Retro-game Shopping will never be the same again

Apologies for not updating this blog as often as I should, this was a busy summer around here! I should take the opportunity here to thank Bryan for the flattering write-up he did about Famicomblog on his wonderful blog here. Much appreciated!

Anyway, as is often the case with my recent posts, in this one I will be describing another one of my Famicom-related shopping experiences. Over the past two days I have gone on a massive buying spree at my favorite retro-game store, Omocha Soko.

I am sometimes given to exaggeration, but I think I can confidently say that I made retro-game shopping history over the course of the past 24 hours of shopping. I was fortunate enough to hit the greatest bargain the world has ever created. Even by Omocha Soko's generous standards this blows away every other sale they have ever had. Remember last month when I was bragging about getting two Twin Famicoms for 100 yen each? That was nothing. THIS was the motherload.

My story actually starts about 3 days ago when I popped in to Omocha Soko to see if they had anything new. The Famicom game racks were pretty much the same as usual - I've picked them over for the past two years and now basically have every game they've got out there. I also checked the console and controller sections but not much new there either.

At the back of the store, however, something really caught my eye. Stack upon stack of these black plastic crates filled to the brim with old consoles, controllers, cables and games of every type. Usually when they get new stuff in (they buy stuff from people who come in off the street) they'll just dump it in the back for a few days until one of their employees gets around to sorting it out and putting prices on it. Normally they might have at most one or two of these boxes out and when I see them I know that within a couple of days they'll have new stuff on the shelves so I make a note to visit again in the next day or two (you have to hurry when they put new stuff out, otherwise other people will beat you to the good stuff).

This, however, was unlike anything I had ever seen before. They had these things stacked almost to the ceiling, row upon row of them. Somebody must have literally dumped an entire truckload of old video game stuff and just said "Just take it all."

Because they hadn't put the stuff on sale yet I couldn't see exactly what they had, but it looked promising so I made a note to come in soon and have a look at the stuff when they put it out for sale.

Yesterday I made my second visit and, sure enough, all the stuff was out for sale. But nothing could have prepared me for the sight that beheld my eyes. Apparently, due to the sheer volume of stuff they had gotten and the massive pain in the ass it would be to sort it all out and untangle all the wires, they just put the crates out with signs saying (basically) "Everything in these boxes is 50 yen. Nothing has been tested so buy at your own risk." I snapped a couple pictures of some of the crates. You aren't allowed to photograph so I did this somewhat surreptitiously (gee, I hope nobody from the store reads this blog), apologies for the blurry pics. These ones had controllers, consoles and a million cables in them:
And these ones had tons of games (only the stuff in the crates were 50 yen, the stuff on the walls was seperate):
The above pictures only show about 1/3 or so of the total amount of stuff. It was massive.

Now, 50 yen is only about 5o cents US so you might expect these crates were full of crap. Not so. Well, not exactly so. Most of the stuff actually was crap, but there were a lot of GOOD things in there too. And by virtue of having arrived at exactly the right time I had first crack at picking them over!! My retro-game shopping dream come true!!!

Being bicycle-bound I had some finite limits on the amount of stuff I could carry, so I ended up making two trips, one yesterday and the other today. This was today's haul, still in its bags:
In total I spent 3450 yen (1600 yen yesterday and 1850 yen today), which is about 40$ US at today's exchange rate. Lets take a look at what I got.

Fist, the consoles. One (working) AV Famicom with both controllers (this counted as just one item despite really being three):
One functioning, clean old-school Famicom complete with the expansion port cover (those things are hard to find):
One PC Engine complete with Disk drive and interface unit (as with the AV Famicom, this only counted as one thing despite it, really, being 3). I have all the cables and a controller for another PC Engine which has a busted console, so this works out perfect for me:
Two Sega Mega Drives. I actually didn't want two of them, but ended up getting two kind of by chance. On the first day I picked up one that was just console-only. On the second day I rummaged through the bins looking for an AV cable and AC adapter for it. At the bottom of one of the bins I found a bag with another Mega Drive complete with the cables (though missing the controllers) and I figured what the hell:
And next, the Famicom controllers.

First, the Famicom Joystick 7 Mk II, which looks pretty damn cool:
And a Famicom Hori Controller:
And two Joycard controllers, one boxed with a picture of Takahashi Meijin on it:
And did I get games? Yes I certainly did.

First I got this fantastic copy of Lode Runner for some 1980s 8-bit Sony console that I don't own (edit: this is a game for the MSX "Hit Bit", a home computer released in 1983). I'll probably never be able to play it but man, I could not resist buying this for the awesomeness of that cover-art. This is without a doubt my favorite box-art of any video game I've ever had:
And Famicom Carts? Oh, you bet they had Famicom carts. GOOD ones, not just a bunch of baseballs and golfs. I picked up 32 of them. To be honest I already owned copies of most of these games but I got these mainly for the purposes of future trades or something. These ones I got today:
And these ones yesterday:
I had been wanting "Crazy Climber"for a really long time and was really excited to find it.

They also had a bunch of Disk System games. I have 3 disk systems now (two in Twin Famicoms and one FDS) but none work. Still for the future day when I actually get one of them up and running I now have some awesome games to play:
And I got these games for other consoles. Perfect Dark for the N64 is one I've been looking for a long time for, but the cheapest I've ever seen it was 3,000 yen (ironically almost the same amount I paid for everything here). I just got the Sonic game so I'd have something to test my new Mega Drives with (when I get a bloody controller for them anyway. Of the hundreds of old controllers in those endless stacks of crates I couldn't find a single Mega Drive controller):
The coolest thing I found though was hidden at the bottom of one of the games crates. I though it was just some piece of junk at first and almost ignored it, but when I took a closer look I realized that it was an original Game and Watch from 1982:
I've really wanted to get a Game and Watch for a long time, but they are so expensive (hard to find for less than 5000 yen) that I've never bothered. I probably wouldn't have gone for Mickey and Donald, but beggars can't be choosers and it was still a good find. I have to get some batteries for it to see if it still works, but its in pretty good shape (edit: got the batteries and it does work!):
And rounding out the purchases were a bunch of miscellaneous cables and stuff that I needed to "complete" some other old consoles I have lying around:
All in all, an amazing haul when you consider how little it all cost. If I can just repeat that total: 3450 yen. Yup. For less than the cost of a single Wii or PS3 game I got all of the crap in the following photo. Is it any wonder that I don't buy current generation console stuff?
The missus might not be happy if I don't get our living room looking like normal again by the time she gets home though, so I better finish this post here and go tidy this up.

My Twin Twin Famicoms

Its been about 2 months since the last time I posted anything here, my time just gets eaten up in the summer and I've neglected my Famicom collection. Until today that is.

There is nothing like finding a bargain to make one want to publish on a blog and I got a great one today. I went into one of my regular retro game shops this afternoon (Omocha Souko, which sells tons of non game stuff too but I just go because they sometimes sell Famicom stuff really cheap). A couple of weeks ago they set up a new "Junk" corner where they dump game hardware they get in but can't be bothered to test or anything and I wanted to see if they had put anything new out there. Mostly its just old Famiclones or incomplete consoles (ie without the controllers or cables) that nobody wants (like the PS1 which nobody bothers with if they have a PS2). Every once in a while though they might throw something in there which is actually worth buying.

Today was such a day as they had just put out these two babies:
Yup. Not one, but two Twin Famicoms! Oh I forgot to mention the best part: everything they dump in this junk pile costs just 100 yen (about 1$ US). So for the price of a bottle of soda I was able to score two Twin Famicoms - one in each color!

Now you might ask why I bought both of them - why not leave one for somebody else to pick up? I mean, its kind of impolite to horde this stuff.

I was thinking about doing that - only buying one of them - but I had a bit of a dilemma. The consoles they put in the junk pile are not tested and you cannot return them - you basically are taking a chance when you buy them that they won't work. And I know the Disk Systems are notoriously prone to breaking down. So what to do? I basically decided to get both of them as a form of insurance - even if one of them didn't work the other might. And even if they both didn't work I could possibly cobble together a working one by cannibalizing parts from both. And for the ridiculously low price I could afford to go for it.

So, apologies to the anonymous person who would have gladly plunked down 100 yen for a Twin Famicom but arrived at Omocha Souko after I did: you'll never know the bargain you missed out on.
Anyway, on arriving home I naturally wanted to test them but ran into two problems. One is the simple fact that I don't own a single FDS game, so I could only test the cartridge part of each.

Second and more importantly though is the fact that neither one of them came with a power cable. The red one did come with an AV cable, but the black one was console and controllers only.

I didn't think this would be a problem because pretty much every early Nintendo console used the same power cable. My Famicom (both the regular and AV) and Super Famicom all use the same power and AV cables, I just switch them over when I want to use one. So I assumed the Twin Famicom would be the same.

It isn't. I tried, but the Twin Famicom uses a different kind of power cable that isn't compatible with the regular Famicom one. Crap. So now I have to go out and try to track down a Twin Famicom power cable, which I suspect is going to be a challenge. Nonetheless, I'm glad I got them!

More than half way there now

June is a busy month for me so I haven't posted in about 6 weeks now. I have however continued to amass Famicom games and recently passed the "official" halfway mark of 526 games (ie halfway to collecting all 1051).

I picked up a lot of games at "GEO" recently. GEO is a big nationwide chain that (I think) started out as a video rental chain but expanded into related lines of business like CDs and, of course, video games. There are a few locations in my area and I've gotten a few of my games there, including "Afterburner" (not sure why that piece of useless minutia stuck in my mind but there you have it).

Anyway, a few months ago all the GEOs put up signs saying they were no longer buying Famicom/SuperFamicom/N64 games (as well as other maker's games from those generations) and marked down their existing stock 50%. That spurred me to pick up a few. Last week though they reduced everything they have left even further, which sent me on a bargain-bin search expedition tour around all the local GEOs looking for games I need. These are some of the ones I got:
I paid quite a bit less than the sticker prices for these. 100 yen each to be exact.

I'm kind of sad to see that GEO is going out of the Famicom business. Their prices were a bit on the high side (before they marked everything down of course) but most of their outlets had a pretty good selection. I also liked the stickers they put on the games, like these ones on Super Contra (good find there):
In Japanese its got all the information you need. Name of the game, genre, the date on which it was originally released, etc. Most places just put the price and nothing else. 1980 yen is a bit high (though still in the ballpark compared to the competition). I also liked the fact that that they used the stickers that easily peel off. I hate the shops (ie Hard Off) that put stickers directly on the carts which are a massive pain in the ass to remove. GEO got that part of the business right. OK, I know this is anal retentive minor stuff, but I'm still going to miss those GEO labels when they stop selling them altogether!

Famicom Fort

I celebrate a small milestone recently with the acquisition of my 500th Famicom cart. I am now just short of half-way there (526 carts will mark the official halfway point).

Out of curiosity I piled up all my carts, including duplicates, in our extra room. It ended up looking like a bit like a fort wall, so I called it Fort Famicom.

Doing this reminded me of the logistical nightmare that this collection has become. I have no really effective way of sorting them and they just tend to pile up here and there. I segregate the doubles and put them on one shelf, and then I have another shelf for all the games I really like which is easy to get to, but other than that nothing. With over 500 carts (plus 200-300 duplicates) it is now officially "unmanageable." I feel like Lloyd Bridges in "Airplane" whenever I deal with them: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue".

Anyway, Fort Famicom looked kind of cool.
Related Posts:
- Wall of Famicom
- The Aesthetics of the Famicom Cart
- The Collection
- Famicom Cart Storage: My Long Nightmare is Finally Over

Square Button Famicom: My new paperweight

I took a little ride out to "Hard Off" today. Hard Off is a nationwide chain of used goods stores that sell books, clothes, electronics and of course old video games.

In my experience there are two types of shops that sell used Famicom games. There is one type of shop where they know exactly what everything is worth and they charge exactly that much, no exceptions. You can go through a massive rack of games and you will not find a single discrepancy. If they have 20 copies of "Super Mario Brothers" and one of them is priced at 1,000 yen, you can be absolutely certain that the other 19 will also be priced at 1,000 yen.

In the other type of shop, the people running the shop exercise very little control or supervision over what prices get put on things. There is no apparent system to it and the prices seem to be decided by whichever member of their staff happened to be on duty when the stuff came in. So if they've got 20 copies of Super Mario Brothers and you find one copy for 1,000 yen you know that if you just keep looking through their racks you'll probably find one priced for 500.

Far and away I like the second kind of shop better and Hard Off is one such shop. To be sure, some of their stuff is ridiculously overpriced, but at the same time you can sometimes find insane bargains simply because the right person had the price sticker gun when the game you wanted came in. So I like to go there once a month or so to see what they have.

On looking through their pile of Famicom games today, I knew that "employee number 3" (I number them) must have handled their latest pricing activity because all the new games they had gotten in since my last visit were way overpriced. "Oh, Employee Number 3, who on earth do you think would be willing to pay 525 yen for F1-Race?" I though to myself as I walked away somewhat bemused.

I decided to check out their game hardware section too as I had gotten some good deals there on the past, including my Vaus Controller. They had a big pile of Famicom consoles on sale for 525 yen each, which is a pretty good deal. I didn't need another Famicom (I have 3 already) but this one - horrendously dirty and yellow - caught my eye:
I believe this Famicom had spent the majority of the past 27 years on the surface of Mars.

Anyway, it wasn't the dirt and yellow that caught my eye. "My god, could it be?" I thought to myself, "Yes, a square button Famicom in the middle of a junk pile!! Employee Number 3, I take it all back, you are cool in my books!"

Yes, I had found a square button Famicom - the rarest Famicom out there and every collector's dream. For those of you who don't know, the very fist Famicom released had square buttons. The square ones, which were very prone to wearing out quickly, proved problematic and so when Nintendo recalled the Famicom to fix something else they replaced them and subsequent versions all had the standard round buttons.

So I was pretty excited when I saw that for a mere 525 yen I could score a square button Famicom. My excitement was quickly dashed however when I got a closer look at the player 1 controller:
Yup, a missing "A" button. Guess that is why they recalled them.

That, combined with the general filthy condition of the unit made me have second thoughts, but then I decided "screw it, I'll regret it if I don't get it" and bought the thing.

I plugged the thing in right away and, not surprisingly, it didn't work at all. Undeterred, I cracked it open and about 12 pounds worth of dust fell out - which may have been part of the problem:
I also took apart the controllers and switched this tragedy from the player 1 to the player 2 controller:
Just breaks my heart.

Anyway, after about an hour of cleaning I had the whole thing looking pretty good, except for the really yellow upper half of the outer casing. I had a non-functioning round button Famicom that had a really nice white casing so I decided to switch them (Edit - the new one isn't quite the same as the Square button Famicom doesn't have the "FF" Famicom Family logo on it. Thanks to DSX in the comments for bringing this to my attention). It gave me the chance to compare the guts of the square and round button Famicoms, they are actually quite a bit different:
The Square one is on the left, it is much less logically wired than the round button one on the right and a real pain in the ass to take apart and put together for that reason. I guess these are among the other things they changed after the recall. (Edit - This isn't quite correct. The one on the right is actually a post 1989 revision. Pre-1989 Famicoms, including round button ones, had similar wiring to the original square button Famicom. Thanks again to DSX in the comments for pointing this out).

Anyway, after getting them put back together my new square button Famicom looked pretty good:
Ah, look at 'em buttons:
I then plugged 'er in to enjoy some good old "Spartan X" and was greeted with a solid green screen. Curse. I won't bore you with the details but about half an hour of cursing and doing everything humanly imaginable to try to get the damned thing to show something other than green screen produced no results so I gave up. As things currently stand, my square button is nothing but a paperweight.

I did get a glitter of hope though. After putting the ugly yellow case onto my broken old round-button Famicom I decided to plug that one in too just for the hell of it. I had bought that one about a year ago and spent a huge amount of time trying to get it to work, but every time the image on the screen was too distorted to play. When I flipped the switch this time though, it worked perfectly!

So the lesson is: if you ever get a Famicom that doesn't work, instead of trying to fix it just try to make it worse by stripping it of parts for another system. That, apparently, works like a charm!

And oh yeah, if anyone has any spare square Famicom controller buttons laying around let me know!

Postscript - October 7, 2011

I sold the old square button Famicom in this post last month to jpx72 in Slovakia, where it now resides. You can see pics of it in its new home here.

Related Posts:
- Mega Bargain of the Day: Another Square Button Famicom
- Famicom Console Wars

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.