Famicom Cart Trading

In addition to the above cover image of the Famicom, another little thing I like about my recently acquired Hisshou Sakusen Mecha Guide is the last page:
This is a page for kids to record which games they have lent out to friends. From left to right, the columns are titled "Friend", "Game's name", "Day it was lent" and "Day it was returned".

This page, incidentally, is the reason this guidebook was much cheaper than the rest: because the kid who owned it had actually filled it out. In the guide collecting world, this is considered serious damage.

I'm rather pleased that he or she did so. The first entry states that the guide's owner lent Bomberman to a friend called "Turbo" on March 13. Either it was never returned or he just didn't bother to fill that column in when it was. The second entry states that Atama no Usenkan Garu, a game I have never heard of, was lent to a friend named "Non-kun". By that time the guide's owner was no longer interested in recording dates of any sort, and thereafter he seems to have abandoned use of the guide for this purpose altogether.

An extremely brief career this guide had as a record of a kid's lending activities, but its kind of interesting nonetheless.

As I wrote about in an earlier post, a lot of Famicom carts out there have kids names on them.
This is mainly a legacy of their having been traded with friends - a way of ensuring everybody knew which cart belonged to which kid.

My wife used to do this when she was a kid too, so much so that a lot of games she isn't sure if she had them or had just borrowed them from a friend. I think that is kind of cool.

Cartridges, I note, are ideally designed for trading like that. They are sturdy and can survive roughing it in a kid's backpack for the trip to and from school or a friend's house. Disc based games were much less well suited to this - the jewel CD cases the PS1 and Saturn games came in are pretty easily broken and the sturdier post-PS2 cases are a lot bulkier than most carts.

Digital distribution, of course, makes this sort of interaction among friends impossible. Which is yet another reason why it is bad.

Another interesting thing about this is that the Famicom's dominance probably facilitated game trading in Japan much more than elsewhere. As a kid in the 80s I played games first on an Intellivision, then a Commodore Vic-20 and later on an Apple IIC. I didn't get an NES until 1989, when I was 13.

My problem - and a lot of friends had this too - was that nobody I knew had a Commodore Vic-20 or Apple IIC. It seemed everybody had different computers or consoles. We couldn't trade games with each other since everybody had software that was incompatible with what everybody else had. If you wanted to play each other's games you had to go to the other kid's house, which always sucked because they (having the benefit of practice) would always kick the crap out of you on whatever game it was.

Probably kids with NES's didn't have this problem so much. One of those rare examples of a near-monopoly producing benefits for consumers. Go figure.

Related Posts:
- 1985 Famicom High Scores
- Famicom Cart Condition: Why Good is Bad and I Never Buy Sealed Stuff

1985 Famicom High Scores

I picked up a rather interesting book at Mandarake the other day. Everybody, meet the Hishousakusen Mecha Guide.

This was an interesting guide book, one of many released for the Famicom in the 1980s. This was the third in this series and was published in 1985, 2 years after the Famicom's release and at the height of the Famicom boom.

It has strategy guides for 13 Famicom games - see if you can guess which ones by looking at the artwork on the cover.

Back in the day these guidebooks probably weren't worth the cover price (580 yen). Unless you had all 13 games you would be getting a lot of useless information. Plus for the most part the mini strategy guides just contain info that can be found in the manuals the games came with.

As a repository of Famicom history though this thing is fantastic. Most of its value lies not in the guides to the games, but in the added bonus features that crop up here and there. Today I thought I would do a post about one of these: High scores.

On page 158 this book has a list of high scores which readers of the series have achieved on some of the more popular Famicom games of the time:
I find this sort of thing very interesting, so I've translated the list below. The only difference between this and the Japanese original is that I've omitted the names of the hi-scorers to respect their privacy and I've also omitted the Hyper Series scores at the bottom which would have been a pain in the ass to fit into the table. Here they are:

Game	Hi Score	Prefecture
Clu Clu Land	139,230	Chiba
Star Force	9,999,900	Saitama
Spartan X	1,243,120	Tokyo
Nuts and Milk	900,000	Hokkaido
Balloon Fight	324,000	Tochigi
Xevious	99,999,990	Kanagawa
City Connection	1,150,000	Tokyo
Mario Brothers	999,970	Chiba
Donkey Kong Jr.	1,109,900	Tokyo
Galaxian	85,030	Gunma
Pu Yan	3,900,321	Ehime
Yie Ar Kung Fu	999,999	Osaka
Galaga	780,000	Tokyo
Pinball	523,540	Hiroshima
Wrecking Crew	99,999,999	Tokyo
Challenger	527,500	Nigata
Route 16 Turbo	822,600	Nagano
Ninja Kun	5,385,200	Tokyo
Golf	-21	Hyogo

Ever gotten scores better than these? These look pretty good to me. The scores for Star Force, Xevious, Yie Ar Kung Fu and Wrecking Crew obviously represent the highest scores possible. The only one I've come close to besting is Galaxian, all the others are way out of my league. But then I suck at video games.

Anyway, I really like this because it reminds me of an earlier age of video games. You ever notice how the high score feature was slowly eliminated from most video games in a process that began during the Famicom's generation? It seemed that by the time the Nintendo 64 rolled by score keeping had been eliminated from all but a handful of games.

In the old days though, pretty much all games revolved around racking up high scores. The purpose was just to get as many points as you could. This was a really brilliant feature of them. The high score provided the perfect measure of one's skill when compared with other players. It gave you something to focus on while playing the game and provided an added level of intensity as it made everything in the game important. Miss shooting down a single space ship and that represented points lost.

Even in games where the main purpose wasn't getting a high score per se the presence of the score feature provided another element of interest. Like in Super Mario Brothers the purpose wasn't really to get points, it was to get to the end of level 8-4. But once you had finished every stage, instead of tossing the game aside you could start again from the beginning with a new mission: using score rather than levels completed as the measure of success. To a certain extent the fact that you could rack up huge points by just endlessly bouncing turtles off of walls limited the enjoyment of this but you get the point.

High scores: I salute you!

Related Posts:
- Famicom History
- Famicom Releases by the Numbers
- Amada Family Computer Mini Cards: The Coolest Famicom Thing You Never Knew Existed