NES

Earlier this month, Capcom released the tenth iteration of its core Mega Man series of games. It’s the 7th to be released in classic 8-bit style, and the millionth title that features the name ‘Mega Man’. It’s all a little confusing, but the important thing is this : there’s a brand new, unseen Mega Man game to play that feels just like it did when I got home from school in 5th grade.

While Mega Man 10 (not to be confused with Mega Man X) has been released for the Wii, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, I’m still a Wii kind of guy. So, for a scant ten bucks (in the form of Wii points) and a few seconds of wireless download time, I had a brand new game installed on my Wii – a perfect companion to Mega Man 9, which I greedily downloaded on release day in 2008 and played until I nearly went blind. It’s that much fun.

Sure, I miss holding the grey, plastic cart in my hands and popping it into the NES (though the Game Genie, because it made a better connection to the NES’s guts) and clutching the squared-off NES controller until my hands turned red – but hanging onto the Wiimote, or the Classic Controller, is pretty alright also. It’s a good enough series to want to play it for the sake of gaming alone, even without stacking it next to my plethora of NES games.

This brings up a lot of old questions about virtually collecting games on the Wii – especially because this was the tipping point between happily playing everything and running out of space. While the Wii offers spots to switch out SD cards for extra storage, it seems like it would be exceptionally simple to create a small, external USB hard drive that could easily house any and all games that are downloaded directly to the system. Instead, we need to manage our virtual game collection between the Wii’s very limited internal memory and these very tiny SD cards. As a collector, this type of arrangement is less than optimal – but as a lover of all things NES, I’ll take it.

I’ve also purchased virtual games on the Wii that I already own in their original versions, simply because I don’t currently have the space to set up all of my original consoles at once. Over time, I think it’ll be worth five bucks if I don’t have to plug in the NES every time I want to play Super Mario Brothers 3. My kingdom for a dedicated TV and appropriate shelving. And a sister who doesn’t toss your console on the floor because she needs a whole shelf for a single pair of her scandalous undies.

All of this aside, Mega Man 10 is a completely stellar, original game, and it feels far more difficult than its predecessor. I hope that this is because the game’s creators amped up the difficulty, and not just because I’m getting old. After an evening of profanity, all of which was deserved and fun, I’ve barely made it bast the third robot boss. Thankfully, the game retains the ability to save your progress, and after you’ve mastered the game, there are multiple tasks that you can accomplish by replaying the game over and over with varying degrees of skill. Should you complete this huge array of herculean feats, you can download new levels, and replay the game as two alternate characters with different abilities. In this way, the series remains relevant to modern gaming, while still feeling completely, purely 1990s.

I’d like to say this to Capcom : I would gladly pay up to $100 to own a cart version of this game, as well as Mega Man 9. I know it’s possible. You should really make it happen. I totally appreciate the vintage styled box art that you’ve put together, but take it all the way!

It’s a series that has the potential for infinite, fun continuation on the same basic platform that it has been formed around. Find a theme for a robot, design a stage around said theme, go. After playing Mega Man endlessly since I was ten, I’m still completely entranced. Yes, even through Sheep Man.

It’s not as if Stadium Events is an especially great game.

Anyone who has played World Class Track Meet knows the futility of awkwardly pounding the accompanying floor mat with your feet, and then giving up and punching it rapidly with your hands, and then having your mom yell at you for making so much noise. It’s a game that asks you to perform a bizarre, Herculean feat that doesn’t match what the human body can actually do, much less when it is eight years old, and you can play it once or twice before the novelty completely wears off.

And still, that game sold for over $40,000 last week.

While “Stadium Events” was later re-named and re-released as World Class Track Meet (accompanying the NES Power Pad accessory), the original US release by Bandai is one of the rarest retail Nintendo games out there.

Popular legend has it that 2000 copies were produced by Bandai in 1986 and sent to a limited number of retail chains, designed to work with Bandai’s FFF (Family Fun Fitness) accessory – a large mat that could be manipulated with the hands and feet in lieu of a controller. Almost immediately after this release, Nintendo decided that they liked this accessory so much that they were going to buy the exclusive rights to it and rename it the Power Pad.

This created a recall of every available copy of the game so that it could be rebranded with Nintendo’s seal. These same popular legends maintain that only 200 copies of the game were already sold and un-recallable, and furthermore, only two still remain in their shrinkwrap. Of course, these numbers are completely unofficial, as no surveyor has really delved into every dusty nerd basement across America just yet, but people like to throw them around.

Divide 200 copies of a game among millions of Nintendo collectors, and you have a hot item. While one sealed copy sold for just over $13,000 a few months back, this most recent discovery sold for almost $41,000 – but collectors be warned! More than one version of this game exists, and one isn’t that rare at all.

Because Nintendo released games across the world, they had to adjust their programming to accommodate TVs that used both NTSC and PAL technology. NTSC tech dominated America, and PAL was used in the UK.

The rare edition of Stadium Events is the NTSC, or American, version. This is differentiated by a circular ‘Nintendo Seal’ on the cover of the game cart and box in gold and grey. The more common PAL version features a Nintendo seal which is oval shaped, and uses grey and white. This Pal version of the cart itself also includes a small photo of a few people enjoying the FFF Pad in front of the TV (which is featured on both boxes). Of course, the more manuals, boxes and ephemera included, the better off you are. Those who do not understand this difference and are eager to hop into the current Stadium Events frenzy have dropped almost $10,000 per cartridge on one that simply isn’t nearly as rare.

I still regret the day I tossed out all of my old Nintendo stuff in an effort to become more mature, only to realize later that maturity was actually embracing who you were enthusiastically. Just pop in World Class Track Meet if you’re not a purist who strives to play every NES game – you’ll save yourself $40,000.

I’ve recently been convinced that Punch-Out!! is the greatest series of Nintendo games ever created – and not just because the most recent version on the Wii has actually motivated me to get off of my big ol’ nerd butt. Sure, Mario and Link have had some fairly awesome, complex adventures, but Punch-Out!! is pure, beautiful simplicity, no matter what form it takes. It’s a glorious combination of four attacks, plus the ability to dodge and block – and nothing else. While this might sound limiting, it’s far easier than trying to find the 5th magical crystal on some ranch all the way the hell across Hyrule, or being told, once again, that the princess is in another castle.

The whole series started as an arcade cabinet in 1984 in which you, a green-haired Rocky look-alike, performs these few moves against increasingly difficult opponents in a kind of first-person view scenario. When this game was well received, Nintendo released the Super Punch Out!! arcade cabinet in 1985. This was more of the same, though it incorporated five different characters. Now, one of the great things about Punch Out!! is the liberal use of marginally offensive racial stereotypes for the opposing boxers. This is not to say that racism is hilarious, but it’s so far out of left field from Nintendo that it’s hard to ignore – the weakest guy is French, the Russian guy is a drunk, and the Polynesian guy is a giant hippopotamus of a man. In fact, he’s called King Hippo, and the Russian guy was originally named Vodka Drunkinski. This name was changed to ‘Soda Popinksi’ for the home version of the game, however, due to Nintendo’s strict policy of using no explicit drug or alcohol references on their console. (Anyone who has played House of the Dead : Overkill can attest to the fact that this policy is very, very dead.)

The home version of the game, and the first one that is reasonable for the everyday NES fan to collect, was 1987’s Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, from those halcyon days before Tyson went completely, unabashedly insane. This was the first version that many of us upstate New York kids played, being far from the flashing lights of the local arcades, and we played it for hours. This version of the game used a mix of characters from the existing games, was exceptionally difficult in the later levels, and featured Tyson himself as the very last boss in the game. It’s considered to be a classic by anyone who owns an NES.

However, completists should note that in 1989, Mike Tyson had lost his status as champion, and Nintendo did not renew his contract – surely one of the components to his slowly developing craziness. After this, all copies of the game were simply called Punch-Out!!, or ‘Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream‘, Mr. Dream being the new final boss of the game, which was identical in every other way. Even Mr. Dream had the exact same mannerisms and attacks as Mike Tyson – just with a slightly different appearance. Both games can be purchased for about five or six bucks each, or the latter can be downloaded to the Wii.

Only the most hardcore completists picked up 1992’s Power Punch II, which is one of the more troubled games in NES history. Originally being developed as ‘Mike Tyson’s Intergalactic Power Punch’, a sequel to the original Punch-Out!! game, it was disowned by Nintendo due to its poor quality, and the fact that Tyson was rapidly departing from the reality that we all share.

And no, there was no Power Punch I, for any system, not unlike Leonard Part 6. For the second game in a row, Mike Tyson was replaced by another character who was thematically less offensive, but obviously a pale simulacrum for Tyson himself. The game has less to do with boxing than it has to do with kinda hitting aliens in some kind of UFO torture basement while four creepy jerks look on, so while most collectors realize that this is not an official part of the series of games, the backstory irrevocably ties it all together. Like the other games, this one can be bought for around six dollars.

Curiously enough, the program for the ‘Mike Tyson’ version of the game was leaked somewhere within the history of Beam Software, and bootleg copies on actual carts are available for around 30 bucks from RetroUSB. While the only difference is a few changes in the graphics (including a very surprised looking Don King), it’s another little variation on the title that’s worth finding. These carts can be purchased for $30.

Super Punch-Out!! moved to the Super Nintendo in 1994 and added a handful of new characters, and is generally regarded as a good, but generally underrated, game. The hilariously bad box art couldn’t have helped. A copy can be purchased for about ten dollars, and the game is also available for download on the Wii.

Despite being one of the few genuinely classic Nintendo games, the whole franchise went untouched until 2009, when Punch-Out!! was released for the Wii, incorporating the system’s natural motion controls in the innovative, but still beautifully traditional, boxing system. Dare I say that Punch-Out!! has changed my life? Not yet, but it’s trying to. Come back tomorrow.

The biggest thing to hit my universe in the past week has been Mega Man 9, and it hit me hard enough to knock the paintbrush right out of my hand. Seriously, I need to get back to work.

Playing through the new game, which is styled in perfect 1990s-era 8-bit graphics, has sent me back into the dangerous tailspin of retro gaming. These things have to happen in phases, because if they all happened at once, my heart would explode like an atom bomb of love. Which would ruin the value of my collectibles.

Wikipedia tells me that there are 779 8-bit NES cartridges out there. Finally having a finite number in mind, I’d decided a few years back that I’d slowly collect them all, and when I had them all together, I’d probably do something neat, and as-yet-undetermined, with them. Not only is the cartridge art often an amazing example of ridiculous hyperbole, but the games bring back a simpler (and far more difficult) era in video gaming. In my day, we didn’t have any of this infinite continue nonsense. If anything, we had codes that we scoured the back of magazines for or traded snacks with friends for, and if you were really lucky, you had a Game Genie to tweak your way through the harder parts of the game.

Of the aforementioned 779 NES carts, not all of them are licensed or were sold in the US. While my collection currently only spans official Nintendo carts, I know that these are going to come into play eventually, and they won’t be cheap.

Wisdom Tree produced a variety of religion-based video games which are less common than the average NES cart, due to pressure from Nintendo which prevented retailers from selling Wisdom Tree’s unlicensed products next to official Nintendo products. For being a company that based their games on ethics and morality, their decision to craft games that worked around Nintendo’s proprietary system and lockout chip certainly doesn’t seem ethical. Their games for the NES include Bible Adventures, Sunday Funday, Exodus, Bible Buffet, King of Kings, and Spiritual Warfare – the latter of which concluded with an extremely creepy battle with Satan. Of this group, most can be purchased for under $10, with Bible Buffet, a bible quiz game with unsettling box art, fetching the highest price, at around $30. I think that at least $25 of that is for the pictures of the anthropomorphic food on the cover. Something tells me that a game that also happens in ‘Fast Food Land’ would not be ‘Family Approved’ today, either.

Generally, Wisdom Tree’s games are regarded as glitchy, overly simplistic and not exceptionally fun, so are usually only collected by NES completists, and completely ignored by purists.

Camerica is responsible for another collection of unlicensed, and often rarer, NES games. Of the 15 games that they eventually released, all can be visually distinguished from a genuine NES game by a slightly different shape (with the game ‘handle’ extending across the entire center of the cart), upside-down cart art, and silver or gold coloring instead of the typical NES grey. Like Wisdom Tree’s games, most can be bought for under $10, with a few exceptions. Quattro Arcade doesn’t seem to appear as often, and so fetches slightly higher prices.

While many of these games are regarded as fun and playable, it’s worth noting that seven of their games require the Aladdin Deck Enhancer add-on, also produced by Camerica. The Deck Enhancer functions like a regular NES cart into which smaller carts could be inserted (similar to a Super Game Boy for the SNES). Because the Enhancer cart itself contained the mechanism to get around the security devices of the NES, Camerica’s ‘Enhanced’ games could be produced for less. The Aladdin Deck Enhancer can be found for $50 to $100 dollars, and unfortunately, is a necessity to play Big Nose Freaks Out, Micro Machines, Quattro Adventure (which features four games, including the popular Super Robin Hood), Quattro Sports, Dizzy the Adventurer and the similarly titled Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, and Linus Spacehead’s Cosmic Crusade. These carts are much smaller, and trapezoid shaped.

Some of these come in ‘Deck Enhancer’ versions. and some are full carts, so be aware of what you’re purchasing!

Far more rare are the two unlicensed Active Enterprises games, Action 52 and Cheetahmen II. Of all unlicensed NES games, these are the rarest, and usually regarded as the two worst games in the history of gaming, and an affront to human decency and all that is holy.

Action 52 included 52 mini-games, and originally retailed for $200. Seeing as how this debuted in 1991, when the average video game price was $50, the ridiculous price didn’t find many buyers. The manual that described play through the 52 games was incomplete, but offered more detailed manuals for each game at the price of $1 each. Not only was the manual incomplete, but the game itself was incomplete, with many games were constructed without being tested for actual playability. Games were repetitive, or would freeze in the middle of gameplay. Again, despite being an abysmal game, this cart can be found for around $50, which is still a steal compared to the original price of three human kidneys.

Cheetahmen II expanded upon one of Action 52’s minigames, but was never officially released. In 1997, all 1500 unreleased copies were found in a warehouse and trickled into circulation through the secondary market. While almost impossible to find, they do appear on eBay from time to time, and a sealed copy recently sold on eBay for $1450. Like Action 52, the game cannot be completed because of a bug that the developers never resolved before producing the game.

Panesian is another company that made unlicensed NES games, all of which were adult in nature. Bubble Bath Babes, Hot Slots, and Peek-a-Boo Poker probably weren’t things that your friends down the block had, as these were not distributed via the normal channels, and it’s fairly sad when your need for pornography is so great that you’ll settle for highly pixelated nudity on a video game system. These three games usually sell for around $300 each.

Perhaps the rarest, kinda-released game of all time is the 1990 Nintendo World Championship cart, which was used, predictably, during the 1990 Nintendo World Championships. Competitors had 6 minutes to earn as many points as they could through Super Mario Bros., Rad Racer and Tetris. 90 grey editions of this cart were given to finalists, and 25 gold carts were given to Nintendo Power subscribers. In addition to the one other cart that was used at the tournament, that equals 116 carts in existence. The asking price for a grey cart is $8000, while the gold cart easily goes for twice as much.

Astute vintage gamers will note my exclusion of ‘Stadium Events‘, a game that was released only in Woolworths in the Northern US, and then quickly recalled. Because the game was licensed and released at retail, if even for a short time, it doesn’t really belong on this list. It also exists in a European (PAL, not NTSC) version, which is very common. The US eventually saw the re-release of this game as the common World Class Track Meet, for use with the Power Pad.

With 131 games in my collection, I’ll be focusing on the ‘pure’ Nintendo games – the ones that come with memories, rather than ones that come with a high price tag. And quietly hoping to find ‘Cheetahmen II’ at a tag sale.

I don’t know why we’re compelled to delay our personal changes and resolutions to a calendrical system when any given day might be used to implement a change in our lifestyles, but here we are once again, balancing drunkenly on the cusp of a new year with a sure-as-hell grimace of determination on our faces. Sure, there are all kind of personal life goals I’m setting for the upcoming year – finish at least two comics, seek out publication once again, reduce debts, lose the gut, move far away and never look back – but what, as a collector, do I need to change in order to keep collecting enjoyable in an increasingly practical world?

FIRST, I know that I’ve stopped finding joy in being a completist. I do not need to own every action figure in a set in order to find satisfaction in it anymore – a compulsion that I’ve struggled with for many years. As a result of this, many complete assortments of things jam every corner of my closets – and only about 65% of these items are truly enjoyable. The rest, those obligatory items only there for the sake of ‘completion’, are on their way out. In my defense, these sets usually pan out to be much cheaper when you purchase the whole shebang. Collect what you love, not what you think you should collect.

Surely the decision to divide up families of items will make the collector-venture-capitalists out there shudder. You can’t read a comic if you expect it to be worth anything, and for the love of God, you can’t break up a set of things! I’ve realized that I’m the kind of collector who really enjoys items on an individual basis. I don’t need that anorexic Black Canary figure from the second set of Identity Crisis figures from DC Direct – it’s ugly, I already have far better Black Canary figures, and it takes up space. Ergo, she goes to eBay, and there will be no regrets. Once you start collecting things that you don’t like just because you feel obligated to, the joy begins to vanish, and I’ve been on the precipice between enjoyment and frustration for a while. I have friends who only permit themselves a single figure of each character – which is a concession that I’m not yet willing to make.

SECOND, I’d like to do a much better job of cataloguing what I DO have. More often than I’d like to admit, I find identical items on opposite ends of the room, purchased months apart because the first item was forgotten. The backlog of stuff that I have around is overwhelming, but I’m finding that Collectors’ Quest’s own community section allows me to keep an accurate tab on what I have, with as much or as little detail as I need. I’m not saying this because they write the paychecks, but it’s genuinely helpful to be able to access a visual database of previous acquisitions to prevent duplicating myself. I’ve done so often, it’s saved me from superfluous purchases, it’s much easier than digging through a vat of things, and best of all, it’s free. I consider this to be the second of many money-saving measures.

THIRD, start using what I already have before I start acquiring more. While it’s probably not a common goal among collectors, I collect with the pretense of creativity. I collect spare parts of things for photos and sculptures, I collect scraps for collages, and generally, I can make use of everything ever created or discarded by mankind, all in the name of ‘making something awesome’. I never look at anything without already imagining how I can take it apart and repurpose it.

So, where is all of this ‘awesome’? I haven’t made most of it yet. I spend so much time collecting things with so many creative goals that I often don’t get to even take the first steps towards these goal. It’s like filling a car with gas, and then realizing that all you have is a whole mess of car parts that you need to assemble first. You know, after you assemble the other six piles of car parts that you’ve collected – at least in my case. So, resolution number three is to use what I have, thereby making ‘awesome’ things and making room for further awesomeness.

These resolutions are about reduction and efficiency, though I retain a few ongoing goals with the express purpose of good ol’ collecting. I’d like to double my respectable NES game collection, minus the vast quantity of sports games that I can ignore. I’d also like to regain focus on my voice-o-graph collection, as I’ve let far too many auctions slip by forgotten, and to lose these one-of-a-kind items is to possibly lose them forever. I can’t trust that anyone else is going to preserve them like I am.

Here’s to another year full of smart collecting, folks!

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