All Shopping Spree'd out

I went back for a couple of more 800 yen shopping sprees at Omocha Soko this week. I have more or less completely picked over the entirety of their Famicom and Gameboy selection, which now consists of stacks upon stacks of Mahjong and Moero Pro Yakyuu, which they seem to have hundreds of copies each of which nobody will ever buy.

At any rate I got quite a good haul. For a total of 2400 yen (about $25) I got all of this:
About 75 games in total. Not bad when you consider that I only paid about half the price that any single one of these games would have cost new back in the day. With these latest additions my Famicom collection is now up to 467 different carts - I'm almost halfway there!

I got a couple of CIB games in today's lot - Wario No Mori and Uchusen Cosmo Carrier. Generally I don't usually bother with CIB games because they cost more and take up more storage space (and its a pain in the ass to try keeping the boxes in good condition). But these ones I really like. Unlike games on pretty much every console since, most of the Famicom games came in cardboard boxes, which I think look a lot better than plastic. It also means that they are a lot rarer, as most people just threw them out.

The Uchusen Cosmo Carrier box is just really cool:
The artwork has a look that reminds me a lot of the sci-fi themed comics, games and toys I used to love as a kid in the 1980s.

I also like the fact that it is set in the futuristic world of 1999, where we are fighting space wars on the moon or something. It always amuses me to remember how I thought the 21st century would be like when I was a kid. A lot of the cool sci-fi movies from the 80s got it wrong. Like Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, in which the villain (Khan) was a tyrant who ruled half of Earth with an iron fist before being sent into deep space in the year.....1996?

Also I remember liking the movie 2010 starring Roy Scheider which came out in 1984. It was the sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and basically involved a follow up mission to Jupiter to find out what went wrong. Here it is, 2010 now and we can't even afford to send people to the moon anymore.

Super-awesome-fantastic Retro Game shopping spree

I walked into Omocha-Soko, one of my local game shops, today just to see if they had any new Famicom stuff. While I was browsing in the retro-game area I noticed a stack of small shopping baskets next to the racks of Famicom games.

I almost ignored them completely but the sign above it had the word Houdai (放題） in big letters so I took a look. Houdai is a word you see at all-you-can-eat restaurants and basically means "as much as you can".

When I took a closer look, the sign said that, for the low price of 800 yen (about 8$) you could get as many retro-games as you could cram into one of those little baskets. This included their entire selection of pre-N64/Sega Saturn/Playstation stuff, which is massive. The only exception was the stuff they had in glass cases where they keep the better games that retail for 1,000 yen or more, but still - how cool is that?

I had to make some strategic decisions. I decided to avoid the Super Famicom and Playstation games because they are bigger and I could therefore fit fewer of them into the limited space the basket had available. Gameboy games were definitely on shopping list - if I had wanted I probably could have fit half their stock into one of the baskets. Unfortunately somebody else had probably already thought of that as their Gameboy selection was pretty picked-over by the time I got to it, but nonetheless I found 8 games that looked interesting so into the cart they went.

After that I decided to go for the N64 and Famicom games, which are roughly the same size and could easily be stacked together. The Gameboy games could then be shoved into the little crevices on the sides of the basket.

The Famicom game racks had been heavily cherry-picked by the time I got to them, including by myself in the past. So I decided to just look for whatever games I didn't have and which looked kind of cool and just shove them in the basket. I found 14 altogether that fit this bill. I rounded off the basket with a couple of N64 games that I thought looked pretty good.

All in all I got a little over 8,000 yen worth of games (according to their sticker prices) for 800 yen including tax. Not a bad deal. Its a lot better this way than buying them in lots too because I could actually pick out the games as opposed to taking a big lot which is half made up of doubles.