic 2 for megadrive for 3pounds. The funny thing is a few days later a second complete copy of MRC arrived and when I messaged them about the error the seller just told me to keep it.

On the 21st I went on a carboot and got a whole bunch of things which I will go on to list below

For 1quid I got a small ds case with a loose mystery stories ds cart in it and 4 loose psp games been 10 alien force, ridge racer 2, after burner black falcon and monster Hunter portable 2g.

I got a loose Gameboy cart of sensible soccer European championship for 2quid

WWF Attitude loose cart for N64 for 1quid

For 5quid I got a TwoDS (a day piracy type cart that can do gba and D's games) with a 8gig sd card in it, a 512mb psp memory card, nhl96 for megadrive boxed no manual and a whole bunch of Mac os installation discs which might help with an old project I never finished.

For 2quid I got a loco roco demo disc for psp in it's packaging.

Bomberman fantasy race for ps1 boxed but missing manual for 50pence

Bubble Bobble revolution complete for ds for 1quid

Fable complete for the Xbox for a quid

and Duel masters for ps2 complete for 50pence

On the 27th I went in Game and they'd marked the two retron HD Nes consoles they had in stock down from 59.99 to 19.99 each so I purchased both of them figured I'd use one of them to play my NES carts from now on and not risk the actual console, surprised to find there are things I prefer about the cadet pad you get with it over the original NES pad. Overall I am very happy with these I wasnt sure with them being new wether to list them here or not but deided that as I consider them part of my retro stuff then why not.

On the 29th I went to the charity shop my daughter used to work at and one of the managers stopped me and said they had something to offer me, it was 3 boxed complete NES games for 2pound each. I brought them and I am very happy with them they are Mission Impossible, Isolated Warrior and Gauntlet 2. Awesome day especially as I can play them on my new retron HD.

I would call this a pretty darn good month I spent £64.98 which I dont think is a bad amount at all ,its not the most or least I have spent but I think for what I spent I got some pretty good stuff and the Retron HD consoles will help me to more easily enjoy the old Nintendo games I own this may atually make them my favourate purhases of the month although I am very very happy with the 3 boxed NES games.

My Retro Purchases June 2018

I started my months purchases on the 6th of June with Thunder Birds Japanese cart only for the SNES arriving in the post, it cost me £3, postage was free so I think this was a pretty good pick up. I also went in a semi local retro shop on the way home from work and grabbed Sonic 2 for game gear cart only for £1.

On the 8th I went to an Indy store and I grabbed Gauntlet 2 cart and manual for NES for £5 and Hook for NES for £5 , in my opinion anytime you can get a NES game for £5 and its not a sports title then you just kind of have to jump on it.

On the 10th on the way home from work I grabbed Asterix and the Great Rescue for megadrive cart only for £. I have to admit to having been a huge Asterix fan as a kid. 

Things were quiet on the retro purchasing front then until the 17th when I spent £1 on a complete copy of Grand Turismo 4 for the PS2 which also happend to have a memory card in the case and the disc for Project Silpheed the lost planet in the case tucked into the manual. Not bad for £1 at all really.

On the 21st I grabbed two loose NES carts, RoboCop for £6 and StarWars for £7.

On the 21st I went to a charity shop, a charity shop which usually wants £3.99 for any game you could possibly call retro whatever format its on and even if it is just an old ps2 copy of FIFA. Well surprisingly this time they had a sign up saying they had too much stock and any product with a red dot on it was only 25pence and so I got the following games all complete all for 25pence each Brave: The Search For Spirit Dancer for PS2, The Jungle book grove party for ps2, Singstar Anthems for ps2, Medal of honor European assault for xbox, Sensible soccor 2006 for xbox, James bond everything or nothing for xbox, Splinter Cell for Xbox, and Mashed for xbox

On the 22nd I once again found myself in a charity shop and I grabbed The Lost World: Jurassic Park complete for PS1 for £1.50.

My last purchase of the month happened on June the  26th when I went into a charity shop and  I grabbed Tony hawk's underground complete for Xbox for £1, Halo (classics edition) complete for Xbox for £1 and Project Gotham racing 2 (classics edition) complete for £1. I might have ignored them if it wasn't for the fact that they were in amazing condition with totally scratch free discs.

So in June I spent £38.50 on retro games which is actually a pretty low amount for me, as for star pick ups I would argue that it wasn't much of an eventful month and I don't think I really have a favorite purchase, so lets see what next month brings.

NES bad box art: Ironsword

OK so if you have been following my blog for any length of time then you will have most likly realised that I love looking at cover art, often comparing different art from different regions. In most cases it has been megadrive/Genesis cover art and usually I have been looking at which region provided the best art. Today is a little different as I am looking at a piece of NES box art, it's an Infamous piece of art. As I have obviously posted the above picture then you know I am talking about Ironsword. If you look at the case without having played the game you might wonder what the issue is, well to put it simply they put a famous model Fabio on the front cover dressed as a barbarian the main issue with this is the fact in the game you don't play as a Barbarian you play as a knight.

Here is the games title screen and the in game sprite basically matches this so that basically tells you that the people responsible for the case art had either never either tried the game or been in touch with the creators to get any information on what the game was like beyond its title. It was like someone just really wanted to be around Fabio while he was getting oily barbarian loin cloth photos done, usually he was on the front of romance books so who knows, but the cover certainly didn't fit the game and often when you do hear about the game it's for the infamous cover art as it's a shame as it's quite a cracking little title.

This is the sort of thing I would have made as a front cover for ironsword wizards & warriors 2 for the NES instead of the famous Fabio one, seeing as you play a knight in armour in the game I thought it would be more appropriate to have an armoured figure on the box art. Yeah the armour might not be exactly the same as the one in the game and be a little more realistic but it in my opinion certainly fits the theme more. Maybe if the game had gotten something a little more like this it would be remembered fondly on its own merit as apposed to for its quirky cover.

Should we really trust Prototype game sales?

So I am sure most people who are into retro games and who either look around on various sale sites such as ebay for example or who read internet news sites will have either seen or read about various prototype versions of games on carts or discs. When they go up for sale they usually go up for a lot of money with some auctions ending on the frankly ridiculous side of things, just to show you the kind of thing I am refering to I will drop an image here before continuing.

Ok so what we have here is a NES game apparently a protoype version of Isolated Warrior. Now you can get a cartridge only copy of Isolated Warrior for about £7 and without trying to put the idea in to anyones head you could very easily use a special screwdriver to remove the case and soak it in order to remove its proper original shop label before priting out something which looks like the above label and gluing that in its place very easily. The above was on sale for the sum of £423, but is it real? Who really knows, sure they posted pictures of the inside of the cart as well as the outside but even if I took apart a real original copy of the game and what was inside it looked diffrent to what is inside this how does that prove this is genuine? Even I with my limited skills could soldier in usless components that would make the board look diffrent, I could add stickers with diffrent bits of writing on and use various processes to age them and make them look like theyve sat there inside the cart gathering dust for the last 30 or so years and how would you know if this was how it was supposed to look or not? Heck you could even know someone else with a prototype which has all kinds of proof with it marking it out as legitimate and yet how would you know that because mine looked diffrent to it that it wasnt just a latter or earlier prototype?

Now I know what some people might be thinking, they might be thinking well the proof is in the playing, if a game is a genuine prototype then it will play diffrently to the released product in some way, maybe it will have less levels, end suddenly or even just have subtle little diffrences and surly seeing this in action will prove the cart is real? Well the answer to that is no it wont. All that will prove is that there is a diffrent rom image burnt to the cartridges eprom chip (forgive me if I am a little wrong on the terms and specifics as this is not a field I am deeply invovled in). When NES carts were new the idea that you could take one cart and turn it in to another would have seemed crazy but thats not the case now, with the right equipment and knowledge you can infact burn a very rare game on to a chip and use a donner cartridge to get the game up and running, its not simple and it might require specialist tools but its possible, people have done it to add translation hacks on to games that have never been officially released in English but it could also be used to burn a prototype rom onto a chip so that you could then add this into a regular cartridge print a fake label designed to make the game look like a lost prototype cartridge and then pretty much ask what you want for it. Hey lets face it I am sure most people have seen a fake pirate cart during there life time quiet possibly one of those 100 in 1 type games? I even have 2 fake MegaDrive carts one of which is an English copy of Golden Axe 3 obviously fake as the game never came out over here.

I was lucky to get this from a lady who used to run a market store for retro games, she sold it to me for £4 if I remember correctly, but how easy would it be to take this and try to claim its some kind of prototype, how could anyone really disprove me? If you want to say the label is not right heck I could go print out any label I want for it remember. All I am saying is when you see something someone tries to claim is rare or special or one of a kind just remember that with all the technology we have knocking around now days it wouldnt be that hard for them to have knocked something up in order to try and pull a fast one and make a profit.

what it was like to be a gamer in the 80's

So when you talk about retro gaming lots of people will get an idea in there heads a picture of what you mean and usually they are going to think about old cartridge based console systems like the NES, the SNES, the MegaDrive/Genesis or maybe even slightly newer CD based systems such as the playstation the GameCube etcetera but there is so much more out there. The importance and the popularity of the NES back in its day in the United Kingdom is often overstated, people try to make out that the machine was highly supported over here, the truth was that not many people had them, if you walked in the average british house you were far more likly to be met with the sight of a micro computer a Sinclair Spectrum, a Commadore 64, an Amstrad or some other such type of machine. The truth is that if you were to see a console it would more than likly be a Master System in fact proberbly a Master System 2. The NES as a system is far more popular now in the UK as a retro console than it ever was as a current machine. Most video game fans my age will have grown up with a draw full of microcomputer tapes not NES cartridges and yet hardly anyone seems to celebrate or collect these in anyway close to the same way.

This is not the first time I have talked about this, if you have been a long time reader of this blog then you might remember me writing an article saying that the first school yard arguments were not about if you were pro MegaDrive or pro SNES they were in fact over which microcomputer you had chosen to support. When you talk to most people now though they tend to make out that they were really into Nintendo, that they owned a NES that all of there friends owned Nintendo Entertainment Systems and that they were massive in the UK, in fact you could argue that the whole history of the video game market back then steams to have been painted over it seems to have been washed away and replaced with this false spin doctored image of what things used to be like, an image that makes us appear well more American. Why is this are we as a group ashamed of our own Video Game heritage, do we feel silly and think that we backed the wrong horse? If you look at the figures for how many households in the UK actually had a NES the highest estimates put the machine in 12% of UK houses.

I think it needs to be rememberd that the humble Micro actually had some advantages over the NES, no I am not going to push how it had a keyboard and you could do programming or any of its uses as a computer why? Well thats simple its because other than a little bit of messing around with programming here and there thats just not how I or any of my friends or aquantances used there Microcomputers. Nes carts were very very expensive, when I saw them new I remember them being about £50 which now as an adult does not sound that much as we all pay sums around that level for brand new games on modern consoles but remember £50 in 1986 money (The year of the NES's UK release) is technically speaking a lot more money than £50 in current cash, they also were not anywhere near as wildly available as Micro games. I owned a Spectrum as a kid, at first it was a old hand me down 48k spectrum but then one Christmas this was changed to a brand new 128k +2 model, and where did I get my games from? I got my games from darn near everywhere. You could get games in Boots the Chemist, you could get them in Game stores, deparment stores, and newsagents, you could get them pretty much everywhere. It wasnt just the availability though it was also the price sure some real big deluxe Spectrum games in big boxes with stuff thrown in could go for as much as £14.99 but they were absolutly piles and piles of games for as little as £1.99.

People might argue that the NES games were bigger or more technical than home computer games and I guess some of them were but were they always better? The honest answer is not really, there were plenty of great games on microcomputers, I would list some here but just trust me, I am holding that back for a future top 10 Micro Computer Games post. I am not here to slag of the NES or anything but I just think its about time people stop and admit that the NES wasnt the champion here that it was in the United States, it was a minor note in the sidelines of our video game history, but I dont think we really lost out, most people were busy playing other things and thanks to things such as Mario All Stars and then things like the Zelda gamecube Collectors disc and various virtual console releases and the NES mini most people who didnt experiance these nintendo games back then have now gotten to see the classics that our American friends grew up with.

The NES mini and Why it is OK to question a companies decisions even if you love them.

Ok so you might see this picture and if you are a regular reader of my blog you might be thinking why is he on about the NES mini again? Yes I  already coverd it in his post about the NES mini and the AT games Megadrive, well I am actually writing about it because of something I saw posted in a Nintendo Street Pass group, I wont go in to too much detail about this group as some of what I say could be considerd highly critical of them and I dont want to turn this in to some kind of slagging match, I instead just want to talk about the issue/issues that were raised.

I have already talked about if the NES mini is worth its price of £50 or not, I mentioned that it came with 30 games on it but no way of adding any more, I also added the fact that it can not play the original NES cartridges. I also mentioned that for your cash you get the machine a HDMI cable and one joypad. What I didnt mention is that you get a USB power lead. Now it had kind of slipped my mind/attention that you get a USB lead to power it and you either need to plug this lead into something it can draw power from (the USB port on a telly for example) or you need to get an adaptor to allow you to plug it into a regular plug socket. Well the idea for this whole post started with someone complaining that Nintendo did not supply the adaptor to turn the USB cable into a fully functioning regular plug, now you would expect this to be met with a response on the lines of one of the following ''well it kind of sucks you dont get the plug but youll proberbly have one in the house for a phone or something you can use'' or ''well it kind of sucks but at least you can buy them relativly cheaply''. What kind of response was this actually met with, well it was met with one saying how Nintendo are in the right for not supplying the plug and that they are actually doing us all a favour by not supplying one and that we should indeed be gratful for there generosity because if they had included a plug then they would have had to add another £10 on to the price, and instead they are allowing us to choose if we want to buy one seperatly or not. Now some people might think that there is a little bit of merit in the response after all extra pieces do cost extra cash, but then stop and consider the fact you get reasonably decent USB plugs in pound land for £1 and Nintendo is a huge company who can have things mass produced, its proberbly saving them 50pence per unit to not include a plug adaptor so no it shouldnt put the price up by £10 to put one in the box at all an considering this they could quiet easily raise the price of the machine by 50pence and it not really make much of a diffrence or heavens forbid they could foot the bill and loose a smidgen of profit but gain a little bit extra customer respect.

Well I wrote a response to this effect saying that with the lack of a plug added to the fact that the pads wires were not long enough and that if this was a problem for you then you were expected to purchase extension cables it just felt like Nintendo had been a little greedy in this instance considering that its not exactly the most sophisticated piece of hardware. I mean lets face it rinky dink little companies have been making NES clones with lots of games 2 pads and in some cases even cartridge slots for a long time and most of the time asking for a darn lot less than £50, yes they have been unoficial and some of them asthetically lacking but still if some pirate company with limited resources can churn them out cheap then Nintendo have clearly plucked the figure of £50 out of thin air. I was met with a response which reminded me that the NES mini was intended as a collectable more than a truly functional machine and added that Nintendo was tottally jusified in there price and all of there business decisions, that if I did not like the price I simply should not buy one and that Nintendo was very generous giving resources to 3DS street pass groups. Kind of funny isent it that a runner of a street pass group should both jump to Nintendo's defense with so much vetrol and also mention how generous they are in helping street pass groups. It makes one stop and wonder does he want to support Nintendo because they do so much for him and he feels in debt to them or is he in some way bound to jump to there defense is it in the terms of something he has signed? I dont know and if I claimed to know I would be talking utter rubbish but it does make you think doesnt it? I would have responded to his response but it dissapeared as did my original response as did the entire thread, leaving me wondering why, does he have to remove things which might paint Nintendo in a bad light or did he simply want to have the last word by throwing a tantrum and deleting things?

I wont be naming this person or the group itself, yes I have said what kind of group it is but there are lots. I am not writing this to have the last say, I am sure more people are a member of that group than will ever read my blog. So why am I writing this? Well I think it is always important to think about everything you hear and read about a Video game company, to think why you hold the oppinions you do and if any of them are effected by blind loyalty. I think it is important that consumers always question companies and dont just follow blindly. I will use the example I have many times in the past but look at the XBOX One's original launch information, it was going to launch with all kinds of really draconian limitations, things to stop you lending your friends games without jumping through hoops etc and what stoped them from doing this? Well partly the fact that there main rivals decided to be far more liberal with there policys but mostly the fact that there own fan base turned around and refused to accept what they had been told the fact that people protested, they argued and they made there oppinions heard, and did this hurt Microsoft? No not at all after people stood up to them Microsoft dropped these stupid ideas and people actually purchased the Xbox One people who otherwise would not have. I will end this with some simple words just because you love a company and the things it produces and has produced it does not mean that you cant compalin or question one of there decisions.

A bit about a few retro consoles and what they mean to me

Retro gaming the very concept means different things to different people, it's all about nostalgia and what your nostalgic for, what the computer or console and its games mean to you, what you associate with them.

I can take just about any machine and give you a story about it, about what it means to me, who I was at that time, what my hopes and dreams where, the friends I was playing the games with, the music I was listening to. The first two machines I remember having were the 48k spectrum and the old wooden Atari 2600, this was at a very early stage in my life when my dreams didn't extend much further than to be like my older brothers. The first game I remember playing on the spectrum would have been a Mister Men educational software tape, I think I was about 3 my mum would be playing Beatles tunes in the background and id just be tapping away not really sure of what I was doing. Soon however I would be growing and as I did I would be playing tank and all manner of simplistic games on the Atari with the whining loading scream of the spectrum in the background, the spectrum games were usually better but the Atari had the instant use appeal to it. In fact I felt rather spoiled as a kid because I had both, when I would visit my friends houses they would have 1 of either an Amstrad, a Spectrum or a Commodore 64 and we would have to play board games or play with transformers while the games loaded. This makes me associate these machines with long load times but also with board games and friends, so no matter how crudy the graphics may be there is still a warmth to be had from seeing them, playing them or even reading about them.

The Master System and the NES I never owned when they were current I always played them at other peoples houses and typically they didn't seem to be owned by kids my age. My first experience of the Master system was a much older cousin had one, it was an original Master system and I cant even remember the games he had , the Master System 2 though I have memories of seeing them a lot id be with one of my older brothers and he would be at a girlfriend house and that's what her or her brother would own and basically id end up playing the Master System and they would disappear obviously now I know they were at least kissing if not screwing but back then I was so absorbed by the likes of chase HQ that I simply didn't give a toss where they were, so I guess the Master system 2 reminds me of sitting in strange houses shunting criminals off the road while loud music usually of a heavy metal persuasion hides noises not suitable for young ears.

I seldom saw a NES, I remember playing them a few times at houses but it certainly wasn't a regular deal, I remember buying one for about £20 with a bunch of games once the Super Nintendo was out and I already owned one, I was so in awe of it yet everyone thought I was crazy for buying ''that old piece of junk'' it was the first time I really got a machine after its time, sure I got new things and I had old things laying around left over from when they were new but this was the first time I had made what you could call a retro purchase. I don't associate music or friends with the NES I associate total silence apart from the game, I took to the NES like some kind of art appreciator I wanted to hear every beep to see every pixel to study and admire them. It was the first time I really though of games as being beautiful in there own right. It was here in this moment that I became more than just a games player but a game collector and when I really began to appreciate them.