A Wannabe Collector Too

I am a lucky gamer.

I once asked my significant other if when I brought home random gaming stuffs or bought them off the internet if he thought "Oh great, another box of useless shit". He thought about it for a minute and said, "I guess that's true, but, no, I don't think that" :)

So, as you can imagine, I've been buying lots of useless shit lately. And what I once read on the internet is true: you have to watch out about becoming a collector because all too soon it becomes an obsession. Obsession? No, no, no. That'll never be me. I thought as I checked the pseudo-Craigslist every hour. (I live way out in the boonies, so we don't have real Craigslist. It's just some stupid website run by some locals who feel the need to shut down their site every freaking Sunday!)

Oh, NES, someday you'll be mine again.

What's maybe a little sad is that this obse . . . um, 'hobby' has come to the point where I've started collecting games for systems I hope to own someday. You know, when I find it at the right price at the right time and place. (Please remember that I live out in the middle of nowhere without flea markets, so I'm left with online and thrift stores.) Hell, if it's cheap enough, I don't mind the games sitting on my game shelf. Not like I really play the games I do have the system for :(

Sometimes I think, Well, this is certainly a waste of money, but I rationalize it to myself by saying that I don't spend money on manicures/pedicures, I don't go to a salon to get my hair cut and I don't buy clothes to keep up with the latest fashion trends (though with my subscriptions to Vogue, Elle and Runway, you'd think otherwise) . . . you know, stereotypical 'girly' stuff, so I think it's okay to spend a few bucks here and there on video games. (Longest sentence ever!)

I certainly wouldn't want to encourage or discourage anyone from collecting games, but here are a few things I've learned over my transition into a collector:

1. Unless money isn't a concern, be aware that getting the more coveted games are going to cost you. If you don't happen upon a random copy of Earthbound for the SNES from someone who has no idea what they have, you'd better be prepared to spend $100+ to get it. Sorry, I don't see it's value dropping any time soon (or ever).
2. Know what you're jumping into before shelling out the shells (however few) for something. Find a few websites (always good to have multiple sources) that you can check up on for price checks. (I like Rarity Guide and Price Charting , but don't be afraid to find others.)



And these are just my recent PS1 purchases.

3. Don't just take things at face value. Just because some guy on a website says he has a PS1 controller for sale and you agree upon a price shouldn't stop you from looking it over once you have it in your hands and depressing all the buttons, plugging it in, etc. I always look any game over before buying. And I'm not just talking about CDs, I check the boards on cartridge games too. Sure you can't exactly tell if there's something wrong, but if it's insanely dirty or has a gouge in it, it may be better to avoid (not to mention this, in particular, can tell you if a GBA cart is pirated).

I'm no expert; I know I still have a lot to learn about as far as collecting goes, but I thought it might be nice for other beginners out there to hear about collecting from someone who's a beginner herself. Someday I'll have a collection worthy of its own game room video, but for now, my games and systems will have to be content taking up a little bit of shelf space in my closet. And I don't mind it one bit, it's a sort of personal haven for me.

The Too-Much-of-the-Same-Thing Towers

Hey, my first review! Huzzah! . . . ?

I recently played through Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for GameBoy Advance, which I had picked up on Ebay for $3.03 with free shipping. Not taking into account the whole Naruto debacle, this was my first GBA game.

It's your basic action RPG with a character you move around and enemies to chase down and hack. Each enemy gives you some experience and leveling up allows you to put more points into both your stats and skills. I do not have the manual for this game, so I can only guess that you can also earn skill points from killing a certain amount of enemies (at least that's the only thing I could guess since it otherwise seemed at random that I had more points to distribute).

While it has admittedly been a few years since I've seen the movie, the game seemed to follow the storyline really well, hitting all the key locations and even including a few screenshots and clips from the movie in all its pixelated glory!

Ahhh, Ebay . . .

At the beginning you can choose which of the five main characters you'd like to play as: Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Frodo or Eowyn. Each has different skill trees, different weapons they can wield and different artifacts they can discover. Probably the main change between the characters is in the locations you progress through throughout the game. As I stated before, it follows the storyline from the movie. This is the biggest aspect going for the game as far as replay value is concerned. It's interesting to cross paths of the character you had previously played through as and seeing how far along you are in your story now as compared to then.

I'll skip going into detail about the colorful graphics or well-suited music to keep this article a reasonable length, and dive right into what I didn't like. If you can't tell from the title of this article, as much fun as it may seem to play through again as a different character, I found the game much too repetitive to bother to do so. Maybe in a couple of months after I've had enough time away from it, I can come back and try it again, but without enough newness to the experience, I'm too bored with it.

Here are some suggestions I have for improvements that could have been made:
1) More puzzles! Sure, every now and then you came across an area where you had to pull a lever to get into a new area or figure out that a certain monster had to be killed, but it certainly wasn't enough to keep my brain engaged beyond the hack 'n' slash.
2) More healing stuffs! Each character starts with a healing spell, and consumables randomly appear to help out with that, but I often found myself standing around waiting for my energy to regenerate so I could cast the heal spell a few times before moving onto the next area. In conjunction with this, I usually ended up putting more points into the heal ability rather than cool fighting moves because of my disinterest in standing around waiting.

What kind of map is this?!

3) A map screen! When standing still for a while, often an arrow will appear to let you know what direction to go toward the exit of the level. While this may be good enough for most gamers, for those more OCD-inclined as to searching every inch to find every last treasure chest, it irks me not to know where I haven't been yet. And the map from the main menu doesn't count!


Overall, I really do think this is a good game and a great experience for fans of the movie (I'd like to say "book" as well, but I've only read Fellowship of the Ring, so can't speak as to that). I realize that many of my complaints are a bit nitpicky and may have to do more with the type of gamer I am than with the game itself. To sum up: good graphics and music, fun to play as characters you know and love, intuitive gameplay and controls. I say, if you come across it at a good price, go for it!

This Game is Rated Aarrrgh!

Piracy. It's often brought up in relation to music and movies. And especially nowadays it's almost all digital piracy (my husband did unknowingly buy a pirated DVD set of GTO). What I never thought would have existed was pirated game cartridges. That's right, I'm talking about people out there selling fake copies of licensed games, specifically, for the GameBoy Advance. What I'm not talking about are unlicensed games for a system as was common in the NES days (this being games that were developed, released and sold as their own work, but not licensed by Nintendo to be sold for the system).

This almost fooled me.

This is a game I purchased recently from Ebay (the image is what the seller uploaded). Why Naruto Ninja Council? Well, while I'm not familiar with the series, I am a manga/anime fan, so I thought I'd give it a try.

This has most of the elements that are part of a real GameBoy Advance game:  the title, ESRB Rating, the Nintendo seal of quality, the developer's logo and the serial code. At a cursory glance (which is all it got from me when I placed the bid) it seems legitimate. So what is it missing? Well, all GBA games also have a Licensed by Nintendo logo on it. Sure this seems like a lot of information to require on such a small cartridge (about 2"x1"), but as I see it, this just makes it easier for us to point out the fakes!

The real deal.

Here we have a picture (again taken from Ebay) of the actual cartridge. As you can see, it looks different! Whereas the real cartridge has a fire background, the forger used a picture of the main character, Naruto, perhaps in an attempt to make it seem legitimate. Of course, the actual cartridge has the Licensed by Nintendo logo, but do you notice something else? The serial code! While AGB (the code for the system) and USA (the code for the region) are always the same, the four letters in the middle will differ from game to game. Though if you're a forger, I suppose it's easier to just bang your fist on the keyboard and go for something random.

Alright, well if I haven't yet bored you to death with details on the fake game I bought (and then returned) from Ebay, maybe you'd like to hear about the actual game. I did play it for about 10 minutes. I had already determined it was fake, but was curious to see if it actually worked. Well, it did. Admittedly, this was to be my first GBA game, so I'm not up to speed as to the system's game standard, but it seemed like an okay action platformer (run around, defeat enemies). I probably won't try to buy it again, but I also wouldn't be against owning it for reals.

Overall, I'd say this was an interesting and educational experience! That is, for a game geek like me who cares about this stuff . . . Who knows, maybe someone out there reading this will discover a pirated gem on their game shelf.