Do the oven trick on the connectors. You can bring them back just like lines on original Game Boy Screens with some light re-flow.
No kidding. What an obvious, missed opportunity.
Bookoff in Shinjuku was kind of a bust. Both stores had way smaller game shelves than 2 years ago and the prices went from a bit overpriced to way over. So I only walked away with two games:
Saw some other stuff I want but I’ll wait for hardoff to get better prices.
But I had fun headphone shopping at Yodobashi and picked up a really great pair of Denon headphones:
And also some cool buds with graphene drivers:
2 Likes
Japan’s glory days are over.
Good article about it:
Sure I guess, it’s certainly not the same as the days when you could go to tourist town akiba and walk away with cheap cheap cheap. But even a couple years ago when I bought a ton of stuff mostly at hardoff those bookoffs were pretty good places to hit up; the one east of Shinjuku used to have a big GameCube section and now it’s tiny.
I think hardoff should still be fine in terms of selection and price as far as I’m concerned. Could always be cheaper but not much you can do.
Yeah you have to get to rural areas and suburbs, middle of Tokyo never has bargains, maybe just for one gen old (Like Wii/PS3 - Gamecube has hit ‘retro’ prices now). Or Osaka or Kyoto or Nagoya, though I went to Sapporo last time and there were a few. Hard offs typically are not near stations out there though, so it’s usually a 30-60 minute train plus 30-60 minute walk, and then I still found nothing sometimes haha
Even so, Hard-offs declined in selections/value between my last two trips (2014-2017). Super Potato prices without the selection. Hardware was okay, like still 50 yen controllers in a bin etc. 2014 was the last of the Saturn/PS1 bargain era so I did rather well then.
Yeah my inlaws place is way into Kawasaki and I’m heading further west into the burbs to at least one hardoff tomorrow. There’s one I know of right next to a station that had great selection 2 years ago so I’ll try that first. And prices are still way, way better than Super Potato, depends on the game and the store but I’d often see stuff for 1/4 the price or less.
I also took a longer look at that article; I think maybe you and I have different ideas about shopping for old games here? I’m not even trying to find Gimmick for 100 yen… I’m really just shopping for games. Prices are what they are, there’s some variance and hopefully I can find some old computer stuff while I’m at it.
In Canada retro game stores are complete junk. Everything is filthy, overpriced (way more than ebay) and anything good is expensive to begin with. Even for the Wii games I bought today, in the overpriced low selection bookoff DK Jungle Beat was 250 yen, whereas cheapest price in Canada for the same game (in English) is $20 CAD.
If I can get roughly Amazon JP prices and actually be able to look at the condition before buying I’m pretty OK with that.
Fair enough, yeah selection is way down though too. Like won’t see good Saturn games at most Hard Offs anymore, they’ve found their way to homes or specialist stores by now.
It’s a fantastic game. I couldn’t put it down till i had finished it with all the secret treasures collected. It deserved a 3DS port.
Yea the lack of Wario Port on 3DS in proper color is more than questionable when you consider the poets coming to the system as of late. Luigi’s mansion? I can see how 3D would really aid that game but ultimately it will be lower res and possibly have less detail than the original.
Virtual Boy Wario Land would’ve been a complete upgrade if given to a competent porting studio.
The problem, I think, is none of Nintendo’s studios work with sprites much any more.
Hard off had the highest prices ive ever seen. Higher then eBay and 2x book offs prices.
Tau Ceti is another one of those very early polygonal 3D games. The gameplay is in the vein of Battlezone, but with more simulation and objectives.
While I would love to have some of the games in that compilation in their original individual package (Saboteur and Turbo Esprit), I’m quite happy to have them at all, given I was mostly wanting the original documentation in physical form. Computer games from that era were often completely devoid of any in-game explanation, and reading the manual was mandatory to know what to do and how to do it. In that sense it served as a copy protection of sorts. I had a copy of these games when I was a kid, and couldn’t understand what I was supposed to do in them and just roamed around until I lost or got bored.
[Edit] Not pictured, a Super Mario Land (JP) cartridge in pristine condition, and a super cheap but yellowed, tobacco-smelling Super Famicom controller. The last one was a gamble, and I lost. Hopefully I’ll be able to clean it a bit.
My latest pick-ups. I also recently downloaded the latest BattleTech by Harebrained Schemes, which I backed on Kickstarter.
That is an amazing shooter on the NES. Time to kill some space bunnies. I’d love to have that in my collection some day, even its the famicom version.
Wow… I didn’t know that was worth so much. Crazy. Famicom version is far more affordable, which is what I’m finding with almost every Famicom/Super Famicom game compared to their US counterparts.
I have ten Super Famicom games coming in an order now. Way less money spent than if I had purchased US (and most of them have no US counterpart…)
I haven’t but looked at famicom vs NES, but yeah SFC vs SNES is much cheaper. SFC is the way to go if you want real carts and don’t want to go the flash cart route. The SFC box art is usually 4000 times, scientific calculation, better as well.
I went to a new-to-me retro store today, meh. They had a nice arcade section with a dozen games or so but not much out of normal besides that. Appeared to be ebay+ pricing as far as I could tell.
I’ve been thinking about a Saturn but without any nostalgia towards it Ive had it on the back burner. Retro store yesterday (different one than today) had a JPN Sonic version for $200. That seemed way high. Based on some light ebay browsing (of non-sonic versions so not 1:1) today I would agree. I don’t need a new console though. I need to trade in some of my real life responsibilities to gamestop in exchange for more free time to play games, lol smh.
Today’s haul:
(that’s Wario Land 3 and 4 hidden behind the PS1 controller)
I’m not sure what sad, sorry Hard Offs you folks are visiting but my one 3 mins walk from a station and even the Book Off in Machida that I visited today were well stocked with good prices. Even managed to take a spy photo of their generous saturn supply:
I probably would have gotten a lot more if I didn’t already have almost all the games I really want at this point. I think I’m just hitting the limits of what I really want in my home library. I also had a list of Game Boy games but I just can’t take the time to flip through loose GB/GBC/GBA carts any more so I’ll probably pick the remainder on amazon.
A neat thing I found was this Sony S-RGB converter YR-421 which converts s-video to RGB.
I’m not exactly reliant on s-video any more but it bugged me not to have a way to hook that up to my OSSC so hopefully this thing does OK after it’s adapted to euro-scart.
3 Likes
Great pickups. Love that converter, it’s adorable!
Nice pickups! Glad you found some deals ! I found it very hard there to not buy…everything lol. The book off in ikebukuro has a shelf full of GameCube games for 500yen each .
I grabbed the Shantae special edition for switch ! I love supporting devs that still do physical releases the right way !
I really like the inside sleeve as well
