[img width=700 height=393]https://i.imgur.com/84w5qlw.jpg[/img]
Have you ever been playing a game and gotten to the point where you know you can approach the final boss and finish the game any time you want to, but are having so much fun that you don't want the game to end? That's where I was with Cat Quest, a light, relaxing RPG developed by Gentlebros and released in 2017. This is a game I picked up on the Playstation 4 based only on the title and cover art. It took me a while to get around to playing it, but the comfort food RPG gameplay and addictive feedback loop were just what the doctor ordered for a relaxing winter playthrough.
I don't think I can give a better elevator pitch for this game than the developers themselves did. From the game's official website: "This is a game heavily inspired by Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and Skyrim. It aims to provide a streamlined and concise open world experience. Think of it as the overworld of Final Fantasy, the combat and exploration of Zelda, and the open world of Skyrim all in one package!" In the game, you play as a cat trying to rescue his kidnapped sister. All the NPCs are cats and the game is littered with cat puns (see what I did there?).
Continue reading Cat Quest
[img width=600 height=359]https://www.earlytelevision.org/images/museum_front-index.jpg[/img]
Collectors of retro video games, as collectors of all media, stand against the ravages of time's arrow. Said arrow only goes in one direction and as it inexorably pushes all forward it simultaneously leaves all behind. As the the grand philosophers in Spaceballs once posited:
Col. Sandurz: Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now is happening now.
Lord Dark Helmet: What happened to then?
Col. Sandurz: We passed it.
Lord Dark Helmet: When?
Col. Sandurz: Just now. We're in now now.
Lord Dark Helmet: Go back to then!
Col. Sandurz: When?
Lord Dark Helmet: Now!
Col. Sandurz: Now?
Lord Dark Helmet: Now!
Col. Sandurz: I can't!
Lord Dark Helmet: Why?
Col. Sandurz: We missed it!
Lord Dark Helmet: When?
Col. Sandurz: Just now!
Lord Dark Helmet: When will then be now?
Col. Sandurz: Soon.
Continue reading The Early Television Foundation and Museum
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Posted on Feb 13th 2021 at 01:00:00 PM by ( EZ Racer) Posted under top 20, nes, snes, genesis, pc, n64, playstation, nintendo, ps1, mario, zelda |
[img width=640 height=480]https://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/223564-super-mario-bros-nes-screenshot-starting-a-new-game.png[/img]
So after taking much of 2020 to look at some of the best games for several different home console systems of the 70's, 80's, and 90's, it only seemed natural to kick off 2021 with a list of the best of the best.
The results are based off of 5 participants:
Crabmaster2000
EZ Racer
DisposedHero
Fokakis79
Wempster
Voters were encouraged to list all their best games if they couldn't get it cut to 20, and a few lists took advantage of that. Games from all systems released as 5th generation consoles (N64, Playstation 1, Sega Saturn) and prior were eligible. Japan exclusives were also eligible, along with PC titles released in 1999 or earlier.
In all, there were 89 games that were considered among the best of the early video game generations, and rather than list the also-rans separately, I thought it woulld be fun to list every game in order. My thought is that all these games are considered exceptional by at least one person, so if your looking for ideas for something to try, it might be for you as well.
Before getting to it, thanks to those who participated this month, and all who made lists in 2020. It's been a lot of fun, and look forward to a lot more in '21! If you're a GameCube fan, check out the link for the next list coming up- http://www.rfgeneration.c...m/index.php?topic=19495.0
So here are your Top 20...er top 89 games as voted on by RFGen members!
Continue reading RFGen Top 20 plus? Games of the Early Years
[img width=700 height=380]https://www.funstockretro.co.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Atari-2600-Article.jpg[/img]
In December 1982, over the holiday break, from my 1st year in school, most of us on my dad's side of the family gathered at the home of my grandparents, to celebrate Christmas. Like any year, it was a time filled with candy, kids playing in the living room, while the adults sat around the dining room table, regaling stories new and old, and of course, Christmas presents. And like every Christmas, though grandpa and grandma didn't have much money, their gifts were thoughtful, and their house full of love. Those times were always magical. Little did I know the magic I was to discover during this particular holiday gathering.
Continue reading Tribute To My Uncle David
If you guys don't know me already, I drive a custom Super Mario Kart Car. It's a 2005 Scion xA and its painted Red, White, and Blue with yellow wheels just like Mario's car in the game. I am constantly working on it, and recently I have been making appearances at kids' birthday parties with it.
Well, I upgraded my shift knob which was a BaBomb for a while, and decided to make one out of a plastic banana to resemble the bananas you throw in Mario Kart.
[img width=700 height=393]https://i.imgur.com/Q5PIoL8.png[/img]
It's a new year (perhaps you've noticed) and things are a lot different. Many things are the same, including many of the problems, but we've got a changing of the guard, vaccines coming in hot and ready, and hopefully an end to at least some of the wretchedness that has gripped this country for some time now. With that, I'm finding myself cautiously poking my head out of the miasma of societal hopelessness I've been in since last summer. I've started doing weekly gaming nights with some friends from my local book club and have a renewed interest in gaming, which has helped my mood tremendously lately.
I've never been much for New Year's resolutions, personally, but I do like the idea of setting goals as a tangible intent to get things done. In that vein, and in lieu of a top 10 of 2020 list, I thought it'd be a good idea to set some goals for checking out some of the games I was too distracted to play last year, as well as check some games off my backlog. I won't commit myself to finishing every one of these, but as a means to hold myself accountable, here are the games I want to play this year.
Continue reading 2021 New Year's Gaming Resolutions
As someone who buys a lot of used video games, especially from older generations, I have long wanted to know how game prices change throughout the year. Do they tend to decrease and increase at predictable times of the year?
If you search for the answer to this question you will find many articles that are more about new and currently popular games, and will mostly suggest looking for deals on Black Friday, or perhaps January. That doesn't really apply if you're looking for something more than a few years old
So in late 2018 I made a new account on http://www.PriceCharting.com and added 50 complete in box games from 23 systems to my collection so I could track its price; a sort of price index of 1,150 used games. Every morning at just about the same time I recorded the value of the collection. The systems I included were the North American versions of everything from Nintendo, Sony, Sega, and Microsoft, but not the most current systems at the time (Switch, PS4, Xbox One), or some small and short lived systems (Virtual Boy, Sega CD, Sega 32X, Sega Pico). The newest system's games weren't included because their prices haven't stabilized. I chose the 50 most popular games for each system on the site, the games that were getting price checked the most.
I excluded all games that cost over $200. My thinking is, games over this price are being searched for because they are known to be rare, and people are curious about how high the price is now, are looking to complete a collection, or are looking to buy games that they suspect will go up in value, not that they are personally interested in playing. Perhaps I should have set the threshold higher or lower, but I think this was useful in not letting speculative market manipulation have an outsized impact, and to keep the data more useful and practical for more people.
That said, two years later 59 games now had a value of over $200. Most notably, as of this writing, Kuon is selling for $564 on average when complete. Pokemon Crystal, Emerald, and Sapphire also rose over $200. No games from the 7th generation rose to this price.
There were a few anomalies with the PriceCharting site. Twice a game was removed from my collection, and I assume from the site. I didn't keep a list of every game included so I have no way of knowing which these were. There were also a few days where the total value of the collection changed by less than a dollar, which probably means that sometimes the site does didn't update prices for an extended period of time.
I was initially just going to do one year. Then in early 2020 thought I maybe two years would be good for a comparison, but I wasn't sure I wanted to keep recording. Eventually it became pretty clear that the pandemic was going to be a big thing and that there wasn't going to be a nice comparison year, but a year that should be interesting in its own right.
The Data
[img width=700 height=305]https://spritecell.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Daily-Average-Value-of-Used-Complete-Games.png[/img]
[img width=310 height=281]https://spritecell.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Monthly.png[/img]
[img width=463 height=185]https://spritecell.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/records.png[/img]
Please note that the Y-axis does not start at 0, which makes the change from highest to lowest look more dramatic.
On January 1st, 2019 the average value of a game from the included systems was $40.59, and on December 31st, 2020 it was $61.68.
Assuming 2019 is a typical kind of year that we may return to in 2022 and beyond, prices grow most quickly in February and March, continue to grow in April and May, and then decrease or grow very slowly June through November. I'm quite surprised November was the biggest decrease in price. There's a lot of Christmas shopping in both November and December, yet the change between these months is the most dramatic of the year.
2020 starts much like 2019, but in March people realize they will be spending a lot of time at home and game prices spike, hitting a high in May, and not approaching pre-pandemic price changes until October. November again sees the largest price decrease of the year, but it's an even larger swing.
While prices have begun to shrink a bit, we're still a long way from pre-pandemic. I don't expect prices to get anywhere near what they used to be, or for the price decreases to last much longer. We just experienced an unprecedented surge, but game prices have always increased over time and I don't think anything will stop that.
I do more video game related statistical studies on my site https://SpriteCell.com, so please check it out if this kind of thing interests you.
In this episode Chris is the Atreus to Kelsy's Kratos as we discuss the much loved God of War (2018) in depth. Also a bonus at the end where we talk about the HBO sci-fi series Raised by Wolves first season.
Get the show at http://www.collectorcast.com
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Intro song by:
Steven Davis - Twitter = @TheDisposedHero, Youtube = DisposedHeroVGM
[img width=468 height=513]http://rfgeneration.com/podcasts/shmupclub/images/2021-01-24_stcc_ep_030_flight_of_pigarus_and_top_5_of_2020.jpg[/img]
In Episode 030, Addicted and MetalFRO look at our December Shmup Club selection, Flight of Pigarus! This SMS homebrew surprised us in a good way. We also take a look back at the shmups we played during 2020, and choose our top 5 games we played, out of all the games for the year!
Download or stream the episode right here at RF Generation:
http://rfgeneration.com/podcasts/shmupclub/?name=2021-01-24_stcc_ep_030_flight_of_pigarus_and_top_5_of_2020.mp3
Check out all the feeds where Shoot the Core-cast can be found via our LinkTree page:
https://linktr.ee/shootthecorecast
Check out the original discussion thread for the game here:
http://www.rfgeneration.com/forum/index.php?topic=19455.0
[img width=700 height=697]https://i.imgur.com/9oVY0Ja.jpg[/img]
I never got into arcade collecting to make friends or meet people; quite the opposite actually. As a lifelong introvert and lover (addict?) of solitude, I'd much prefer to make a few clicks on my favorite money-sync websites and wait for my new treasures to arrive in my mailbox, sans interaction. With console game collecting, this approach works great. However, if you were to get into full-sized, real-deal, space sucking arcade game cabinets, things get a little bit more complicated. Taking a quick look on eBay reveals some hard-to-swallow truths for the burgeoning arcade collector. Shipping prices alone for these massive pieces of memorabilia can easily climb to $500 or more, and local pickup options aren't going to be helpful if you live in Nowhere, USA. Where is an arcade addict to turn for their fix?
Enter craigslist and the thrills therein. Every arcade game I own, barring my starter "fake" SNK NEO GEO cabinet, a chance offer from a local friend was found on the magical world of craigslist. Having collected for the arcade cabinet's little brother, the home console, for near two decades now I am no stranger to the strangers of craigslist. Contrary to the horror stories that pervade discussion on local meetup sites, I have never once had a negative interaction with anyone on craigslist. Even for the most introverted of collectors, setting a price, time, and meetup location to pick up a cardboard box of someone's discarded childhood is fairly simple and painless. Public places like gas stations or truckstops provide relatively safe locations to wheel and deal, and being a 6-foot-tall surly-in-looks-only man doesn't hurt. But, what if the object of your neurotic affections is located in that strangers basement? Or deep in the back of a dimly lit garage or barn? Such is the life and times of an arcade collector.
The siren's call of just one more game to build my arcade empire is a seductive one. My first craiglist arcade adventure came with the classic Namco fighting game Tekken 2. I had never played Tekken, nor was I a fan of fighting games, but the one thing I did have was a hunger for a cheap mate to my first cabinet no matter what the title. Messages were sent and arrangements were made. For the low, low price of $360 my faux NEO GEO could have a friend and I could start a bonifide collection. But like any good introvert, the desire for treasure soon began to clash with the terror of meeting a stranger, in THEIR own home no less! What if this game owner was a weirdo? Even worse, what if I was the weirdo? The siren's call could not be silenced, however; yet this gave way to new fears. It was the final hurdle of any arcade collector: logistics.
Arcade games are less collectables and more pieces of furniture with near-antique electronics inside. The monitors themselves can approach 100 pounds of fragile glass and circuitry. The laminated wooden cabinets, even when gutted, are unwieldy and heavy on the best of days. Trying to muscle a fully loaded arcade game without help is a fool's errand. Sourcing an appliance dolly is in your best interest (as well as the interest of your new trophy), and the help of a second fool, er, friend doesn't hurt. Good old dad helped source the dolly but was unavailable in the muscle department. Now that you have your dolly, the logistics further complicate. Are you going to wheel it all the way home on your discount, Harbor Freight friend? Best to leave wheeling arcade games through heavy traffic to George Costanza. What you need is a larger set of wheels, be that a truck or van. Or your wife's SUV with all the seats torn out, pending her approval, of course. Dad came through as dad's do again by lending me his pickup truck for the day with ramps in tow.
So I nervously made my way across town to meet my new friend, as well as its former owner. The owner seemed nice enough, or at least any Buffalo Bill vibes had not come through the fog of email. With much trepidation and hopeful drooling, I pulled up to the rural-ish home down a long road out of town. What met me as I climbed out of the protection of dad's pickup cab chilled me to my introverted core; an extremely personable and affable man approaching middle age. All joking aside, the guy was very friendly and put me at ease immediately. As soon as you show the strangers of craiglist that you are indeed there to purchase and carry away their old junk and not murder them, they are generally more than happy to chat about the arcade hobby. Or at the very least efficiently and quickly get this junk collector out of their home, which works for this introvert. The owner opened up his detached garage and revealed a mancave of wonders; a fully stocked barcade complete with a full bar, arcade games and slot machines! The owner confided that he was parting with Tekken 2 to purchase a Quarter Pusher machine (put quarter in, get quarters out in the rare event you win). I'm still not sure what use such a machine would be in a private arcade for one, but as a fellow collector of weird ephemera, I won't judge. After a quick demonstration of the game and any special instructions (game has xyz quirks, here's the keys, don't feed after midnight, etc.), we loaded the game up on the dolly and safely secured it to the bed of the truck. Slightly shaking from nerves, I happily shook his hand and was on my way. A call was made to a fellow collector friend on what felt like the longest 5 mile drive home ever to help unload and I was in business. The entire ordeal had more or less gone off without a hitch, accidently tearing off the oversized control panel and almost plummeting to my blood-soaked death while unloading the game notwithstanding. The game proudly stood in its (temporary) new home in the dining room for months, much to my wife's chagrin and my great amusement.
I had not gone into this adventure expecting much more than a thinner wallet and a new toy. Yet the start of my collection brought with it new thoughts and questions. How many people had played on this machine? Was it someone's favorite? Where had it spent it's 25 year life? What fun-filled nights with friends or dates had it seen? I cannot think of any other group of items I own that have been touched literally and figuratively in their life than my stable of arcade games. Along with the haunt of the smell of stale cigarette smoke, this new game was also haunted with a little piece of every person who had ever played it.
Those of you who watched the progress videos for the 2019 RFGeneration NES Challenge may recognize this track as it was included in one of the medleys I recorded. This was always one of my favorite segments from those medleys, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before I revisited it with a full cover. I really enjoyed being able to flesh this one out a bit more, and it's really cool to compare the two recordings and see how far I've come in regards to recording quality and production values. I hope you guys enjoy it!
[img width=640 height=760]https://gamefaqs1.cbsistatic.com/box/8/3/5/24835_front.jpg[/img]
Dragonsphere is a point and click adventure game published by MicroProse and developed by their internal development studio MPS Labs. This internal team at MicroProse had developed two point and click adventure games prior, Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender and Return of the Phantom. Dragonsphere would release as MicroProse's third, and final, internally developed point and click adventure game. Dragonsphere was developed for MS-DOS and would release in 1994. Much later in history the game would be put under a new spotlight when it was released as a permanently free game through CD Projekt's Good Old Games digital store in 2011.
Continue reading Dragonsphere
Don't eat the Red Flowers in this month's "A Brief Look At"
This month, we check out Cave Story + for PC, Wii, 3DS, and Switch!
[img width=500 height=624]https://i.imgur.com/FaWhVuC.jpg?1[/img]
As I've written about a few times, I'm a big fan of selling on eBay. For all of its shortcomings on the seller side, I still find myself able to leverage it to earn enough extra money that it is worth my time. One speed bump I have run into lately is that I am running out of big ticket items in my video game collection to purge, so I had been doing a bit of thrifting in the hopes of finding things to flip for profit, but I was having little success. Recently, I started visiting the Goodwill Outlet Center which is conveniently on my way home from work. It is quite an experience to go there, and I have been able to find some great loot, most of it to flip, some of it to add to my collections.
If you have been to a normal Goodwill store (or any traditional thrift store), you will be greeted with retail furnishings stocked with used clothing and miscellaneous items that have been donated by the general public. A Goodwill Outlet is something completely different. When you walk in, all you will see are big blue bins with people digging vigorously through them looking for treasure. At the particular location I go to, books are five for a dollar, and everything else is weighed and charged $1.49 per pound. Bins are changed out one aisle at a time about once every half hour, and people line up for the fresh bins to be released upon them in a Black Friday style frenzy. I have yet to line up because the action is a bit too much for me, and I like taking my time.
Continue reading Dig and Flip
[img width=550 height=688]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/games/U-215/bf/U-215-S-06800-A.jpg[/img]
Happy New Year! As we head into 2021, we all know it is a different world than even a year ago. Most brick-and-mortar retail, including for video games, has taken a very rough beating. Somewhat surprisingly, even online stores often had a short supply of many new games. If ever there were a catalyst to speed up our medium's transition to primarily digital download, it was 2020. Conversely...
The retro game market spiked in prices, as would be expected. Even PS4s and XBox One systems became hot commodities in some areas, not to mention the Switch. The massive increase in at-home workers using programs like Zoom meant less bandwidth for online play and slow download speeds. If anything, for me the last year was another reminder of why I enjoy collecting physical copies of video games.
Continue reading Thoughts on Gaming and Collecting Going Into 2021
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