FujiSkunk
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Posts posted by FujiSkunk
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Edited bump.
Canadian C-64 Frogger box. Everything is in great shape. Asking $5.Sold! -
Edited bump.
A Pink Nintendo DSi, model TWL-001...Sold! -
Drums and keys are my thing, which is why I like Rock Band 3 the most. I even shelled out for a good Roland e-kit, to play drums as "legitimately" as possible in the game. Still, it's fun to pick up the guitar now and then.
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I never did get one of the World Tour guitars, but I have the Aerosmith guitar, and the neck is pretty bad =) They made it detachable, but I make sure never to take it apart, because you have to get it JUST RIGHT or some of the buttons won't work.
That's a shame. I've only ever had one Aerosmith controller in my possession, so I haven't had too much experience with them. The GHWT and GH5 guiltars, however, are my workhorses. If I recall, the only problems I've ever had with them were when something about the electronics wouldn't make them power up at all. Beyond that, if they worked at all, they worked perfectly.
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I'm kind of surprised Harmonix never cashed in on GH3 and put a CD of the games soundtrack out as I wanted to buy that so much back in the day, I still would now. The Beatles, no point, it's a given and I've got the 1 CD along with that more recent-ish 'Love' remaster done by their original producers family(son, etc) which is fantastic.
Harmonix was off the Guitar Hero series after the '80s game. That's when Neversoft took over for Activision, and also when Harmonix started the Rock Band series. Having said that, there was in fact a GH3 soundtrack CD.
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I have quite a backlog of stuff I haven't gotten around to hearing yet.
You and me both!
Hmmmm... I had only done the guitar bit on the Wii and it had no dongle. That's why I forgot about that one as I never bothered other than on there or the screwy handheld first one on DS and that original PSP Rockband as well. Totally agree with the other systems as if they're that easy to break and mostly lose the guitar is useless. The $30 one on the Wii got me as it requires nothing but a Wiimote jammed into it.
Coincidentally some of the guitar models that connect to the Wiimotes are the best, most durable guitars for the games, in my experience. I'm talking in particular about the controllers that were released in tandem with Guitar Hero World Tour and Guitar Hero 5. The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions obviously don't have Wiimote connectivity, and the PS3 design still requires a wireless dongle, but they all have the same almost-full-size design with sturdy fret buttons and strum bars. I'm more partial to the Rock Band series of games myself, but I have to admit Activision made better guitars than Harmonix back then. Of course the better design means they're more in demand, so the game stores are going to ask more for them. I have to agree though, $30 is a bit ridiculous. Keep your eyes peeled and you should be able to score one of those at a thrift store before too long. Odds are it'll even work.
Btw, you never fail to surprise me with all the trivia and info you know about things I'm also interested in. Is it just that you recently looked stuff like that up when the conversation or score happened or do you have all that trivia just floating around in your head waiting for an opportunity? I thought I was good with trivia like that but I think you could outdo me in many areas I thought I was pretty versed in. Either way, I'm impressed!
Shucks, thanks.
I do read up on albums as I get them, but I've also been a music chart and discography geek for a while now. A lot of random trivia has stuck with me over the years. -
Man that's a great vinyl haul! There are several in there I'd love to get like Herbie Hancock, Parlament and a few others. I'm a big Herb Alpert fan as well and that cover seems familiar to me but I couldn't find a match on discogs. Which album is it?
Thanks! That's the 12" single for "Diamonds". The original version of the song is on his 1987 album, Keep Your Eye on Me. Since Alpert was not only a client of A&M Records, he was also the president (one of the two, anyway), he pulled in a favor and had fellow A&M artist Janet Jackson sing vocals. People figure that's how the song made its way into the Top 40, one of Alpert's last singles to do so.
(Better picture of the 12" single's jacket here.)
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To the fans of bad games, you're not alone. I like Star Fox, not enough to put it in my top 20, but still more than I was ever apparently supposed to. Sure it's a Defender clone, and a rather uninspired one at that, but the one-on-one dogfights have their own charm, and the background sound effects are strangely captivating.
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You know since you brought that up, what in the hell happened to those wireless guitar hero/rockband guitars?! Very few years ago you couldn't GIVE them away at garage sales, goodwills, flea markets, etc for $5. Now they're like $30 shipped online. I wanted to find one for Guitar Hero 3 for Wii and the only one i could locate was $30, I walked away. I'd rather get comfy playing on easy using 3 buttons on the wiimote than get ripped off that hard.
Two things.
One, just about all of the wireless guitars require their own dongles. The exceptions are those for Microsoft consoles and some of the guitars for the Wii, particularly those that were smartly designed to integrate with the Wiimote and let it handle connectivity and motion sensing. All the rest, if you don't have the dongle, the guitar is useless. When you find maybe one dongle for about every five to ten guitars, they become particularly valuable.
Two, while it's actually still relatively easy to find cheap guitar controllers if you look hard enough (dongle problem notwithstanding), finding good, working guitars is quickly becoming difficult. These are family/party games, and many of the controllers have suffered family/party abuse, the kind of abuse mass-produced $60 plastic controllers just weren't built to withstand. The sort-of good news is, there was no overwhelming single point of failure. Sometimes the frets went flaky, sometimes the strum bar broke, and sometimes the tilt sensor went out of whack. That means that if you are handy with repairs, you could Frankenstein your own working guitar if you found enough parts. But if you aren't handy with repairs, you have to be prepared to pay a little extra for one that does work, especially at game stores and on eBay where money-back guarantees are involved.
None of this would matter if the games weren't getting played anymore, but there actually are still quite a few die-hards out there, myself included. Rock Band 4 and Guitar Hero Live can be bought new for the latest platforms, but many players still prefer the older titles, particularly Rock Band 3, for a variety of reasons. The new instruments won't work on the older games, so the market remains alive and well.
I think I found the real reason for shortage of guitars:
Someone's hoarding them for decoration!
Haha, nice!
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I decided not to take pictures of the Wii haul my thrift store got in last week, because it was just so much stuff. In the end I opted to sell most of it in the store, because it all made for nice bundles that wouldn't walk off so easily as individual games would. I put together a Rock Band bundle with the game and full drum set; a Rock Band 2 bundle with the game plus a wireless guitar and microphone (the guitar even had its dongle!); a uDraw Studio bundle with its tablet; a Cabela bundle with hunting game and gun controller; and an Ubisoft bundle with Monster 4x4 World Circuit and an Ubisoft-branded steering wheel. Among the remaining stuff were a few games that didn't require extra accessories, a couple of Nunchuks, and several Wiimotes of different colors, including one I hadn't seen before with the same shade of blue used for Wii-U hardware. Surprisingly, there wasn't an actual Wii in the collection. Even more surprisingly, there wasn't a WiiFit board among all the game accessories. That's good considering I already have over a dozen of the things I need to get tested and sold.
And now, another vinyl round-up!
These came from three different excursions. The first was at Christmastime, where I went shopping for gifts for my roommate's niece and her first turntable. Of course I had to buy extras, so I could have some choices on what to offer as a starter collection of good '80s tunes! The second excursion was to a surprise Sunday-morning yard sale about three blocks from my house. I had enough time between commitments at church that I figured I'd run home for a bit. Instead I followed signs to a yard sale that promised "thousands" of records for sale. They weren't kidding! The guy knew what he had, so there weren't any steals to be had, but he at least priced everything to move quickly. The third and final excursion was to my thrift store, which recently got a fresh batch of vinyl donated in, with lots of good titles I didn't yet have.
More good '80s fun!
Not just '80s LP's, though. The yard sale in particular had lots of...
12" dance singles! I love these, both for the rare packaging and the often hard-to-find remixes.
But let it never be said that I'm stuck only in the '80s...
Good '60s and '70s classic rock, and in one case, classic funk!
These next three were particularly good finds...
Elton John's Greatest Hits (1974) and Greatest Hits Volume II (1977) do a good job of capturing all the songs of Elton John's "classic" era. In the early '80s, the two albums were combined into a single release, Greatest Hits Volumes One and Two, available only by mail to members of the RCA Music Service record club. That makes this a particularly "rare" release, if not exactly a more desirable one; mail-order record clubs weren't always known for their high-quality record pressings.
Next is the British Parlophone mono release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Why a British copy was in a collection of records donated to an American thrift store is a mystery, but who am I to ask questions? It's not mint or even what I would call "very good", but it's still in decent enough shape that I chipped in a few extra bucks above the store's usual asking price for records.
I also chipped in extra for George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. All three records are here and the outer box actually hasn't suffered too much abuse. I was quite happy to get this one in my collection.
There were a lot more recent vinyl gets, including several old Stan Freberg comedy records, but you know, you can only show so many pictures before people get bored...
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Coincidentally, I played the Famicom version of Tetris for the first time last night. I had always assumed the NES release was the same, since both were credited to Bullet-Proof Software, but the Famicom version is actually quite different, enough to suggest the NES version was a complete rewrite. Anyway, the Famicom version quickly ended up on my crap list because you press down to rotate a piece and the B Button to drop the piece. That's the exact opposite of literally every other version of Tetris I've played, including the NES and Game Boy ports. Why in the world did they do that?
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Edited bump.
Electronic Basketball. I'm not quite sure who made this one, or when it came out. It looks exactly like a Basketball game made by Electronic Readout Systems, and even shares the same model number, 003401, but this one doesn't have the company logo. There's a good chance it's an unauthorized clone. Whatever the case, it's in good physical shape, and it's fully functional. One of the 9V battery connectors has a minor bit of corrosion, but that doesn't stop the battery from making good contact. The display is a bit scuffed, but no worse than what you might expect from a handheld this old, and it doesn't get in the way of the action. The battery door is included. Asking $3.Sold!Mattel Electronics Baseball, first released in 1978. This one is also in good shape for its age, a bit scuffed and dirty but still fully usable. The battery compartment and connectors are clean, and the battery door is included. Asking $7.Sold! -
Edited bump.
Hydro Thunder for the PS1, complete with case and manual. Asking $7.Sold!Mario Kart Wii with manual and case, though the case is missing its cover. Asking $12.Sold! -
Impossible Mission for the 7800.
A little more seriously, Zaxxon for the 2600. It's not the choppy scrolling or the change in perspective that gets me. It's the showstopping bugs that make the game a lot harder than it should be, especially for two players. If you move all the way to the right, you risk crashing into something on the far left. And if you die on the second asteroid in level 3 or higher in a two player game, kiss the rest of your lives goodbye. Why Coleco didn't catch this before pushing the game out the door is a mystery to me.
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I own a few steering wheels, including the first-party force-feedback wheel for the XBox 360. That one is particularly nice, but I rarely use any of them because I just don't have the set-up for them. A steering wheel pretty much requires a permanent installation, or at least some way to easily attach it to a good, sturdy desk or other piece of furniture that won't move. The best I can do is a TV tray in front of the living room TV, and that is definitely not sturdy. Maybe Someday I'll have the means to use a steering wheel more often, but it ain't today.
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Short answer: Yes and no.
Something like Dragon's Lair would require a lot more than extra memory. It would also require extra CPU and extra graphical horsepower. Thanks to the Melody cartridge we have plenty of extra memory and CPU now. Graphical horsepower is another matter. As CDS mentioned, you're still going to be stuck with a limited number of sprites and colors per scanline, and those aren't nearly enough for something as epically detailed as Dragon's Lair. Spiceware and other homebrewers are working on a process called bus stuffing that eventually could enable the 2600 to do games like The Legend of Zelda with pretty good graphics, but I think even then Dragon's Lair will be a bit out of reach. That's talking about the arcade game with its laserdisc-sourced animation, of course. You could possibly port something like the Commodore 64 version to the 2600, but likely that wouldn't look like Dragon's Lair enough for most players.
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Swordquest: FireWorld. Worst 2600 game ever, and that's even if you do count Pac-Man and E.T.!
Let's see, nine other games I found I could do without are...
- Karate
- Fire Fighter
- RealSports Baseball & Super Baseball
At least with Home Run you can actually tell why a pitch was a ball or a strike! - Sky Skipper
- Amidar
- Basic Programming
- James Bond 007
- Rubik's Cube
I haven't played everything in the catalog, so I'm sure there are some even worse stinkers out there. But these games stick out in my mind not only because of how overall bad they were, but also on how badly they failed to deliver on their promises. Sky Skipper and Amidar are hollowed out shells of their arcade games, Basic Programming isn't even that, and James Bond 007 captures absolutely nothing from the Bond films, and so on.
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One of these years I'm going to make it to PRGE since that seems to be turning into the retro event of the year. Sadly it won't be this year, though, if the HAAG Expo is the same weekend. Every year I find myself committing a little more to the Houston show, and this year won't be any exception. I'm hoping to be in a position where I can bring some disk drives and games for C-64 and Atari 8-bit systems, so people can get their Impossible Mission and M.U.L.E. on, among other classics.
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Ok, double awesome for the find as well as "animal shelter thrift store". I wish we had one of those, I'd be there all the time!
Next time you find yourself on the north side of town, visit the AABY thrift store. AABY stands for Animals Always Believe in You. They don't support any animal shelters directly that I'm aware of, but they do support various discount programs for seniors and other pet owners, and in the past the owner helped secure funds for the local dog park.
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Tell your son he's back in the will.
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No fair excluding homebrews!
But seriously, hmm... maybe these 20:
Crystal Castles
Ms. Pac-Man
Millipede
Stargate
Jr. Pac-Man
Solaris
Combat
Super Breakout
Missile Command
Wizard of Wor
River Raid
Yars' Revenge
Midnight Magic
Kaboom!
Demon Attack
Q*Bert
Video Pinball
Astroblast
Turmoil
Warlords
I'm surprised at how difficult this was. It's not that I had more than 20 favorites I had to choose from, it's because after my first 10 or so essentials, nothing else stood out, so I had to decide what I would be most happy with after having my fill of my most favorites. I think this list would just about do it, though I reserve the right to change my mind later!
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I love it when things come in fully usable bundles...
A Tandy CoCo 2 with joysticks, several boxed games and a tape deck. The only thing missing is a power cord for the tape deck. But that's okay because it also runs on...
These are collector's items now, right? I mean, sure they're dead as doornails, but it's pretty impressive they weren't corroded, no?
A little more seriously, I have to wonder: Who in their right mind would trust their data on a cassette written by a tape deck running only on batteries? Those things were bad enough even on wall power!
Then, while this one wasn't quite a "fully usable" bundle, but I still deem it good enough:
I'll take my bundles where I can get them!
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Edited bump.
Indigo Game Boy Advance, fully functional. The screen does have some scratches, but these do not distract from game play, and for the most part are only obvious in direct light. Asking $12.Sold! -
Edited bump.
Super Mario Sunshine for the Game Cube, with manual and original case. Asking $20.Sold!Gauntlet: Dark Legacy for the Game Cube. I'm calling this "loose" but I'll include the Hollywood Video rental case if the buyer wants it. The disc has just a few very minor scratches that do not interfere with game play. Asking $20.Sold!Coraline for the PlayStation 2, with manual and original case. Asking $5.Sold!Kinect Star Wars, one of several new 360 Kinect titles now available. This one is complete with its case, manual and bonus demo disc. Asking $3.Sold!
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The Official "Thrift finds" Thread
in Classic Console Discussion
Posted
Question for you, Jess. Does this copy of Rock Band 3 say "MTV Games" and "EA" on the front, or does it say "Mad Catz"?