Famicom Galaga CIB Completes my Namcot collection

 

I haven't been posting much recently, mainly due to just being busy.  I did hit a milestone in my Famicom collection that I thought was worth mentioning though.  

7 years ago I did a post detailing my attempt to put together a complete CIB collection of the 18 little Namcot Famicom games. At the time I was just three short of finishing it - Burger Time, Valkrye no Bouken and Galaga.  

I was able to score Burger Time and Valkrye a few years ago, leaving me just missing Galaga to complete the set.  But I got distracted and totally forgot about it for years.  Then the other day my son was playing Galaga (I do have a loose copy of it, its a favorite) and it kind of jogged my memory: "Oh yeah, sitting in a box in a closet somewhere I have all the Namcot games CIB except Galaga.  I should do something about that."

So I got on Yahoo Auctions and looked for CIB copies of Galaga and HOLY CRAP!  I haven't perused Yahoo Auctions for games in over a year and damn, prices have gone through the roof.  I guess this is another one of those weird side effects of the Pandemic, everyone is buying video games so prices have soared.  

Anyway, the best price I could find on a dodgy, beat up CIB copy was about 20$, but I decided to instead go for a nice shiny copy (not new, but close to it), which cost me about 50$.  I think it was worth it, voila:

The collection is complete!

Well, kind of.  My copy of Battle City does not have the manual, and the box is in pretty lousy shape so I might upgrade that one at some point (unfortunately that will be expensive).  Druaga and Super Chinese are also a bit iffy and might also get replaced with nicer copies.  I really wish I had done this 5 years ago when doing so would have probably cost about 1/4 what it will today, but oh well!

Collecting Goal for 2014: Finish my CIB Namco 18 Series

Of all the game boxes released for the Famicom I think the original Namco series of its first 18 games are my favorite.  They are small, made of cardboard and they have some awesome cover art.  Perhaps more important, in terms of inspiring me to collect all of them, as the above photo demonstrates they also look really cool when displayed together!

After a few important pick ups that I made over the last few months, I am really lose to finishing the set with 15 out of 18:

As you can see from the photo the ones I am missing are:

5 Galaga
11 Burger Time
17 Valkrye no Bouken

Galaga and Valkrye are actually pretty easy to find and don`t cost too much so they shouldn`t be a problem.  Burger Time is a tougher one to find CIB and usually sells for more, but I should be able to find that pretty easily too. In fact I could probably just buy these all right now off of Yahoo Auctions, but as usual I like to wait patiently for a bargain to come along.

Some of these are not truly CIB - Battle City and Sky Kid I don`t have the manuals for and the boxes on them are pretty rough so I`d like to upgrade those at some point. 

I have a lot of trouble deciding which one is my favorite.  Warpman is a really recent acquisition so I am currently quite taken with it.  THe blue and orange cover art just looks really awesome:

Battle City is pretty cool too though, as is PacMan and Sky Kid. 

As always I am left with the question of how to properly display these in a cramped Japanese apartment.  I envisage these someday getting a wall rack that will adequately show them off, but for now I have to keep them in a box since I don`t have the wall space.  Someday....someday....

Precious Namcot games.....Precious....

Some new `pieces` for my collection: the first four games Namcot released for the Famicom complete in box!
I`ve been wanting to get a set of the first 18 Namcot releases (they are numbered) complete in box ever since Bryan over on the Gay Gamer picked up a few of them a couple years back, the pictures he put up just knocked me out. I love the boxes on these, they hit all the right buttons for me: small, cardboard, colorful and with great, evocative imagery on the front.

I already had a couple from this series CIB but they are in the kind of `B-grade` level of games - stuff like Star Luster and Pro Wrestling. These ones however include Pac Man, the one I wanted the most! YES!

I found these on Yahoo Auction in part of a larger lot of boxed games. They set me back quite a bit, but I was massively impressed when I received them. Most of the other games in the lot were in beat up condition but these Namco ones are like new:
They only have some tiny wear on the flaps but other than that they are in perfect condition and look like they could have come directly off a department store shelf from 1984. The photos in the auction weren`t close up so I wasn`t expecting them to be this nice. In fact I was in a bit of a panic when I realized how beautiful they were as these are way too good to just casually toss on a random shelf with the rest of my games where they will get all wrinkled up (what I normally do with games). I had to empty out a plastic bin to put them in for safe keeping.

So my collection now has some showy mint stuff in it. I will not be putting these into hard plastic containers for disply or anything, but I will be keeping them in that plastic bin until I find some safe way of storing them.

Next on my wantlist for this series are Battle City, Warpman, Sky Kid and Burger Time - all of which have awesome cover art. And are probably going to cost me a bit of $$.