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A little while ago, I made a blog post called NES Collecting By The Numbers, where I explored NES collecting as sorted by rarity. This was to assist in narrowing down my missing titles by how easy it would be to find them, which has been a HUGE help.
I recently decided to go for a complete N64 set and figured this would be a good tool for that as well. I made a similar tool for N64 stuff, and added more formulas so it can calculate more information automatically. I'm happy with the results, so I've set up base versions of these files as shared Google docs so you can do this yourself! You'll need to make a duplicate copy of these on your Google Drive to edit it. Here are the links:
NES Stat Machine
N64 Stat Machine
Here's how it works. Each spreadsheet has 2 tabs: one called 'Totals' and one called 'Game List'. The former spits out all the numbers based on what games you have. To indicate those, all you need to do is go the 'Game List' tab and put the word 'Yes' in the 'Owned?' column next to each game. Once it's done, go back to the 'Totals' tab and you'll see something like this:
[img width=609 height=224]http://i.imgur.com/jgtZe.png[/img]
You can also use filters in the 'Game List' tab to see which games of a certain rarity you're missing:
[img width=700 height=117]http://i.imgur.com/Z1Q1V.png[/img]
Seriously, how have I never picked up All-Pro Basketball? Oh well.
Anyway, that's about all there is to it. I'm interested in making more of these for different systems (assuming there's a generally agreeable checklist with rarities on it), and to expand the stats to sort by other things (such as year, publisher, etc.) Stay tuned for more updates, and feel free to leave suggestions!
I enjoy messing around with numbers and stats, and I recently found a great new project that would combine doing that with game collecting. I had a lot of fun doing it, so I decided to share the results.
Not long ago, I passed the 500-cart mark in my NES collection. As of this writing, I am currently up to 526. This is about the point where it's said that NES collecting gets a lot more difficult. Hard-to-find, expensive titles become all that's left, and while that's rather exciting in its own right, it's an interesting and sometimes frustrating turning point. In my case, I couldn't help but wonder - is that really the case? Are there really just expensive games from here on out? Did I miss some common titles without realizing it? I came up with a good way to find out.
I somewhat arbitrarily decided to go with the list and rarity guide on NintendoAge for this, though any thorough list would certainly work just fine. That list puts the 'complete' NES set at 768 games and rates each game's rarity on a scale from 1 to 10. The 'complete set' total doesn't seem to be universally agreed upon, but this list seems to be as good as any to me. I then split NintendoAge's list up by rarity and counted the number of games at each level. I then checked my collection against each of those to determine where the games I'm missing fall within the different rarities. The results weren't too far from what I expected but still quite interesting:
[img width=606 height=240]http://i.imgur.com/7C6yl.png[/img]
I knew I didn't have much (any, really) of the really high-end rarities but a decent number of semi-rare titles. As expected, the percentage keeps going up as the rarity goes down, including no missing titles in the 2 or 1 range. Not a lot of surprises, really.
It wasn't a total waste, though. The most interesting information I found was the higher-than-expected totals of 3's and 4's I didn't have. There are 43 games between the two, including quite a few games I've seen and passed on dozens of times. I've somehow never picked up Rocket Ranger, All-Pro Basketball, Yo Noid or Digger T Rock after all these years. In those instances, I think that I simply assumed I'd bought them a long time ago and never gave it a second thought.
Thanks to all this number-crunching, I've learned that I can likely reach 550 without as much trouble as I'd feared. 600 and beyond will be quite the challenge, but I'm feeling up for it. If your NES collection is in this range, I recommend taking stock by rarity to see what easy finds you may have missed.
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