SFC and Famicom Collecting

[kainemaxwell]

Anyone here collect various famicom or sfc carts versions of their fav games? Thinking of trying my hand at it was some FF titles soon and looking for some inspiration.

[Nesmaster]

Anyone here collect various famicom or sfc carts versions of their fav games? Thinking of trying my hand at it was some FF titles soon and looking for some inspiration.

I started last month by picking up a Super Famicom with a bunch of loose games, and a few boxed or complete titles. Grabbed some cheap favorites, got some cheap auction wins or BINs on eBay of games way cheaper than the North American versions, and have been looking for good, accessible exclusives. Magical Pop'n is pretty damn good but not very accessible in terms of price. I did get Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shogun Magginesu (sequel to Legend of Mystical Ninja) for very cheap and it's pretty good too. I got Super Metroid for ~$9 and it has a full english option. I never had that one in cart form so I'm cool with the price. :)

[StealthLurker]

Yup. I've got a couple hundred boxed/complete games for SFC and famicom. However, I'm pretty much an import collector. Mainly focus on "action" games like platformers, shmups, beat'em ups, vs. fighting, etc. Got a few puzzle, racing, sports etc games if they're "worthy" haha. Got very few RPGs. I pretty much toss out or steer clear of the "crap"/worthless titles (to me at least) like text adventure, mahjong, sim, etc garbage.

.

[o.pwuaioc]

I don't have hundreds, but I like what I do have. Some highlights:

Final Fantasy V
Seiken Densetsu II

Both with English roms inside.

Neugier

ARPG, so not too much Japanese is needed.

Final Fight Guy
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time

Much cheaper to get these in their JP form than in their NTSC form.

Gokujou Parodius
Marchen Adventure Cotton 100%
Pop N Twinbee
Syvalion

Some excellent shmups! I prefer Gradius to Parodius, but they are pretty cool anyway.

[Tron 2.0]

I do collect for both but i haven't bought much lately for the famicom av.Last i check in total for the famicom over 100 for cartridges and disk combine.Now last year i did buy a sfc,but i just have a couple of games for it and a flash-cartridge so i'm not in a rush to buy for it.

What famicom titles i can suggest.

Holy Diver
Crisis Force
Wanpaku Splatterhouse Graffiti
Akumajo Densetsu
Arkanoid II

What SFC titles i can suggest for far.
Clock Tower
Magical Pop'n
Terranigma
Parodius Da,That version has kid dracula in it ;)

[Rickstilwell1]

I plan on adding imports to my list of things to get when I rebuild my collection for the third freaking time. This time I am steering clear of any and all games I haven't thoroughly beaten and enjoyed. If I haven't mastered it, it can stay confined to Everdrive/Powerpak/Emulator until I do.

For example my first console game was Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis. Since I know the game like the back of my hand it would make sense to get a complete in box copy of each version I can find so I can own the various artwork from different regions. Maybe buy an additional cart and manual of the US version for use by my girlfriend and others who wish to play my games without me having to dig a game out of a video game box protector and the box itself. This is an example of a game that should be very common and cheap in all regions.

I just need to use the advice from the other thread about buying games from Japan and make sure I am only paying dirt cheap prices for those import versions. Maybe buy whatever US games I'm ready for bit by bit first, then go back and order a lot of Japanese games and PAL games at once to save on shipping. The main thing to make sure I do is buy my US versions slowly so I can accumulate money in the bank instead of blowing it every time I get it like I used to do. Collecting too fast only leads to situations where you might have to sell the collection you put all that work into just to make it for a few months. And keeping the collection down to a mandatory requirement to only collect games I've mastered will prevent it from taking up too much space.

[treismac]

Anyone here collect various famicom or sfc carts versions of their fav games?

I have Super Mario Bros., Adventure Island, Kung Fu, and R.B.I. Baseball and their Famicom counterparts. I also have Obake no Q-tarō: WanWan Panic, but, strangely, not its NES counterpart, Chubby Cherub.

[kainemaxwell]

Think I'll give this a shot then with some Final Fantasy titles. :)

[Niku-Sama]

just a heads up megaman titles for famicom /super famicom are pretty easy to come by and are cheaper....except for megaman 1

of course they are rockman in japan.

Dragon quest is a good one too but i wouldnt know how much to get them online from a shop or auction. i bought all mine on my visit in japan, dragon quest 1 through 4 i caught at super potato for roughly 1800 yen (about $17 US at the time the dollar was stronger against the yen) then Dragon quest 5 on SFC complete was anouther 850 Yen and crusing a random shop i found another copy of dragon quest 4 for 980 yen complete and finally, on a seccond trip back to super potato i got dragon quest 6 for 980 yen along with the redone versions of 1 and 2 on one cart for SFC for another 980 yen

[omidus]

if I'm necroing a thread I apologize, but eh... I saw this forum while browsing for old games. I was curious if anyone knows what these 3 games are worth these days, if anything at all lol

http://i40.tinypic.com/14vsqpj.jpg

[kainemaxwell]

Pretty box art for Star Ocean.

[FoxNtd]

DQ6 should be a couple bucks, StarOcean is 20 give or take, I don't think I've seen it sell for less than 15 when it's complete, and 天外魔境ZERO is probably a couple bucks though honestly I'm blindly guessing, I've never looked that one up, but if it's like the others in the series it should be very cheap like most RPGs. :)

[sixwayshot]

I picked up a Super Famicom from a local store, oddly enough. The thing's busted. Graphics are screwed.

I just modified my SNES to take the Japanese carts, so I can still play the games. I hope to get a legit SFC controller soon as well.

Right now, I've got a few SFC games:

Rockman 7
Super Aleste
Super Donkey Kong 3 (DKC3)
Super Tetris 2 + Bombliss
Fire Pro Wrestling X
Super Mario World

Nothing too crazy. But Super Aleste is fun as hell.

[Aussie2B]

DQ6 should be a couple bucks, StarOcean is 20 give or take, I don't think I've seen it sell for less than 15 when it's complete, and 天外魔境ZERO is probably a couple bucks though honestly I'm blindly guessing, I've never looked that one up, but if it's like the others in the series it should be very cheap like most RPGs. :)

Yeah, that sounds about right.

They were all worth more years ago, which sucks for me because that's when I got 'em. Star Ocean used to consistently sell for $50+. The other two weren't especially expensive, but they still had a little bit more value 10 years ago than now. Between emulation handling them okay now (Star Ocean was unplayable back when I got it), fan translations, and remakes released officially in English of Star Ocean and Dragon Quest VI, demand in the Western world has gone down considerably for these titles.

[Mayhem]

Super Aleste = Space Megaforce (completely daft name for a game!)

But yeah, it's fun as hell...

[FoxNtd]

I really enjoyed StarOcean. About the only bad thing I could say is it felt short, or kind of lacking, as though I expected to have more substance to explore, and that's even including the extra dungeons you can reach after finishing the game. It's probably because Tales of Phantasia which I played first was hard and felt long. Took me about 50 hours to finish that and I know there's more material in that game I didn't even do!

Despite this StarOcean is amazing. So many good ideas that were fresh and different for an RPG. I had actually played SO2 years ago and I was happy to see just how much game design and mechanics were inherited from the original. It's enjoyable and battles are fast paced thanks to Tales of-style real time battles instead of classic menu/sequential style.

[Aussie2B]

It's been pretty much all but confirmed that Star Ocean was rushed in development, so that's why the final parts of the game come out of nowhere and why it's over so fast. As it was, it came out past the release of the N64, so they probably didn't want it to be even more of a late release. The PSP remake fleshes out the final parts a good deal, although I still think the original version is the better game.

[Pikkon]

I love the super famicom,have 50 games for it now,mostly platformers,action and beat em ups and for the famicom have a little over 30.

[SparTonberry]

I thought the DQ games were always pretty cheap because they were so common.
(but then I see the prices on DQ3 for GBC!)

I don't know what FEoEZ is worth now. Got mine like 10 years ago for about $5 CIB. But then again I also got Tenchi Souzou CIB around the same time for another 5, and that's not going to happen again anytime soon.

[badinsults]

I went to a used game store here in Japan, you could pick up loose Super Famicom games 3 for 1000 YEN (I picked up Rockman X2 and X3 and FEoEZ). They also had boxes of 24 untested games for 2000 yen. SFC games go for far more on Ebay, because US collectors are far more willing to pay a lot of money.

[SparTonberry]

But was it 24 good games, or is it just baseball/soccer/mahjong/pachislot games? :P

[Aussie2B]

I went to a used game store here in Japan, you could pick up loose Super Famicom games 3 for 1000 YEN (I picked up Rockman X2 and X3 and FEoEZ). They also had boxes of 24 untested games for 2000 yen. SFC games go for far more on Ebay, because US collectors are far more willing to pay a lot of money.

They are willing to pay more money, understandably, but you also have to factor the costs of importing. If every Super Famicom cart (and I'd say most Western collectors wanted CIB imports, anyway) was sold at 300 yen, then we'd never have the opportunity to buy them in the first place. That wouldn't even cover shipping alone. The prices getting pulled in have to be worthwhile enough to the Japanese sellers to go to the trouble of exporting.

And for games like Rockman X2 and X3, there are external factors that don't come into play for Japanese shoppers within Japan. They (typically) don't know jack squat about the localizations of these games, so they have no idea that Mega Man X2 and X3 are expensive games on the used market in the US. Western buyers, though, they want an alternative to those high prices, so they import and as long as the price stays lower than the US release, they feel they got a good deal, even if they're paying way more for the game than they would had they been shopping in Japan. There's a lot of artificial inflation like that of regional variations of expensive US games.

[Immutable]

I've been collecting Famicom titles for a decade now. Here are a few recommendations -

Flipull (In-game text is entirely in English)
Dig Dug (not the sequel, the original arcade game)
The Goonies (same scenario as "Dig Dug")
Battle City
Puyo Puyo (the main menu is in English)

[SparTonberry]

The prices getting pulled in have to be worthwhile enough to the Japanese sellers to go to the trouble of exporting.

There's charging more for the expense, and then there's a few sellers that price everything they have in hundreds of dollars. $400 for something like Bing Bing Bingo? Gotta be at least 100 times what it's worth.
(one of the games the seller had I was interested in, but someone else found he was simultaneously listing it on a Japanese site for a reasonable price, which was a tenth of his ebay price)

[Aussie2B]

Yeah, gougers are universal. That's what sucks about importing sometimes. If the item rarely comes up for sale, there might be no other option but the gougers. Patience always pays off.

[TheChristoph]

I think that someone living in Japan could make a nice profit by going to places like Hard-Off and second hand gaming shops and selling games and systems to Americans. Even if they didn't use eBay.

I have a pretty beat up, but complete, copy of Final Fantasy VI. It's pretty.

[wiggyx]

Anyone here collect various famicom or sfc carts versions of their fav games? Thinking of trying my hand at it was some FF titles soon and looking for some inspiration.

Unless you can read Japanese, this will be miserable experience.

[lkermel]

I've been collecting SFC/FC games for a long time, and I love them so much that I'm sharing them in my own review site - www.videogameden.com - feel free to look at it for some inspiration :)
And I personally think that there are a lot of Japanese games that can be experienced without much (or no) knowledge of Japanese.

[Aussie2B]

Unless you can read Japanese, this will be miserable experience.

Comments like this really get under my skin. They usually come from people who have never even attempted to play a text-heavy game in Japanese in the first place so they're in no position to talk, but even if you have and didn't enjoy the experience, what gives you the idea that EVERYBODY else in existence is going to have the exact same experience? What kind of arrogance is that? As gamers, we should encourage people to explore our hobby, not tell them that they shouldn't even try when we have no idea if they'd have a good time or not.

Also, kainemaxwell was 1) talking about collecting, which doesn't necessarily mean he plans to play them, and 2) said that he wants to collect Japanese versions of his favorite games, so even if he does want to play through them in Japanese, he already knows exactly what to do in them.

But even if somebody is playing a text-heavy game in Japanese that they've never played before in any form, that is still NOT a guarantee that a miserable time will be had. All I need is myself as proof. My knowledge of the language is nearly nonexistent, yet I've played through many, many text-heavy Japanese games and had a great time. RPGs like Final Fantasy are actually among the easier ones to figure out because, if you've played some Japanese RPGs in English before, you know the conventions. A tiny bit of trial and error to figure out the battle commands is about all it takes. Then it's just a matter of thoroughly exploring your surroundings, as you'd likely do in a localized version anyway, and talk to every NPC in order to trigger any necessary events to move the story along. That's about it. It's the simulations and strategy games where things can get a lot more challenging if you don't know the language, but with enough patience and trial and error, I even figured out games that are almost nothing but text like Wonder Project J2 and Getter Love!! and loved the games immensely. I even wrote FAQs on both, and people who use those FAQs always assume that I know Japanese fluently.

And I am not an unusual, isolated case. There are plenty of importers like me who are experimenting with text-heavy games despite not knowing the language, and they're having fun. I fully understand and respect the fact that some gamers really care about the stories in their games and can't have fun without understanding all the text, but I wish those who have don't have fun with text-heavy imports would show the same respect to those who do and those who would like to give text-heavy imports shot. Not every gamer is alike, so can we PLEASE stop with this nonsense of telling EVERY gamer that he/she will have a "miserable experience"?

[Yoshi]

I started collecting Famicom games last summer after acquiring a Twin Famicom. I just bought my 38th game today (Arumana no Kiseki). I also recently bought an SNES for a project (its shape fits the project better than a SFC), but I plan to mainly buy SFC carts for it. Really my interest in the SFC is that I've owned and played almost everything of note on the Genesis/PCE/Neo but never got deep into the SFC scene.

edit: I left out the inspirations! To me, the Famicom is all about Konami. You almost literally can't go wrong if you grab any of their games from that era. Capcom and Konami seemed to share that honor more during the 16-bit generation. Ironically for my username, I firmly believe third parties made Nintendo's early consoles what they were, but that's a topic for another thread.