It's been a while I know. I'm not sure why, but garage sales have been really slow so far this year. Luckily, I finally have enough stuff from the past few weeks to make a worthwhile post.
Continue reading Treasure Hunt Chronicles 2010 - #2
 Can you believe it? 6 years old. A lot has changed in six years. In just six years we've grown to a massive database with over 52,000 games and 84,000 images. Between our 1664 collectors, we own nearly half a million games. We couldn't have gotten here without you, our loyal members. Through the years, you guys have made hundreds of thousands of submissions and edits to make our database, THE classic and modern video game database!
To celebrate our 6th birthday and all your hard work, I'd like to announce PAIN YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS CONTEST 2010! This isn't an easy contest, that wouldn't be any fun. To win, you'll literally have to pain yourself with submissions. Last year's winner had over 3000 submissions in May alone. But don't let that discourage you from attempting the contest. Everyone has a chance to win!
Of course, this contest has some rules. Basically, you win the contest by submitting and being active in the community. Just about everything you do on the site will garner you points, the member with the most points at the end of the contest wins!
This is how the points will be gained:
Title Addition: 4 Points
Variation Addition: 4 Points
Page Edit*: 2 Points
Review*: 30 Points
Overview*: 10 Points
Image Upload: 15 Points
Submission Review**: 1 Point
Blog Post*: 30 Points
Blog Comment: 1 Point
Forum Post: 1 Point
Forum Karma: See Explanation
*Regarding the asterisk: For page edits, if it is noticed that you are consistently only adding one field per edit multiple times for a single ID just to up your points, you will be disqualified. Any review or overview completed will count as a page edit as well the points for an overview or review. To get the points for an overview or review you MUST contact me via Personal Message so that I can keep a tally. In addition, the review or overview must be on the actual game / hardware page. A review or overview of poor quality could result in less points than stated being granted. The same statement holds true for blog posts.
Because we want the forum to be a lively place of fun and interesting posts, we're enabling Karma during this contest. Karma rewards members that make good posts and smites those who do not. Your Karma will play a wildcard role in posts. Positive Karma at the end of the contest will increase your point total by a factor, while negative karma will decrease it.
As with any contest, there is fine print. Any submission that you make must adhere to the RF Generation guidelines / policies. We wrote these policies and guidelines for a reason, and well, we’d like everyone to adhere to them. Failure to adhere to the guidelines could result in a disqualification.
Any point reduction or disqualification can be contested. In the event that you wish to contest, you must explain why the reduction or disqualification is unfair. If you win the contest, we’ll restore your greatness, but if you lose, you shall be pelted with figurative rocks and garbage.
**KICKER! Everyone, except for the directors of this site, is in this contest. There is a catch though for staff members… their final score will be halved. So, that should lead to a lively competition. I think halving their scores is fair, and I hope you do as well. Oh yeah, there is that 1 point for a submission review, that unfortunately only applies to staff members because they are the poor souls who must review your submissions.
What do you win? Well, we’re a poor bunch here at RF Generation, especially since we're on a dedicated box, but we've got a lovely prize for the top winner:
Gaming swag not to exceed $60 and an RF Generation Ringer T***
And new for this year, a special prize! The top 5% of points gainers (minus the top winner***) will be entered into a special drawing to win a piece of my personal collection! The drawing will be a completely random reverse drawing to determine the winner of at least one prize package.
***The top winner of the contest can choose to decline their prize listed above in exchange for not one, but two entries into the drawing.
If you want to win, you better get to it, the contest ends at MIDNIGHT, JUNE 8th, 2010. (Tuesday 12:00AM)
What's that? You say its April 20th? OK, it is a little late for the RFG Thanks for March, I guess the zombie brain eating earlier this month left me a little forgetful. But late is still better than never, right?
March was another great month for RFG and its members. There were 2,352 total submissions;1,037 page edits; 358 image submissions; and 525 title additions. Many of you helped us to gather all these wonderful bits of information. But five of you stood out of the crowd and made over 100 submissions alone. Those members were Paully3433, Izret101, Link41, ApolloBoy, and Madir. Rounding out the top ten submitters were ga5ket, Duke.Togo, NES_Rules, Shadow Kisuragi, and Pop Culture Portal.
But as always, many of those submissions wouldn't go anywhere without our team of reviewers. In March, with well over 100 approvals, the top reviewers were Izret101 and ApolloBoy.
Now let's see if we can April even better! We're getting very close to 55,000 scans and 30,000 screenshots in the database. Maybe we can do it in April, if you've got a scanner and/or a way to capture screenshots; get to it and make some submissions. You will be helping out RFGeneration, its members and the countless others that use us as a resource for their collecting needs. Plus, its always neat to have your name and/or a picture of one of your games forever immortalized on the Internet!
Finally, I'd like to announce the promotions of Izret101 and Paully3433! Because of their continued contributions, they have been promoted to DB Editor and DB Reviewer, respectively.
It's been a long and cold winter. Four months have passed since I last posted some treasure hunting finds, but I am pleased to announce that the wait is over. The record snowfall that buried most of the country in February has mostly all melted now thanks to a couple of weeks with temps in the 60's and 70's. And that melted snow has shown at least one treasure hiding under it. The warmer temperatures will be getting people into the "spring cleaning" mood, and soon they will be parting with junk they haven't seen in decades. Soon, the garage sales will start to pop up on weekends following the days of unseasonably warm weather and soon enough, flea markets will start opening their gates and the garage sales will be open almost every day of the week.
Fortunately, for me, I've already found a couple treasures this year, without having gone to a single garage sale! Finding my first treasure of the year is a tale of mystery, hard work, more mystery, and a lot of cleaning.
Continue reading Treasure Hunt Chronicles 2010 - #1
Today marks a true milestone in the history of RFGeneration, for today at 1:39:30 AM, the 50,000th game was added to our database. In under 6 years we've accumulated information on 50,000 games for dozens of systems from all over the world, this is an astounding task when you really think about it. This milestone further cements RFGeneration's place as THE Classic and Modern Video Game Database.
The 50,000th game was Toy Soldiers on Xbox Live Arcade that was submitted by Izret101.
There have literally been hundreds of member from all over the world that have helped us get this achievement, and each one of those people and their submission(s) have been important. Some members have left a huge mark on RFGeneration by contributing over 1000 title and variation additions since we began tracking them in October 2006; and those members are ApolloBoy, Funk_Buddy, Tynstar, Madir and Belgarath.
In celebration of this momentous occasion, I'd like to announce another way to get your daily fill of RFGeneration! This new aspect of RFGeneration is a personal pet project of mine that the donors and I have been using for a little while now. This will hopefully be a tool to help get our name out there in cyber-space as well as keeping our members that decide to use it, some of the latest information pertaining to the site and occasionally the video game industry as a whole. So here it is, http://twitter.com/RFGeneration. That's right RFGeneration is now on Twitter! As you can see from previous tweets, the Twitter page will be used to promote excellent blogs as well as reminding readers of upcoming DB milestones and site news. Now that the page has been announced for everyone, I will be using it more often than I am now, so don't be discouraged by the lack of tweets there already. They should be becoming more frequent.
I'd also like to take a moment to thank Den68 for making the graphics for the Twitter page!
February was not our best month, but even without a huge number of submissions, its still progress and progress is always a good thing. While we did not see our lowest submission numbers last month, it was below the mean number of monthly submissions. So I would like to thank those of you that made some submissions in a slow month to keep us going. Even being below the average, we still managed to crank out over 2,000 submission; 2,094 to be exact. 536 of those were images, 298 were game title additions, and 974 were page edits.
The top ten submitters were Paully3433, Izret101, ga5ket, Madir, Doug Plummer, ApolloBoy, Shadow Kisuragi, Malingo, Spoon and Seno. Out of those ten, nine had over 100 submissions each. Thanks guys, you are the truly dedicated members that keep us going!
The top three staff members approving all those submission with over 100 approvals each were Izret101, ApolloBoy, and NES_Rules.
So, February wasn't a spectacular month for submissions, that means only one thing. We need to make March even better, so get out your games, find them in the database and see what information you can add. If you've got a scanner, that's even better because you can add images if they're missing and your game will be forever immortalized on the pages of RFGeneration.
It looks like 2010 is going to be another awesome year for RF Generation. In the first month of the new decade there was a whopping 5,366 total submission. There were 2,012 image additions, 859 game additions, and 1,915 page edits.
The top ten submitters all had over 100 submissions and were Paully3433, ga5ket, logical123, Madir, Izret101, Spoon, Malingo, ApolloBoy, OatBob, and Medevilblader. These ten members made 87% of the total submissions last month. Truly these are a dedicated bunch of members that make RFGen the special place that it is.
The top staff approvers last month were Izret101, Madir, NES_Rules and ga5ket, each with over 200 approvals last month. These guys let the January submissions in out of the cold that is the queue line and let them into the warmth of the RFGen DB. Without them, those submissions could have very well frozen there, and we don't want frozen submissions.
So remember as you go about your days on the site and remember to thank these eleven individuals for all the hard work that do to keep RFGen THE Classic and Modern Video Game Database!
December has generally been one of the slowest months of the year for submissions, but that certainly was not the case for December 2009. There was an astounding 3,723 submissions in December, 1,254 of those were image submissions, there were 802 image and hardware additions, and 1,346 page edits.
The top ten submitters of the month were also those that had 100 or more submissions, and were: Paully3433, ga5ket, Link41, ApolloBoy, logical123, Madir, bickman2k, Spoon, NES_Rules, and Malingo. Those ten members submitted an amazing 84% of the total submissions, a huge 'thank you' goes out to all of them. But I'd also like to thank those of you that submitted the other 16%, because every submission, no matter how small, helps make our database better.
The top five staff reviewers of all those submissions were: NES_Rules, ApolloBoy, Madir, ga5ket, and bum_man. Without these guys approving your submissions, they would just sit in queue forever, so we should all be very thankful for them.
Now that 2009 is over, its time to thank everyone that has helped RF Generation throughout the year. The top ten submitters of 2009 were: ga5ket, y2richie, ApolloBoy, Funk_Buddy, Madir, NES_Rules, Izret101, Pop Culture Portal, audiman83, and Paully3433. Of those ten, eight had over a thousand submissions, a truly impressive feat. These ten members submitted a total of 68% of all submissions made in 2009. These people are clearly dedicated to keeping RF Generation as THE Classic and Modern Video Game Database.
The top five staff reviewers for 2009 were NES_Rules, ga5ket, ApolloBoy, Tan, and Madir. together they approved almost 15,000 submissions throughout the year. My hat goes off to all you for that feat as well.
For 2009, we had 211 different member submit at least one thing over the course of the year. Together, those members submitted a total 34,883 submissions, of those 17,056 were image submissions, 9,812 were page edits and 5,025 were game/hardware title additions.
With those combined with previous years, puts our database at around 48,000 game titles, 3,500 hardware titles, 52,000 scans, and 28,000 screenshots.
Truly, 2009 was an outstanding year for submissions, but 2010 can be an even better year, and I have a feeling that it will be. But it won't without the help of everyone, so contribute anything you can this year, scans your games and then your friends' games, fill in missing information, whatever you can to help the database grow.
I did one of these last year and I'm glad I did because its allowed me to see just how much stuff I accumulated this past year. So, I'm going to do it again so I can see what all I bought in 2010 come 2011.
Here is my current collection numbers, they may not be exact (with 2000+ games it is sometimes hard to remember to add or delete a couple games) but it should be pretty close, and this is what I use as my "official" count of games at the end of my Treasure Hunt Chronicles posts.
NES - 542 total, 384 unique
SNES - 208 total, 171 unique
N64 - 134 total, 104 unique
GameCube - 42 total, 42 unique
Game Boy Color - 25 total, 24 unique
Game Boy Advance - 13 total, 12 unique
Sega Genesis - 317 total, 243 unique
Atari 2600 - 212 total, 184 unique
PlayStation 1 - 315 total, 254 unique
Dreamcast - 53 total, 45 unique
TI-99/4A - 16 total, 15 unique
PlayStation 2 - 118 total, 114 unique
GameGear - 14 total, 11 unique
Odyssey^2 - 1 total, 1 unique
Sega CD - 40 total, 33 unique
Saturn - 25 total, 25 unique
Atari 7800 - 3 total, 3 unique
GameBoy - 22 total, 21 unique
Master System - 34 total, 33 unique
Sega 32X - 3 total, 3 unique
Game.com - 4 total 4 unique
Tiger Quiz Whiz - 2 total, 2 unique
Xbox - 71 total, 68 unique
Intellivision - 19 total, 17 unique
3DO - 18 total, 18 unique
ColecoVision - 11 total, 11 unique
Wii - 7 total, 7 unique
TurboGrafx 16 - 32 total, 32 unique
Atari 400 - 11 total, 11 unique
Xbox 360 - 9 total, 9 unique
Nintendo DS - 4 total, 4 unique
Commodore Vic-20 - 5 total, 5 unique
Sega Pico - 6 total, 6 unique
Atari 5200 - 3 total, 3 unique
Totals:
Total games: 2,339 (417 more than last year)
Total unique games: 1,919 (441 more than last year)
Total spent on games, systems, accessories, etc: $742.21
Total spent plus shipping costs for trades: $824.86
Total amount sold: $586.19
Total "loss": $238.67
Average price paid per new unique game: $0.54 (calculated by total amount spent minus total amount sold divided by total unique games bought).
Now to just wait and see what 2010 will bring for my collection
2009 was another great year for RF Generation, we saw many new members discover our little slice of the internet, thousands of additions to our database and hundreds of new blog posts containing everything from members' collection updates to dozens of game reviews to systems reviews to historical background and information. But enough of last year, out with the old and in with the new. 2010 is sure to be another great year for RF Generation, and that great year is starting out with some new staff members.
Those new staff members are Logical123 and Paully3433, and they are the newest DB Contributors. Along with these two individuals joining the staff, there was was also the promotion of Izret101 from DB Contributor to DB Reviewer.
Also coming up this year will be a slight change to the PlayStation section of the database. That change will be the addition of all known variations that we don't currently have. These will include the different types of "long box" variants and rereleases. Check back often for updates on the progress being made there.
Here are some goals for the database that I would like us to meet this year, some will be easy, others are going to be more challenging:
- 50,000 total games
- 4,000 total hardware entries
- 60,000 scans
- 30,000 screenshots
These are not the only things in store for RF Generation in 2010, so be sure to keep it tuned right here to Channel 4 for all the latest and greatest.
2009 was another great year for treasure hunting and for adding to my collection. Overall, I added over 400 new titles to my collection and even managed to sell a few duplicates. If you want to see every thing I bought or traded for this year, you can go here but I doubt very many of you want to do that, so below is my top ten favorite deals of the year.
Continue reading Treasure Hunt Chronicles '09 - The End
Well, it's been another spectacular month here at RFGen, submissions abounded and good times were had by all. There were a toal of 726 images submitted last month, 324 games were added, and 471 game pages were edited. There was a whopping 1,684 total submissions in November.
There were four members who each submitted over 100 submissions, those members were ApolloBoy, Fuyukaze, Pop Culture Portal, and Spoon. Rounding out the top ten top submitters were ga5ket, Paully3433, Funk_Buddy, Tynstar, dom meatball, and NES_Rules. A special thanks goes out to all of you for taking the time and energy to make all those submissions. And for the 46 of you that made submissions but weren't in the top ten, I thank you as well, every little bit certainly helps. And for those of you who didn't submit anything in the last month, what are you waiting for? Your fellow gamers and collectors need that information you have, so why not submit it and share the knowledge. Even just filling in something as simple as UPC codes is a help.
But as always, submissions do no one any good if there is no one reviewing and approving them. The top approvers last month (with well over 100 approvals each) were Fuyukaze and ApolloBoy.
And if anyone noticed, there was no RFG Thanks for October, this was not intentional, it just completely slipped my mind until I started doing this write up, I can still hardly believe November has come and gone already.
And since a late thanks is better than no thanks, thanks to all that submitted stuff in October. The top submitters with over 100 submissions were ApolloBoy, ga5ket, Donkey Kong Kid, and Funk_Buddy. The rest of the top ten submitters was den68, tigerhandheld1989, Spoon, Madir, NES_Rules, and Darth Sidious. Thanks again guys.
The top approvers in October were ga5ket and ApolloBoy, again, both with well over 100 approvals.
If you weren't mentioned for October or November and want to be, there is one way to fix that, make some submissions! And even if you don't make the top ten list for the month, your name will be forever immortalized on the game page you helped make better.
It's been several weeks since the last post, and I'm going to call it, the 2009 garage sale season is dead. At least around here, maybe in the more mild climates, people are still selling their junk but the cold wind and dropping leaves has brought death to garage sales and the flea markets around here.
So here is my treasures from a while ago, I don't even remember when I bought all this stuff, so it's a good thing I wrote each item up when I got instead of trying to do it now. I haven't bought anything in the past two weeks, mainly because I didn't even go saling these last few weekends.
There will be one more of these this year, sometime is December to account for any unexpected finds, and to give a recap on what I thought was this year's best finds.
Continue reading Treasure Hunt Chronicles '09 - #24
As a Director of this fine site, I'd like to welcome the newest addition to the RFGen staff, Crabmaster2000! He will be joining the ranks of the RFG staff as a Blog Writer, which means he'll be gracing the front page of RFGeneration more often. He will be writing about the 'Unloved' games that most of us pass by as well as giving a description of the current month's "Off The Shelf" game, which was also a creation of his.
So, fellow members, take the time to congratulate Crabmaster2000, he certainly deserves it! And remember to keep it on Channel 4 to read his and all the wonderful blog posts on THE Classic and Modern Video Games Database!
I told you this was going to be a monthly thing, and I wasn't lying. I may lie to my grandmother, but never to RFGen members. So here is another RFG Thanks, this time for September of course.
In September we had 3 members submit over 100 entries, those members are ga5ket, ApolloBoy, and TigerHandheld1989. A huge thanks goes out to these members. But we can't forget all the members that made less submissions that are just as important to the database. Rounding out the top ten submitters for September 2009 we have Duke.Togo, NES_Rules, itatton, Sirgin, Donkey Kong Kid, OatBob, and Darth Sidious.
Of course, without a very dedicated approval team, all those submissions would just sit in queue forever, so I'd also like to thank the staff members that approved the most submissions last month. With 100+ approvals we have ga5ket, NES_Rules, and ApolloBoy.
Thanks again for all the contributions everyone has made in the past, each one is truly appreciated. Now let's try to get even more this month!
|
|
