Ninfundo (I have a feeling I’ve used this title before…)

Older games from Nintendo are definitely some of my favourites, and it seems that whenever I think I’ve found all that I could ever want to play for those systems, I find out about something new and exciting.  That’s what I love about collecting – there’s always something to look for and new games to explore.

Much of what we have found lately has been for various Nintendo consoles.  There were a few NES games for sale locally that I jumped on – Arkista’s Ring, Zoda’s Revenge: Star Tropics II, as well as The Guardian Legend.  Though all vastly different in gameplay style, I was happy to find them all from the same seller.  They’re all in relatively good condition, though I do wish I had the manuals for all three.  Arkista’s Ring is especially fun, but those stupid Ninjas at the end of the game make me want to throw my controller through the window!  I’ve been holding off trying out The Guardian Legend because I have a feeling I’ll get sucked in pretty quickly.  I don’t have time for getting sucked in right now!

Thanks to my lovely friend TheDeviot over at Comma Eight Comma One, I was able to get a bit of reading done on these titles using the Ultimate Nintendo Guide to the NES Library by Pat Contri.  TheDeviot graciously picked up and mailed me a copy of the book after listening to me complain about the outlandish cost of shipping to Canada through the official ordering mechanism, and I’m so grateful to have it in my possession!  When the book was first revealed, I was completely enamoured by the prospect of a book that would detail much of the information I was always scratching my head over (rarity, rating, etc.), and have reviews for each game on top of it all.  I honestly can’t see myself using the internet to look up anything NES-related going forward since everything I need is right here in this enormous book.  There were lots of really great contributors to the book as well, so if you’ve been thinking about buying it and haven’t yet, take it from someone who loves retro games too much for her own good: do it!

I had to go back and check through previous entries to make sure that I hadn’t already posted about these next four games, but I finally, finally got the last of my reproduction cartridges in the mail after almost a year.  I got three of them within a few months of placing an order, but the third one never shipped and after going through quite a long process with the guy who makes the cartridges, he finally sent another one out to me. After playing Earthbound for the first time last year, I decided I wanted to try out the first game in the series and opted for the Anniversary Edition, which is slightly less difficult than other iterations of the game.  Ys II was another game I wanted because at the time, I didn’t have the PSP version that included the two first games of the series, and this was as close as I was going to get to playing the original on a Famicom.  Adventure Island IV is a game that never saw an English release, and you may have forgotten just how much I love Adventure Island games.  I have the first three and desperately wanted the fourth after I tried it out on an emulator to see what it was all about.  Though it mostly departs from previous games in the series, it does present an interesting story.  Lastly, Final Fantasy III was the only game from that franchise that I didn’t own physically.  I have a digital copy of the game, but to me, there’s nothing quite like popping the game into the console and playing it through.  I’m interested in streaming the game sometime, so the version released for handhelds wasn’t going to cut it.  I’m not usually a huge fan of buying reproductions, but for these specific games, I couldn’t quite help myself.

A nice surprise was seeing a lot of SNES games on the local classifieds site a few weeks ago.  Though a few games here were doubles for me, they will make for good trades down the line at swaps and other such events.  The ones I was probably the most excited for were Super Ninja Boy and Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow.  Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow has some of the grooviest music I’ve heard come out of an SNES console (save Super Adventure Island or Sim City).  I tried out Clue for about 2 minutes before I lost.  I wrongly accused someone and immediately game overed, so I’ve learned an important lesson: never play Clue again.  Just kidding.  It honestly looks like it would be a fun time.

I alluded to finding some things for some handheld consoles in my last few posts, and I wasn’t kidding!  I managed to find a 3DS at a really great price and picked up a bunch of games for free from Shoppers Drug Mart using their points program.  All of these are still sealed for the time being until I’m ready to play them, but I heard such amazing things about Kirby: Planet Robobot that I had to get it when I saw it there.  I’ve got a huge love for Kirby and robots, so some weird fusion of both things seems like a no-brainer for me.

Also for the 3DS, I ordered two games from the internet: The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, and Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon.  I’ve yet to play the original Luigi’s Mansion, but I have played A Link to the Past in… well, the past.  Though it’s far from being my favourite Zelda game, I’ve heard a lot of praise for the 3DS game.  This means that along with Tri Force Heroes and my recent acquisition of Link’s Crossbow training, I now have every major canon installment in the Zelda franchise.  Does anyone know if A Link Between Worlds was supposed to come with a proper manual?  Just wondering!

For the regular old DS, I found a copy of Super Princess Peach.  There was something that really drew me to this game, and I think it was the Yoshi’s Island-like graphics.  I think the gameplay being called easy by many different folks is a bit of a stretch.  Like many games, it’s easy if you don’t go the completionist route like I do for these kinds of adventures.  It was taking up quite a bit of my time before I put it down for a while, but I’m looking forward to finishing it up.

Speaking of games that started eating my time for breakfast, I also found a copy of Pokemon Soul Silver for DS. I had found a copy of Heart Gold last year, but it didn’t come with the Pokewalker.  This Soul Silver did, and I was really excited until I realized that a Pokewalker is really hard to de-sync from a game file.  I deleted the game file from the previous owner and started playing the game with a new save before realizing this, and even with a brand new battery, the Pokewalker doesn’t want to connect to the DS to be synced to my new file.  I’m pretty sad about that because I do a fair bit of walking at work.  What better way to hatch eggs or potentially raise affection with certain pokemon?  Oh well.  I fought with it for two evenings for about 15 minutes each time and I’m okay with giving up for a little while.  Maybe I’ll have a brainstorm and get it working some day.

In addition to these lovely handheld games, I was sent a wonderful gift by mail from Brad at Cheap Boss Attack!  The games are Bomberman and Ice Climber from the Classic NES Series for Game Boy Advance, and I couldn’t have been happier to receive them.  Oddly enough, I didn’t previously own either of those games for NES unless you count my multicarts, so it’s nice to finally have an official version of both of these classics.  The games are in nearly perfect condition!  I’m pretty excited to try them out.

Some other games I picked up just yesterday were Operation Wolf for NES, and Gauntlet Legends for N64.  I feel like at some point I had watched a really, really negative review for Gauntlet Legends, but it just doesn’t seem to want to be recalled in my head.  This purchase was a situation where there were lots of games for sale but I had most of them, and despite my attempts to get a package deal, the seller was pretty adamant on her price of $10/game.  My boyfriend is especially excited about Operation Wolf since he loves light gun games, and this one has an optional integration for it.

Yet another bunch of games from this same seller were for the Game Boy.  She amazingly had a Game Boy pocket in her pile of stuff that I ended up buying.  Along with that, I got a bunch of really great common games for the system including both Mario Lands, some Pokemon games, Kirby’s Dreamland, Warioland, and Donkey Kong III.  What was most surprising to me in the lot was a game I had never seen before, and that was Avenging Spirit.  I found out that the game was a port of an arcade release called Phantasm where you play as the ghost of a gunned-down man trying to save his kidnapped girlfriend from a rival gang.  You get to possess enemies in the game and use their properties to attack and kill other enemies.  It’s a really interesting premise for a game that I haven’t really heard much of outside of this release.  It oddly sounds like the plot of Ghost, and any game where I get to play as a figurative Patrick Swayze is fine by me (I think we need a Dirty Dancing game too)!  It turns out the game is pretty uncommon, so I ended up bargaining at $40 with the woman for that particular game.  It was kept in a protective case and is pretty flawless.  Considering that there are barely any copies online and that it actually looks fun to play unlike other uncommon or rare Game Boy games (coughAmazingTatercough), I think it was a pretty good deal.

Lastly, I found a SNES Game Genie!  I’ve had one for the NES since my youth and it brought my family and I lots of hilarious moments while gaming.  I was pretty shocked and mostly appalled to see just how small the code book is.  I haven’t really shown it in the photo below, but it can’t be more than 50 pages and only covers a very small number of games.  It’s not that I’m a huge Game Genie user these days (ask my childhood self for an entirely different answer), but when you look at the Game Genies for NES or Sega Genesis, you could use the giant code books to fend off an intruder!  The box and its contents also both smell (un?)pleasantly of laundry detergent or fabric softener.  It was a little jarring when I first opened the box.

Though it’s taken a few weeks to put together a sizeable post, I hope you enjoyed seeing all these lovely games.  I am so thankful to have finally started having some luck locally again, and I am especially grateful to TheDeviot and Brad for sending the book and games along to me.  I appreciate it more than you know, so thank you both again for your generosity and for thinking of me!

And as always, thank you to everyone else for reading.  I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.

-GG