there were like 4 or 5 SMS games that were taken from the eurozone and brought over to usa for sale where they put a UPC sticker on the case over the label are sticker
there is debate about these all time but the game having it ups the price, sometimes quite a bit.
There was golden axe warrior, Spider man, strider, sonic 1, and I forget what else. (may have only been those 4)
Sonic is the biggie if it has the UPC.
other than that sticker, there is no difference between the USA release and the Euro release of these games. they even have the horizontal manuals.
As for prices.....
Anything Nintendo is astronomical, for the most part. Sega stuff, while going up, is still very cheap in my eyes.
Most US SMS games can be found complete for less than 10 or 15 bucks, hell, out of my complete USA SMS game collection there is only one game I paid more than 75 bucks for. Try that on any other system.
COMPLETED MY USA SMS SET!!!!
Bacon it's just those and you're right. Sonic is the nastiest. Funny story I bought Sonic 1 from the UK, ended up of all things getting the US UPC version for like $10. When I got that around 2 years back the two most recent ebay paid sales, one from within the US in fantastic shape was barely shy of $1K, and one as nice but going to the US from the UK was a little over $500. ALL FOR THE STICKER. The others don't come near (GAW, Spiderman and Strider) but there is a premium.
I sold mine when I got rid of the SMS and I worked a deal with a guy through hours of chitchat over ebay internal mail as I had it OBO. My sticker was missing like 15% of it and it had (dead) mold and water damage. I still got $300 for it and other than the jacked sticker mine was very nice too, so even hosed up it was worth a lot.
Also you're a little off, not everything Nintendo is bad. Most of the N64 stuff is lower priced still, few of them are in that original $50 retail and higher club for loose carts. The DSI mini set (has like 4 games only for it) is stupid cheap even sealed, and if you ignore Jack Bros almost all the Virtual Boy US releases are cheap too. What is bad is the popular stuff -- NES, SNES, and even the Gamecube where a good bit is rising in value sadly. Everytime some fools get into wanting to monetizing something the cancer spreads.
DSi set is probably cheap because it's only four games (3 NA, 1 EU) and I don't think any of them are highly desirable games either.
I'll echo what everyone has already said. Case in point: I remember feeling I paid too much for my copy Dragon warrior 3 for NES at 15 dollars in the early aughts. Can remember late nights on irc with members of the NES scene complaining that Little Samson was getting outrageously overvalued at upwards of $40 in price. Game regularly goes for $500 now on ebay.
Not to totally thread jack but how does Gamegavel compare? I briefly browsed and saw a lot of BIN's and a bunch of auctions that haven't been even bid on. Do sellers do pretty well on there?
Well, in terms of rarity N64 games have been overpriced for a long time. Game like Mario64, Mario Kart 64, Donkey Kong64, and Zelda ocarnia are some of the most common games on the planet. There are very few N64 games that are actually rare and hard to find, especially compared to nintendo nes which has tons of rares.
Well, Little Samson at 40$, that would have been a long time ago. While it is not the rarest of nes games, it is hard to find. Mainly because of word of mouth, everybody wants a copy. For many people ebay is the only place to really snatch up a copy. The same goes for alot of the rarer games, people trying to complete collections are forced to pay ebay prices.
I think ALOT of it is speculation also, I think people buy carts like samson, flintstones 2 and other pricey rares because they think they will become astronomically valuable in the future, but that is very unlikely. People see the price jump and think it will continue but most likely it wont. Not many people are willing to pay even close to 500$ for samson despite what completed listings show.
Last edited by bb_hood; 04-24-2014 at 04:17 PM.
Sellers fees are miniscule. They don't gouge like Ebay. Seeing their site from awhile it was no difference in price from Ebay. Looking now the same bullshit again.
This is the difference. The only difference is the sticker on the back with Golden Axe Warrior, other games can have a difference with the box art and manual but not this one. The European version is more common than the US, but now both are really valuable. Most people just want to play it as it's one of the best games on the system.
There are Canadian releases that have a sticker, just like US versions do. I haven't heard of anyone specifically collecting these versions yet. I took a picture of one I have. For the longest time even with the rarity guide here, there's no separate section for Canadian releases. There's just a note on the European games that they've also been sold in Canada. I kind of wonder why it's not the same with those US releases with just a sticker, it's the same thing with Canadian games.
It started with stuff like Classic Game Room and The Angry Video game nerd. Now you have Metal Jesus, Game Chasers, Gamestar81, Game Sack, Retro Ware etc.... You watch one of those and Youtube will start linking you to other users showing the same kind of stuff about retro gaming and collecting. 3 or 4 years ago, nobody cared about the 7800 or the Jaguar, but after Classic Game Room started giving positive reviews for those systems the prices started going up for a Jag and even the pitiful 7800 gained a little more value.
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I don't buy retro games from Ebay. There are other online stores and sites that will give you a better price.
Just last week I found a minty copy of Sword of Berserk for the DC ($14 shipped) by doing a google search for people selling it. I believe that game sells for around $20-$25 on evilbay.
I think it's because people are finally discovering what a wonderful little system it is. Back in the 8-bit era, most people missed out because of Nintendo's bullying of retailers and publishers. When you corner 90% of the market with a monopoly, it's hard for other machines to get an audience.
The GameCube wasn't the same situation because Nintendo's hold on the market was long gone by then. I guess most people didn't have room for a third machine, and now that it's cheap, they're finding out that the GC was a great console.
I can't fully blame Nintendo for Sega's failure. It wasn't Nintendo's fault that Sega decided to make most games use the most boring cover art possible, and use no cartridge art at all by using plain text labels(with plenty of spelling mistakes). Just going by the marketing of the system for store shelves, it looked stupid and boring. I originally thought Sega's original controllers were horrible because the cables were stuck out the right side of them, but since the Famicom had the cables the same way I won't blame Sega for that stupid decision, though it was still stupid to just copy Nintendo. Putting the pause button on the console instead of the controller was also a dumb move. North America did miss out on a bunch of good games, but we would have got most of them if the system sold better here.
At the time having a system that was capable of playing DVDs was a big deal, Nintendo's system couldn't do that back then. The PS2 also had backwards compatibility with PS1 games which made it the best system to get at the time, that and the games had a more adult appeal compared to the kiddie image of the Gamecube. Now it doesn't matter if systems can play DVDs, players are pretty cheap. Playing PS1 games isn't that big a deal anymore either, people can use a PS3 to play them now. A few reasons why the Gamecube is more popular these days. Just a feeling of mine anyway.
Also, GameCube was seen as a "kiddie" system when it was released. It was seen as a console mostly for first-party games, like the Wii U probably will be in the future.
Making purple the primary console color probably didn't help.
Master System HAD marketing? :P
(maybe I'm just not old enough to remember it, but I hear especially after Tonka took over, there was pretty much no commercials in the US, so I never even heard of the console until emulators came around in the late '90s. Knew the NES quite well, though.)
i would love to talk to the marketing directory of sega/tonka at the time of the SMS....i really want to know why....
sucks that the US got shafted with it as in europe there were tons of great games we never got.
COMPLETED MY USA SMS SET!!!!
One thing I have noticed lately is a lot of auctions being bought with 2 seconds left by accounts with hundreds if not thousands in feedback score. I assume that these are standard ebay sniper-resellers using bots, but I don't recall that being a problem in old video games a couple years back.
Is this all true?, and if this happens with Japanese games as well with legit japanese sellers, (not those damn US sellers living in japan using the same trend tricks "RARE VINTAGE WHY THE FUCK WOULD I WANT TO START MY AUCTION AT 0.01 CENTS LIKE LEGIT AUCTIONS INSTEAD I WILL MAKE A BIN PRICE WITH ONLY A 10USD DIFFERENT FOR THE STARTUP PRICE THAT MIGHT GET EVEN HIGHER!"), then i may as well just try to get X3, Hoshi no Kirby 3 and Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius, and be done)
Bot snipers have been around for more than a few years now, it's not just something fairly recent. The problem is all the reseller trash and predators getting into the racket especially in the last 3 years which is making it look like a recent thing. The volume of douchebags is just a lot higher trying to fight for stuff to flip.