Pretty cool retro NES articleby MTV

[vealchop]

pretty informative and "inside" for MTV standards! 

HERE

[JC]

Ah yes...the now-famed article featuring one of our forum members! (though he's quite inactive )

[vealchop]

REALLY? who?!

[madman]

Hopefully not the guy in the picture w/the power glove.

[JC]

NGD -- National Games Depot. He signed up a long time ago, but hasn't post much, if at all. He's really into NES, as you can see, but he's not big on Famicom, I guess. Anyway, he's not Nick, who is wearing the Power Glove. NGD is the dude inside his giant NES.

[vealchop]

The terrible art direction of the box art for a good majority of games for the NES would drive me away from collecting them. If only they would have stayed minimal and closer to the design of the NES itself would it be more appealing. They should take a cue from nintendo japan, who always seem to come correct with their box art.

[JC]

Only a graphic design/ad dude like yourself would say that!

I'm not fanatical about collecting anything and everything like the guys in the article (thankfully), and I try to keep close to my goal of having a collection fit for the ultimate Nintendo 8-bit gamer. I do it merely for the gaming, so I usually buy only what's fun to play, unless I find something cheap that I can resell at some point. My recent excursions into the purchasing of a few CIBs is new to me, and I'm very wary of it.

[vealchop]

Don't get me wrong, if I saw some CIB Zelda I and Zelda II for NES going for a reasonable price I'd snatch em up. The Famicom merch is just a lot more eye catching to me. Plus as Famicom collectors in the US, it's like our own exclusive club that not everyone knows about! 

[JC]

Plus as Famicom collectors in the US, it's like our own exclusive club that not everyone knows about! 

Isn't that great! Not a lot of people know about it and most of the hardcore NES collectors who do simply don't have a great interest in it. I like that we're few in number. Some people would like to see this forum get really popular, but I'm content having only the dedicated members we've got right now. A few more wouldn't be bad, since we're missing some areas of expertise, but it's nice that the Famicom isn't anywhere near the level of popularity that the NES is at in this country (and I image that's true of most places beyond Japan and its neighbors).

[Jedi Master Baiter]

I don't know why, but that article pisses me off.

Maybe it's the fact that Burnambill, the one who scammed people online with resealed NES games, was on it.

But it also might be his scalping of a PS3.

It might also be the whole ideology of collecting simply as a matter of who has the biggest pockets & can get the most stuff.  I don't know; when I look at these people, I doubt my status as a collector at all - I won't ever have every released NTSC or PAL or boxed game.  So far the only game I've come across that I ever considered not buying ever was Hydlide.  It's bad enough that it's an RPG; it's a bad RPG.  I took collecting to a halt so I could catch up & play all the games I haven't tried yet.

I don't know, there's something about this article.

[vealchop]

"Maybe it's the fact that Burnambill, the one who scammed people online with resealed NES games, was on it."

can you fill us in on this? Is there I link somewhere I can read about it?

[JC]

Maybe it's the fact that Burnambill, the one who scammed people online with resealed NES games, was on it.

You can read more at NES World, vealchop. It was thoroughly discussed there, because he's a member there.

I thought the article was a bit shady as well, seeing that he was featured. He might have a sizable collection, but there are more genuine and more worthy collectors out there who would have fit better in that article. Oh well. One of the failures of general assignments journalism is that you have journalists who are never experts in what they write about...so they never know even half the truth of the subject they cover (and hardly do they care to discover it).

If there's anything that throws me curious when viewing the piece, it's the craze or obsession, or the utter devotion to a fanatic gaming lifestyle this fragment of collectors was portrayed as having. The PS3 thing doesn't bug me so much...but I see how Nick was profiting off the same obsession.

[vealchop]

wow what a shame about what that dude did. You figure if you dedicate so much of your life to a hobby you love, why would you risk soiling your reputation in the very same community? Bummer.

[Jedi Master Baiter]

I think DreamTR should be interviewed: there's a lot about him I'd like to know. How the hell did he get ahold of a bunch of NWCs & why did he get rid of them?

The whole unreleased/prototype/beta/undumped obsessions are more interesting to me.

[vealchop]

I think he got a hold of a lot of unreleased/prototype/beta/undumped carts because he wrote a lot of strategy guides and also wrote for a few video game magazines. He also worked for some pretty big companies. My guess is when he was reviewing NES games or writing guides for them, the company would send him the games in their beta release. Back then they probably never thought these things would be valuable. Also, aren't a lot of the prototype/beta games programmed on chips the deteriorate over time? I don't know too much about it but I thought that these carts eventually become worthless when the don't boot up anymore.