$1.2 Million Ultimate Games Collection 149
An anonymous reader writes "If you're a collector of video games, counting the complete back catalog of titles for one system as part of your collection is a commendable achievement, but what about having full gaming sets for 22 different systems? I doubt anyone has ever done that through game purchases alone, but one eBay seller is offering such a set. The price? A cool $1.2 million. That's a crazy amount of cash to spend on games, but when you find out what's included in this auction, and the condition the games are in, it might actually sound like a good deal. Here's the list of systems the auction is offering full game sets for along with the number of games for each one:
Nintendo Famicon – 1,050 games
Nintendo Famicon Disk – 200 games
Nintendo Virtual Boy – 19 games
Nintendo Super Famicon – 1,500 games
Nintendo 64 – 200 games
Nintendo DD64 – 10 games
Nintendo Gamecube – 320 games
Sega Master System (Europe) – 300 games
Sega Mark 3 & Master System (Japan) – 80 games
Sega Game Gear – 200 games
Sega Megadrive – 450 games
Sega 32 X – 19 games
Sega Mega CD – 115 games
Sega Saturn – 1,150 games
Sega Dreamcast – 550 games
PC Engine Hucard – 300 games
PC Engine Supergrafx – 6 games
PC Engine CD – 120 games
PC Engine Super CD – 300 games
PC Engine Arcade CD – 12 games
PC-FX – total games not stated
Pioneer Laseractive – total games not listed."
Nintendo Famicon – 1,050 games
Nintendo Famicon Disk – 200 games
Nintendo Virtual Boy – 19 games
Nintendo Super Famicon – 1,500 games
Nintendo 64 – 200 games
Nintendo DD64 – 10 games
Nintendo Gamecube – 320 games
Sega Master System (Europe) – 300 games
Sega Mark 3 & Master System (Japan) – 80 games
Sega Game Gear – 200 games
Sega Megadrive – 450 games
Sega 32 X – 19 games
Sega Mega CD – 115 games
Sega Saturn – 1,150 games
Sega Dreamcast – 550 games
PC Engine Hucard – 300 games
PC Engine Supergrafx – 6 games
PC Engine CD – 120 games
PC Engine Super CD – 300 games
PC Engine Arcade CD – 12 games
PC-FX – total games not stated
Pioneer Laseractive – total games not listed."
what, no atari 2600? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sheesh
Re:what, no atari 2600? (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell me about it. The platform I loved the most was the C64. Of course, the Amiga has some rockin' games, too.
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no Atari 5200?
no Atari Jaguar?
no Colecovision?
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It's obvious why just by looking at the pictures. The games are almost entirely Japanese, so US systems like Atari aren't represented.
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It's obvious why just by looking at the pictures. The games are almost entirely Japanese, so US systems like Atari aren't represented.
even then, where the fuck is neogeo? or is that collection up for 12 million as a separate bid?
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even then, where the fuck is neogeo? or is that collection up for 12 million as a separate bid?
From TFS:
PC Engine Hucard – 300 games
PC Engine Supergrafx – 6 games
PC Engine CD – 120 games
PC Engine Super CD – 300 games
PC Engine Arcade CD – 12 games
PC-FX – total games not stated
Re:what, no atari 2600? (Score:5, Insightful)
How was this not modded up?
The Atari 2600 games, and the cabinet arcade games of 1978-1983, were the foundation. There is no such thing as an "ultimate games collection" without them.
Location: France, Price: in EUR (Score:5, Informative)
The Atari 2600 games, and the cabinet arcade games of 1978-1983, were the foundation.
but it's hard to say it's complete. The odyssey was pretty cool too.
Location of the eBay entry: France.
(Read the following with a strong french accent:)
Sorry, what are zeese "Atari" and "Odyssey" you're speaking about? I've never heard about zem.
(/accent)
Joking aside, the european video gaming console scene has went through a slightly different history than the USA.
For one, the japanese console manufacturer have had a stronger bigger presence (at the time when they arrived, Europe hasn't been through a big video game crash, unlike the USA, and thus wasn't suspictious of video games).
Also, home computers (either european like Amstrad and Sinclair, or north american like Commodore) played a much bigger role in the general gaming scene too.
That explains why this guy's collection is mostly japanese brands (Sega, Nintendo, NEC... though not SNK as NeoGeo was considered as a luxury overpriced import for people wanting the real arcade hardware at home, not for video console enthousiasts) and no US-american hardware at all (nothing from Atari, Magnavox, etc. - they weren't widely available in regular commercial channels. The ST was the first machine from Atari that I remember seeing here around in europe).
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Bullshit. I lived in England for most of the 80s and Japanese consoles were not popular there at that time. Nobody had a Nintendo or a Sega, they had Ataris and Commodores.
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Nintendo was quite well-known in Switzerland, as were Commodore and Amiga (I believe they're different things, yes? I was a NES kid...).
Yet, I just know of two people who owned Sega. One had the color handheld (which, frankly, blew the Gameboy out of all waters) and the other had... well, everything, it seemed.
Do I know you? (Score:2)
One had the color handheld (which, frankly, blew the Gameboy out of all waters)
That could be me. I think I may know you personnally... :-D
as were Commodore and Amiga (I believe they're different things, yes? I was a NES kid...)
Yes, sort of. Back then,
- "Commodore" did refer to the "Commodore C64=", a 8bit home computer commercialized by the "Commodore International Limited"
- "Amiga" did refer to the "Amiga 1000" a 32bit successor home computer commercialized again by, but later, "Commodore International Limited"
(So commodore is also the name of the company selling these machines)
for collecting, not for playing (Score:5, Informative)
It's over 6,000 different games, many of which have never been opened. No one has enough free time to play them all, so the collecting itself becomes its own reward.
Re:for collecting, not for playing (Score:5, Interesting)
6,901 + unstated number of Pioneer Laseractive and PC-FX.
Let's assume 7,000 in total. If you spent just 30 minutes on each game and played 8 hours a day, every day, it would take approximately 62.5 weeks to play them all.
Re:for collecting, not for playing (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously I'll never have that kind of cash, but just a quick look shows some of those single items are like $750 ea, and I'm sure some are more. If 10% of the items are worth something like that, that's already $525,000 on the face of it. That puts the rest around $107 ea.
For someone that would have to spend years hunting down all that stuff in original factory wrap, and that has that kind of expendable money, maybe it's actually worth it.
Hard to say... I'll never be that person.
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Just like torrenting porn you never watch.
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You have 30 videos in your ATM queue?
That's oddly specific. Do you have a job, or do they not care if you take long bathroom breaks?
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Do you have a job, or do they not care if you take long bathroom breaks?
He could be a government worker with an office and a closed door.......
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There's always time for porn!
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Depends on how you watch it.
Yeah, if you break out a glass of wine and actually watch the whole thing to give a review on the riveting plot twists and depth of the characters... it might take you some time.
It's like being a tourist or being a Navy Seal that is rapidly inserted into the field of battle to kill them all and let God sort them out later.
I think most men are probably the latter with porn (we got shit to do man) and have seen pretty much all the good parts that would be put in the movie trailer.
Re:for collecting, not for playing (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to play classic video games, you're better off buying flash adapters and modchips.
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I think you misspelled "download emulators and roms".
USB adaptors are available for many system's controllers if you want accuracy of input.
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No thank you. Emulators are inferior to actual consoles. Get a console, any console, and compare it to an emulator hooked up to the same display with a video switch. You'll see.
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Latency is inevitably worse on an emulated system. The length of time between say, pushing a button and having that action getting back to your eyes and ears is longer, and likely to be less synchronized.
It's particularly bad if you're substituting a modern LCD TV for a CRT TV.
This is a big deal of course, as many classic games are tuned to human reaction times. If a game requires you to react in 200ms, and you lose 50ms to extra latency in your system, you don't stand a chance.
Think Space Invaders when the
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The latency issue is all (well, 90%+) about I/O, and no emulated system is complete without I/O.
Have a look at the latency measurements here [eurogamer.net]. Around 70ms at best. These aren't emulated games, but I don't think that makes much difference.
On the original systems, typical latency would be just one frame, around 2ms.
If cherry-picking hardware is allowed, replace the LCD with a CRT, replace the wireless USB with a parallel port game controller, and block your ears.
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Oops - that should be 20ms latency on the original system, not 2ms.
(I figured that as 25 frames per second, with an average response time of half a frame.)
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The correct answer is somewhere in the middle. For years, emulation was barely accurate enough to run the most popular games. Even on somewhat newer systems like the SNES, there have been games that have only recently been properly and accurately emulated. Until an emulator for a given system reaches, and surpasses, that sort of "uncanny valley" to appropriate terminology, then the real hardware will always be superior no matter how many addon features the emulator has.
Plus, for tile-based systems prior to
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And in the case of the PS2 when it becomes "classic" instead of merely "last-gen", there's always softmods requiring no hardware hacking. Also in existence for the original Xbox and not sure about any other systems as those two are the main ones I'd care about going forward that aren't truly "classic" or even "vintage" at this point, of which those are pretty much already covered with accurate emulators and hardware solutions that also require no hardware hacking.
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Re:for collecting, not for playing (Score:4, Insightful)
That'd be a nice trick. Who is going to rewrite the thousands of hours worth of server code that doesn't ship with the client and is never released to the public?
Re:for collecting, not for playing (Score:4, Informative)
..you'd be surprised about some projects on the net.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popular_MMORPGs_with_a_server_emulator [wikipedia.org]
3 type of situations. (Score:3)
Situation A:
- its a single player game. the online component only serves as an advanced form of DRM, under the false excuse of some community-related social stuff (online score boards and the like).
The game is probably cracked nowadays already. And the server components in that situation are pretty much minimal, so full emulation isn't that much complicated.
Situation B:
- its an online multiplayer game. as in a MMORPG, most probably.
- the game is any where in the range of "a few people did hear about it" to
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It's over 6,000 different games, many of which have never been opened. No one has enough free time to play them all, so the collecting itself becomes its own reward.
Considering the quality of some I've seen that list should be pared down considerably to those which are actually playable, rather than some poorly thought out crud (or poorly executed port) which you wouldn't want for free, even if the time spent playing it didn't subtract from your lifespan.
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And that is different than Pokemon how?
Actually, if you break it down a lot of time spent in many video game genres is actually just collecting. You have actual collecting quests FPS. You also have collecting a full set of accomplishments (get all secrets in a level to get a gold star for that level) in platform games. RPGs are almost entirely about collecting (collect this great loot, collect completing all these arbitrary missions).
When you think about it, this guy just took it to another meta-level.
AMIGAAAAAAA (Score:1)
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Where are the Amiga games?
Commodore was a Canadian company. This was an auction of his Japanese related property. RTFA(Read the f'n Auction:-P
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Where are the Amiga games?
Most addictive game I played on Amiga was Ralph Reed's BattleMech. Must have spent over 1,000 hours on that game alone.
Most regretable was Ultima V, which some idiot bypassed the keyboard API and wrote his own keyboard polling routines, which worked like $#!% on the Amiga 2000 - I think my profanity laced phone call to support had a lot to do with that lack of successor, but considering I have a game I heavily anticipated and paid a lot for, I think I was justified.
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Most addictive game I played on Amiga was Ralph Reed's BattleMech. Must have spent over 1,000 hours on that game alone
You're not alone :-).
Hmmm... (Score:2)
If we ignore, for a moment, the probably-imperfect state of emulation of some of the odder consoles on that list, does anybody have a good ballpark figure for the total size required to contain this collection?
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Most of them are older games, so even 7,000 games would probably fit on a modest sized thumb drive.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Complete sets for all of these consoles are available through torrents. I have downloaded most of these, and they come in under a terabyte. IIRC, the Dreamcast and PC Engine CD are the largest torrents, each a couple hundred gigs. The cartridge based systems obviously take much less space.
FWIW, a complete PSX torrent comes out at about 500GB. And that's USA only, with ECM stripped and 7zipped.
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Complete sets for all of these consoles are available through torrents
How do you load a Torrent onto an old Nintendo or Sega game box?
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
They sell flash devices now that read the ROM file and present it to the console as if it were a real cartridge. For the NES, the only one around AFAIK is the PowerPak. For the Genesis, your best bet is the Everdrive. For the PCE, there is a card from NeoFlash but I don't recommend it, mine broke. The creator of the Everdrive is rumored to have a PCE card in the works, so I'd wait for that.
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We had floppy-based systems for SNES and Genesis. About time someone updated that to use flash drives.
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No need to ignore software emulation limitations anymore. There are many devices today that can run games loaded off commodity flash drives, on actual hardware. See: Everdrive, Powerpack, Acekard, and others.
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For the Nintendo 64 at least, that's a maximum of 12.8 GB. However, few games actually hit that 64 MB max, and many were down in the single-digit range. So I'd guess no more than 8 GB.
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I would say about half of a shipping container, maybe a little more since they're all in their original packaging.
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ever heard of romhustler dot net?
Not as easy as a all-in-one torrent, but they have lots of stuff and nice hosting.
If you take away the Gamecube... (Score:2)
Average price (Score:2)
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But if nobody will pay more than $15 a year later, then "outrageous" wouldn't even begin to cover it.
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You could probably scrounge around the internet for 1/4 of that...
It saves you the work of doing that 5k times, I guess.
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You're leaving out the actual systems, and the fact that many of the games are sealed (which is a huge price boost). I'd say that $164 per game on average is a steal, considering the rarity of some of the stuff the guy had.
A day late (Score:5, Informative)
The auction ended Jul 08, 201213:59:58 PDT, so even if you dreamed of getting this collection, it's too late.
old people will buy anything for nostaligia (Score:5, Insightful)
baseball cards, my brother has a bunch of old ones including Mark McGuire rookie. I think he also has barry bonds and some other good rookie cards. dumb middle agers will pay lots of money for paper cards with photos of baseball players
1980's GI Joe and other action figures. look at ebay prices. dumb middle agers will pay top dollar for toys their parents never bought them
comic books, the list goes on
so WTF are you going to do with this stuff? put it in your closet, keep it in "mint" condition, kill anyone who dares to touch it and think how worth it everything was?
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No Neo-Geo I would expect it for that sort of cash.
Re:old people will buy anything for nostaligia (Score:5, Interesting)
so WTF are you going to do with this stuff? put it in your closet, keep it in "mint" condition, kill anyone who dares to touch it and think how worth it everything was?
Well, if I were to have all those games, I'd open a museum. Buy as many consoles + TVs as possible (old CRTs, if possible, for max realism), pop in as many games as possible. Put up a little placard next to each, describing the history and historical importance of the game. Keep the most popular ones on constantly, but rotate out all the rest. Supplement it with other material - old game magazines, videos, etc. Do some proper archival work as well - have all the games backed up militantly, so the games will never truly be "lost" (maybe do the playing on the duplicated copies, if cost-effective).
Charge $5 to $25 to come in and play the games all day. Run some special events, maybe have the Minibosses or the Protomen do a promotional concert every so often.
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so WTF are you going to do with this stuff? put it in your closet, keep it in "mint" condition, kill anyone who dares to touch it and think how worth it everything was?
Well, if I were to have all those games, I'd open a museum. Buy as many consoles + TVs as possible (old CRTs, if possible, for max realism), pop in as many games as possible. Put up a little placard next to each, describing the history and historical importance of the game. Keep the most popular ones on constantly, but rotate out all the rest. Supplement it with other material - old game magazines, videos, etc. Do some proper archival work as well - have all the games backed up militantly, so the games will never truly be "lost" (maybe do the playing on the duplicated copies, if cost-effective).
Charge $5 to $25 to come in and play the games all day. Run some special events, maybe have the Minibosses or the Protomen do a promotional concert every so often.
I actually saw something similar to this in an arcade in Nashville, TN. It was an arcade with a bunch of pinball on the left, older arcade games on the right. In the middle was a large screen tv and a smaller screen tv. They had older systems and a very large shelf of games. You could pay to play by the hour and get to use any of the games in the library.
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The Oneups (if they're still playing, last show was over a year ago) and Metroid Metal are also good game-themed bands. Given how popular PAX is, this plan is clearly viable.
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"Dumb" does not mean "values something more than I do". And yes, that IS what you meant.
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Looks great until you realize... (Score:5, Funny)
Shipping kills the deal. Red, T/D.
Re:Looks great until you realize... (Score:4, Funny)
Shipping kills the deal. Red, T/D.
Yeah, no kidding, I almost placed a bid until I saw that the shipping was around $1200 -- I hate when eBay sellers price a product cheap and then jack up the shipping charges.
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Well, how much does it cost to ship such a large collection? What about insurance for $1.2M worth of irreplaceable goods? Can they even use a commodity courier service or do they have to spring for the same kind of shipping museums and the like use?
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I believe hawguy was being sarcastic... :)
Average price: around $173 per game? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm not so sure about this. A lot of games that are expensive in the U.S. are dirt cheap in Japan. E.G. ChronoTrigger for the SNES, loose, is worth $65. In Japan, you can find it loose in stores for the Super Famicom around 100-400 yen.
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At the same time, assembling such a collection is quite a bit of work. Assuming you're a multimillionaire, what is your time worth? And how much time would it take to assemble this collection otherwise?
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And the purpose of collecting is the hunt.
This guy probably got every thing he spent his life looking for, and realized that he had nothing left to find.
To just buy a complete collection whole?
Kinda pointless.
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You have to account for the price of having the full collection. This is one of those cases where the whole is worth a lot more than the pieces.
If you had one Ruby Slipper from the original Wizard of Oz movie set, it would be worth some money. But having a full pair is worth SO much more.
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Why? (Score:1)
Why?
What? No Intellivision? (Score:2)
Obligatory eBay link (Score:5, Informative)
Since they forgot to put it in the summary [ebay.com]
Anyway, the auction already ended with a sale. Also, shipping on it was 1000 euros. Pretty ridiculous, but I suppose it would take quite a few boxes.
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He is selling 22 game consoles. Each console probably costs 30 or 40 dollars to ship. That is like $600+ JUST for the consoles, let alone the 6,000 carts. How many carts can you fit in one box? a hundred? or two hundred? At two hundred that is over 30 boxes.
1000 euros actually sounds like a decent deal. Of course he probably is throwing it on a pallet and shipping it.
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I wasn't complaining. I was applying an adjective. Besides, if I had the 1M euros to buy that, I doubt I'd be quibbling over 0.1% more for shipping.
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I suspect that might have to do with it never receiving a Japanese release, as far as I can tell. Nonetheless, I don't see him specifying that his N64 collection is Japanese-only, as he does with some of his other collections.
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Thanks for the link.
100% Complete Nintendo 64 Fullset: All releases (around 200 games), complete in box with instructions!
Except for Conker's Bad Fur Day [wikipedia.org]. I wonder what else is missing.
it's obvious. he kept it. wouldn't you have?
All I want is.. (Score:2)
I saw it on ebay yesterday (Score:2)
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Since he got 999,999.99, no he must not be joking. Some of those games are so rare, worth in the 1.5k range. I'm not surprised he got a mil for it. Since he was taking bids, his number must have been right around 1mil and decided to end it and get his cash.
Preservation (Score:1)
If these are all in the kinds of condition that would warrant such a high price per piece.... where is the inner geek here?
We must preserve these, as every good geek knows, you can emulate away, but nothing compares to the solid, mint, original.
To those that believe this is a rip-off: You now know how to make 1.2 million dollars, good luck hunting!
Magnavox Odyssey II (Score:1)
You can't have an ultimate video game collection without Odyssey II.
19 VirtualBoy Games... (Score:2)
...in other words, all of them. Wow.
direct link to auction (Score:2)
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Its' famicom, not famicon.
Both are technically right.
Family Computer => famicom
My poor attempt at Romaji since Slashdot doesn't support Japanese...
famarii conputa => famicon
Since the product came from Japan and was never marketed as such to the US...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Geo_(system) [wikipedia.org]
The Neo Geo ( Neo Jio?) is a cartridge-based arcade system board and home video game console released on January 31, 1990 by Japanese game company SNK.
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He claims JAPAN-ONLY fullsets. If the game wasn't released in Japan, he didn't include.
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[citation needed]
Oh, hey, I also got word from a quality source that the post I'm replying to was written by a goat-fucking man suffering from micropenis and gynecomastia. How do you like that goatass?