Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Opening a 30 Cart Famicom Pack

I found the above at Omocha Souko the other day. It is a big package of thirty Famicom carts wrapped in plastic that they were charging 2.000 yen for. That works out to only 66 yen (about 80 cents) per cart, which I thought was a pretty good deal.

Omocha Souko used to sell Famicom carts in bunches like this all the time, especially back during my first year of collecting. They were great, I got most of my carts that way back then. It is kind of fun because you can`t see what most of the carts are inside but you can kind of guess just by looking.

You might be thinking ¨yeah, but they`ll just put crappy sports games in the middle that you can`t see so those are probably a rip off.¨

Actually though I would sometimes find good games in the middle of these and they generally had a good mix, so even though you would sometimes get stuck with a bunch of baseballs and mahjong games you`d usually get at least something in them worth having.

They stopped doing that about two years ago, so I was really glad when I saw this. This one had ten carts visible on the top, but the other twenty were more or less a mystery. I was a bit reluctant at first because the ten you could see were pretty much all RPGs, which aren`t my thing. Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Fire Emblem, Wizardry....blah.
Looking at the back though I could at least make out that it also had Macross. That isn`t necessarily a great game (its not a bad one either), but at least it gave me some assurance that the other twenty weren`t all RPGs too.

So for that cheap price I decided to just go for it and bought the thing. I decided to photograph the grand opening specifically for the purposes of this blog post. Lets see what I got, shall we?

Step 1 - cut open the plastic wrap with my teeny Swiss Army Knife scissors that I usually use to cut my toenails with (too much info?):
After removing the top layer of carts here is what lay beneath:
Its a bit of a disappointment. Seicross is a great game and Road Fighter isn`t too bad, but the rest is....pretty mediocre. Two baseball games, a Mahjong game, Murder on the Mississipi, two wrestling games and some Dragon Ball game. Rats.

Lets see what the bottom layer has:
A bit better. Donkey Kong Jr Math is, believe it or not, actually a pretty good find. Its not the most entertaining of games (an understatement, I know), but its actually one of the harder pulse line carts to find so it is a bit of a `get`. Macross, Lunar Ball and Tecmo Super Bowl aren`t bad either. Hara Kiri Stadium I now have 400 copies of, or maybe it just seems that way. The only thing about Fighting Golf I like is that the cart is a pleasing shade of green. Hercules, some Shogi game and that vertical shoot em up with the title written in difficult kanji that I can`t read round off this layer.

Anyway, there you have it. 2000 yen for....a bunch of Famicom games that I already have. What was I thinking????

12 comments:

  1. Oops! Oh well, sorry to hear your run of luck hasn't continued here but, as you say, it was probably worth the risk and it must be quite exciting... until you've unwrapped it, at least! :)

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  2. I got a 12 or 16 pack for 1000 yen from Super Potato once.

    It came with a bunch of RPGs. Dragon Quest III was in there, as well as a DragonBall Z RPG and a Saint Seiya one. It also (unfortunately) had the MUSCLE game. But it also came with Adventure Island and Hot Scramble. Adventure Island is a pretty good game, and while Hot Scramble uh... isn't, the difficulty of it kept me coming back to play. I never got past the 2nd level.

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  3. it's still a pretty good find! Anything with Famicom is a good find ^_^ Congrats sir! I would be happy of getting games at 80 cents a piece any day especially when it's about Famicom!

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  4. Well, on the bright side, that's more games you can sell on your Famicom World post...

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  5. too bad i read this whole thing figuring you took the time to write about it, you must have found somethin good. what a let down lol! oh well. i found Quadrun (incredibly rare) and Halloween along with a few other valueable 2600 carts goin through my old atari crate at my dads house. i guess i was just wishing you similar luck. :)

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  6. Simon - thanks. Yeah, it was worth it just for the excitement:)

    Nate - if it had Adventure Island then it was totally worth it! Actually I got Adventure Island (and Hot Scramble) out of these back in the day too.

    FF - Thanks. Yeah, for 80 cents each it was worth it!

    Skyrunner - yeah, I`ll be updating that soon with these babies, cheap;)

    Jayar - LOL, yeah sorry to build it up and then not have a great pay-off! I really wish I had gotten something good out of it. Thanks for the wish though, and that must have been amazing going through those 2600 carts and finding some rare ones! I`ve made some really great finds at that store in the past though (picked up a CIB Gimmick for 100 yen a couple weeks ago there, it usually retails for about 10,000), hopefully the next post will be such a great find!

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  7. Well, like someone else has already said: At least you can sell them to other folks! You should be able to make quite a ROI, don't you think? ;)

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  8. Thanks, Bryan! Yes, I should at least be able to get my money back!

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  9. I really love that Japanese shops do that, it's how I got my Wonderswan collection started. Fun and cheap! :-D

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  10. Yeah, it really is cool, isn`t it? Fun and cheap all right!

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  11. Uh, that says Harikiri and not Hara Kiri, doesn't it?

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  12. Uh, yes it does.

    Thanks for correcting a minor typo on a 4 year old blog post! I think.

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