Famicom - Complete Game Set Collecting.

[famidon]

Hi Guys.

Im a total newb to colelcting Famicom. I have decided to go for a complete set of official famicom games. Theres a great list on this site wich ive copied to Excel and plan to mark them off as i go.

Ive never emtemped a complete set before and i will prberbly ever acomplish my goal. But i would like a bit of advice.

Wich games in the famicom libary are going to be an utter slo to try and track down, and what are the most expensive??

Any advice from you uys would be great. Im now at the age and in the postition were i would like to persue this task but im going to need Advice and LOTS of it! 
Post Merge: November 10, 2013, 05:10:29 am
Oh yes. Forot to add. Im going to start with collecting carts, Will pick up disk system games on the way but im mainly focusing on cart colelcting for now.

[fcgamer]

There are a lot of special edition and promo carts, if I understand things correctly.  Those will cost you a pretty penny, if not make it even impossible to get everything.

Mr. Gimmick will cost you a bunch, same with Recca.  Some of the more popular NES stuff has risen in price for Famicom as well, in part due to western gamers using the Famicom games as an alternative to the really expensive NES counterparts.

It is a large goal you have, and one which I wish I were brave enough to attempt; however, knowing that there are so many games in the Famicom library, I think this is a goal that few would actually be able to complete.

Good luck, and I will be interested in hearing how things go!

[nerdynebraskan]

Yeah, there are some that are rare and/or expensive. Gimmick! and Recca: Summer Carnival '92 are a couple of notorious ones, as they're both solid action games that are widely wanted by collectors and gamers alike. There are a number of prize carts, with the gold version of Punch-Out!! probably being the most coveted.

You may want to do some visual research on the pricier carts, to make sure you don't buy one of the pirates that tend to be very common. They're usually easy to spot, but be careful.

I don't want to tell you how to collect, but I would ask you to maybe consider your priorities before going too nuts with this. Please realize that there are over 1,000 unique games in the licensed Famicom library. And that figure doesn't even include major label variants, prize/promo carts, and the other oddball stuff that would be included in some standards of completeness. And would you be going cart-only, or for a Complete-in-Box set? The latter can be interesting, but it's also harder and much more expensive.

Are you buying these just to look at their art, or are you planning to play all of them? Do you read Japanese? If not, you're not going to get much out of the hundreds of turn-based RPGs, strategy games, point and click adventures, and video-novel "adventure" games in the library. Are you really going to enjoy 50 different, obsolete baseball games? Do you need ten different gambling games where you bet on simulated horse races? Do you need dozens of mahjong games? (Do you even play mahjong?)

My FC collection stands at around 125 games, with 90% of them cart-only. (There's at most another 50 that I'd like to add before considering my licensed set complete.) I buy them to play them, so nearly all of them are action and puzzle games. Virtually all of them are games that are either not released in the US or Europe (as I also collect PAL NES), or are at least dramatically different from their US/PAL versions. My collection is less pricy and less ambitious than many of the others here, but I'm pretty satisfied with it because it serves my purposes.

[Ghegs]

I've often toyed with the idea of getting a full set of CIB Famicom games, especially since I already have about a hundred CIB games including some of the expensive titles like Gimmick and Recca. But then I remember that I would never play over 900 games of the Famicom's full library. All the sports games, mahjong games, games that are just plain bad, games that I can't play due to the language barrier...it would just be a huge money sink and very problematic to store.

Sturgeon's Law of "90% of everything is crap" very much applies to FC games as well.

For the really ridiculously expensive stuff you might need to acquire depending on your definition of "complete set", consider Kidō Senshi Z-Gundam: Hot Scramble - Final Version. Only a 1000 copies were ever made. You'd end up paying around a thousand dollars for a game that's not very fun.

[lobdale]

Unless you live in Japan or have lots and lots and lots of money forget about it.

[L___E___T]

Yes, a complete collection is a gallant but misguided goal I'd say.  Better to get an everdrive and all of the 'good' games.  Otherwise you're spending thousands on tripe.

As it is you'll already be spending thousands...

[fcgamer]

Yes, a complete collection is a gallant but misguided goal I'd say.  Better to get an everdrive and all of the 'good' games.  Otherwise you're spending thousands on tripe.

As it is you'll already be spending thousands...

There will definitely be a lot of "fat" in that set, as well as "meat"; however, I think that if the op wants to do it, it is more than possible, if one would choose to go for a modified "complete" set (i.e. a set that is not complete, but only excludes limited edition carts, prize carts, stuff like that).  Removing those things that are just terribly impossible to find, I would imagine that the common "swill" carts would go for little money.  To go for a CIB collection would be foolish, I think, but a loose cart collection would be doable.

[P]

I would start with the games that interests me the most first and then see if I would want to continue.

[famidon]

Yeah i am intrested in the Everdrive. Any idea were to aquire one with cart label??


Post Merge: November 11, 2013, 10:21:22 am
Thanks for all the great comments guys!!!

I must agree that when i first looked at the list on the main page of this site, It didnt look like to much of mamoth task. but in truth most of you are right.

90% of the games in the entire libary are crap.

I think im going to start off getting the games that intrest me the most. Think ill try and get these CIB.

Number one on my list is Journey to silius. Ill mainly be going for the Rare/hard to find stuff to begin. Ones that actually play as great games. Like the Hal version of Ghostbusters 2. Man that games is awesome 

[P]

I think Let has a spare shell for Everdrive.

I haven't played every Famicom game, but I have played quite a lot of them past the years and I think 90% crap sounds too high. Famicom has a many quality titles and although you sometimes wonder how a certain crappy game could pass Nintendo's quality check, most games seems to me to have been worked on quite hard (which can't be said on some other consoles/computers by other companies). 90% are mediocre might be more accurate I think.

[fredJ]

I also would not mind playing at least 50% of famicom games. And this means of ALL famicom games released, so among excluded games are baseball games, RPGs I can't read, text-adventure games, most sports game, and such.
Games such as Ninja Hattori Kun and Ikki are "kusoge" (which ironically means crap) but I could still play them a short amount of time... If you only play the 10% most popular items , you can not be a dedicated fan of anything...  If you want 3D graphics and online multiplayer, play xbox or something else. f you like rock music for example, you would listen to that 90% too... if you like movies you would enjoy most of them...
only the occasional user would say that 90% is crap, for example I would say that most movies are crap. Although I think that usually the ratio that people say is typically 80/20
But it depends on the system. I don't enjoy pc engine so much and there are few games there I truly enjoy. I enjoy Saturn and famicom more and Game Boy most (although Saturn is closing in on game boy). But on Nintendo 64 I can't stand playing any game. On game boy, I'll play most Japanese games.
I do think that the Japanese library in general is superior to PAL and US, I think because they had less licensed crap. Even the licensed titles in Japan were surprisingly playable, as P said most of them seem to have been worked on, which you can't say for some NES LJN crap.
For example, Zippy Race is kind of fun, Sqoon also. But Mach Rider is painful to play. Lum is playable. Even GeGeGe no Kitarou is playable (I made a video of it, and have spent a couple of hours with it).

[L___E___T]

I do have a spare Everdrive cart shell - I have several.

In terms of collecting, I would take Satohi Matrix's top 100 as a starting point, then expand:

http://satoshimatrix.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/top-100-nesfamicom-games-list-a-visual-recap/

[senseiman]

Collecting all the carts is actually a quest I have been on for almost 5 years now.  I have close to 800 (out of about 1050 or so). 

The above advice is all pretty accurate.  I live in Japan and thus have an advantage, but even here it is pretty hard. The first 500 were easy to collect since I was mostly getting the common ones.  After that.....progress slowed to a crawl as I had to start getting some of the more expensive ones and actually investing (though I was really lucky with a couple like GImmick that I found for super cheap). 

I don`t go for any of the gold-version carts and I have about 200 CIB, but for the collection goal I say it is good enough to have them loose (mainly for cost reasons, but also for space in my apartment reasons!)

If you do undertake this noble project, I wish you luck!!

[fcgamer]

Collecting all the carts is actually a quest I have been on for almost 5 years now.  I have close to 800 (out of about 1050 or so). 

The above advice is all pretty accurate.  I live in Japan and thus have an advantage, but even here it is pretty hard. The first 500 were easy to collect since I was mostly getting the common ones.  After that.....progress slowed to a crawl as I had to start getting some of the more expensive ones and actually investing (though I was really lucky with a couple like GImmick that I found for super cheap). 

I don`t go for any of the gold-version carts and I have about 200 CIB, but for the collection goal I say it is good enough to have them loose (mainly for cost reasons, but also for space in my apartment reasons!)

If you do undertake this noble project, I wish you luck!!

Haha, please don't say things like "The first 500 were easy to collect".  Things like that make me really consider going for an abridged full set of Famicom games myself, excluding the gold cartridges and promos, those things that are nice but in NWC caliber for rarity and cost. 

Japan is not so far away from me, so I could easily see myself sometime going over there for a few weeks and just going crazy picking up games, as I have been obsessed with (wanting) a Famicom and carts since I was a little kid.

I've always pondered this goal myself, but instead opted to go for a complete set of unlicensed Famicom carts, which I am nearly done with.

Who knows, in the future I might be looking for a new collecting challenge.

[senseiman]

LOL, sorry to implant ideas in your mind 

You should make a trip to Japan someday, but be sure to bring lots of cash (or perhaps it would be better not to....)