Major_Tom_coming_home

June 18, 2015

The artwork on the cartridge is extremely appropriate, congratz. Score one for the collectors!!!

June 17, 2015

If old = valuable I would be happy to sell the 1,000,000 year old granite rock in my front yard for $500,000 LOL.

Sellers like this end up asking the same price without budging until the day they kick the bucket. Either they are hoarders who don't really want to part with anything, or their ego makes them delude themselves into thinking they own lots of valuable things even though they actually don't have a pot to piss in. Their $55 combat cartridge will still have that price tag when it gets tossed into a landfill never to be played or collected again. It a sad situation for this type of seller when you think about it.

I love the common argument. "Those games are all old, rare and valuable."

June 17, 2015

Well, to be fair $5 isn't bad for Plaque Attack if you don't mind a roached up label . I would have gotten it if I needed it for my collection. Also, if that boxed River Raid 2 is being sold for $10 I would buy it in a heartbeat assuming that is actually the price he has for that item.

Everything...

Everything in this picture... *Sigh*

carts.png

June 17, 2015

Sadly no pics but still worthy to mention: Circa 2004 I went to a toy store in the local mall (KB-Toys I think but I am not certain) to buy Metroid Prime for the Gamecube. The location was in the process of closing and they had a bunch of old crap that had been recently been 'discovered' in their distribution center. They were selling brand 'new old stock' copies of Desert Strike for the Sega Genesis at something like $30. At that point, the game was 12+ years and two console generations old, and was / is a very common game. Honestly, I probably would have bought it at $10 just for the nostalgia of buying a brand new Sega Genesis game from a toy store. To be fair, it actually is a very good game IMO. :-)

June 15, 2015

I was wondering if the Sears Arcade II combination joystick / paddle controllers work for both functions on other models of the VCS? I believe the Arcade II has a switch to toggle between joystick control and paddle control, and I'm wondering if this means the combination controller will only work properly with an Arcade II system? Thanks!

June 12, 2015

... Then there was OS/2 Warp... for windows! LOL

Methinks IBM was quite delusional in thinking they could wrest control of the PC market back out of the hands of the PC clone manufacturers and Microsoft DOS / Windows. They did get some sales for their PS/2 systems based on the IBM name alone, but not enough people were ever going to spend 2x the price of a PC clone to get a system with hardware / software that could only be supported by IBM at exorbitant cost.

June 12, 2015

A bit off topic, but I also miss the old Sears. Pretty much every power tool and gas powered lawn equipment my grandpappy bought came from Sears, and much is still being used after his death 20 years ago. My first socket set was Sears Craftsman made in the good old USA. I'm not sure if Craftsman hand tools were considered 'top of the line' when I got them but they were undeniably great value for the money. I bought my Craftsman cordless drill because the consumer reports rated it very highly and it was 1/2 the price of the other highly rated drills. The sad part is K-Mart bought them not to operate them but with the intention to slowly milk them dry, let them go out of buisness, screw the employees, and then make the real profit from the land. Their former culture and the way they used to operate is sadly now obsolete, but had advantages for the consumer. Sears was a place you could go to get everything for a household in one place. You knew that anything with a Sears brand would be good quality. They carried parts for everything they sold and they gave great post sale support. Their employees cared because they were commissioned and knew a lot about the products they sold. Great customer service. Basically, they were the opposite of Wal-Mart in every way and it's too bad we don't have that option any more.

I dig these Sears threads.

Sears was THE store back in the day. Most of my original games came from Sears although funny enough our first VCS was an Atari branded one. Dad saw that Gemco had an awesome sale one weekend and so off we went and he had it hooked up to our Zenith portable (portable in that it sat on a table instead of being a huge console TV) that same day...

We usually shopped at Sears. There was one on Southmore in Pasadena, TX that we shopped at all the time. It was a 2 story standalone building built in the late '50s I believe when that part of the Houston area was booming. By the late 1970's/early 1980's it was still a pretty nice part of town economically speaking. The Sears was really nice, the middle of the building had a huge snack bar with popcorn, submarine sandwiches, candy, and soft drinks/ICEE's. There was a small arcade area near one of the entrances that had a few games. The toy section was near the automotive/tool section of the store. My Dad would drop my brother and I off in the toy section while he looked at tools. Mom would usually be upstairs looking at housewares or clothes.

At the time they had one of those Sears Telegame cabinets set up so you could play a lot of the games. It was pretty easy to tell which games were clones even though they had different names than their Atari counterparts, so we never double bought any games.

I do remember that there was also a Sears Surplus store off of I-45 South. That was a Sears store that sold scratch/dent applicances, last season clothes, and other stock that was just being closed out. When the crash hit, we got a bunch of games there. I think a lot of them were only $.99 sometimes.

Remember that during those days, Sears had enough clout to even have their own GI Joe exclusives (like a Cobra version of the Mobat tank). Even camping gear made by Coleman had a Sears logo on it back then.

Up until fairly recently, my Dad would only buy Craftsman tools. They were made in USA and had a lifetime warranty. Now they are made in China and there isn't much reason to spend the extra cash when you can buy the same thing just about at Harbor Freight.

June 8, 2015

It's something you spray on dirty contacts or controls to clean them and regain electrical contact. Regular control cleaners often have some light lubrication in them to help with old, dirty switches. Ironically, the stuff I was using claims to be safe for the environment and supposedly safe on most plastics and even natural rubbers except styrene and polystyrene. I still feel disgusted about what happened. Now all I have is a case donor. I've never seen something like this happen when I've been cleaning controls in a vintage game system, antique radio, or arcade game and I"ve been using this same cleaner for the past few years since I bought a case for $10 at the Ohio Pinball show!

I'm sure lots of us have been there and done that, as you may have read in my previous post.

June 8, 2015

What is contact or control cleaner?

I believe it's more or less a less harsh liquid spray form of silver polish. At least that's the purpose.

June 8, 2015

I'm sorry to read that this happened to you. If it helps, you aren't the first person to destroy something by attempting to repair it. I've bricked two beautiful high end Asus laptops by trying to 'fix' something that either wasn't really broken or was something I should never have tried to fix myself in the first place. As you can probably understand, I'm typing this post with a desktop computer (that I actually quite competently built myself LOL) and will never own a laptop again. $60 certainly stings and I feel for you, but the same lesson cost me $3400 over the course of about 4 years to learn.

June 5, 2015

H.E.R.O. has really skyrocketed recently. I checked on ebay. And only 3 buy it nows prices range from $90-$100!! It is worth owning. Such a fun game and very addicting. River Raid 2, Private Eye, Frostbite, and Cosmic Commuter are fairly pricy. $20-$40 range for them as well.

I actually have Pitfall II ($11.50) Frostbite ($3.50) and Cosmic Commuter ($13). The Frostbite cartridge had marker writing on the label but I was able to get the majority of it off without harming the label. I could probably get it all of but my OCD was satisfied with 90%. My experience has been that if you are patient with Ebay and are willing to sometimes bid instead of buy it now, you can get very good deals on Atari games. I think the Price of H.E.R.O. won't stay as high as it is now, but if it does that is why I have a harmony cartridge. My absolute limit on Atari games is $25 and that would only be for the 'extra special' titles like H.E.R.O. . At the moment I can't actually think of any other games I would pay the full $25 for.

June 4, 2015

What was really weird about this was that Atari went along with it even when Sears was selling it's version of Intellivision as a 'super' game system a step above their Atari rebrand... I never understood why Atari put up with that.

I'm guessing they were 'riding the bear' - making concessions to a much larger and more powerful company to maintain an important business relationship. Microsoft did this for a while with IBM in the early days of the PC by developing OS/2 for IBM at the same time they were developing Windows. Publicly they said OS/2 was the real next generation operating system and was Windows on steroids. Of course, Microsoft soon got to the point where they didn't feel they needed IBM anymore and most people have never heard of OS/2.

June 4, 2015

Just wondering what the previous post has to do with the topic of this thread?

I freely admit absolutely nothing. I started the thread and was enjoying the tangent the thread had taken. No disrespect intended.

June 4, 2015

I am wondering if anyone else would consider replacing a factory blue text label with a repro picture label? Ghostbusters is the only Activision game I have with the blue text label but I would love to replace it with the black label that has the ghostbuster's logo. (Note: This isn't to 'increase' the value or re-sell, just for my collection and I'd be fine if it was 'Atari Age' branded.)

June 4, 2015

The thing I like about collecting for the VCS is that as a general rule, the good games are pretty much not overly expensive...except for H.E.R.O. :_(

Out of what I own:

1. Spider Fighter

2. Keystone Kapers

3. Pitfall

4. Pitfall II

5. Crackpots

6. Pressure Cooker

7. Cosmic Commuter

8. Megamania

9. Stampede

10 River Raid

June 4, 2015

My favorite arcade game of all time is Gyruss, and while watching youtube videos comparing the different versions of the game (Arcade, Atari 2600, NES, etc.) I started wondering if there was a back story to the game. The game takes place within our solar system, and there must be a reason you are starting at the outer part of the solar system and heading towards the earth. I was feeling especially creative at the time so I came up with my own back story. I wanted it to be brief, coherent, but over-the-top and slightly cornball in the same way 1980s space game type stories tended to be. I also posted this to youtube, but I don't think many people are watching Gyruss video's. Here's what I wrote:

"Earth is under attack!!! The invaders came without warning, attacked without provocation, and their only terms are the utter destruction of human kind! A few small scout ships are all that escaped the destruction of Earth's once proud space fleet. You are now on a desperate mission to save humanity! A friendly alien scientist in the Centauri Sector has given you a small device that is capable of wiping out the invaders, but only if you can get it to Earth. As you approach the outer planets of earth's solar system, you realize the enemy has discovered your plan! Wave upon wave of enemy ships appear on your radar as you drop out of warp to fight them! The last of earth's planetary defenses are beginning fail. All of humanity is counting on you. You must get through!"

June 2, 2015

Behold, Stella in her FULL GLORY

June 2, 2015

This is purely opinion and not everyone would agree, but I think Solaris actually looks better than any of the intellivision space games and the later VCS games like jungle hunt could graphically match the intv. Stella can do amazing things in the hands of a programmer that knows her ways. I mean, Solaris can almost pass for an NES game!!!

http://youtu.be/AXjwBNyWmzw

June 2, 2015

Oh yes! George Plimpton. The Intellivision commercials from 1981-1983 were great! I was too little to see any of them, but I do enjoy these commercialson youtube.

I can also claim bing too little, and saw them on youtube as well. Plus my dad had made a few modifications to our cable television box and our TV was usually tuned to HBO or Showtime. Ah, the good old days of everybody easily cracking open the cable box and stealing all of the pay channels...

June 2, 2015

It is kind of easy to forget but Sears was a retail giant in the late 1970s -- remember this was a company that built the world's tallest building and occupied more than half of it with its corporate HQ earlier in that decade. And at the time almost everything in Sears was its own brand.

I actually do remember this, at least from the early or mid 1980s. The Sears Catalog was basically the modern equivalent of Amazon.com and they sold everything. Kenmore, Craftsman, Diehard, and other sears brands were very popular, respected, and stood for quality. You could never go wrong buying tools, electronics, housewares, or anything else from Sears. The salespeople knew their shit and provided great service to rightfully earn their commissions. Sadly, that kind of business plan no longer works and the shit show that is K-Mart will eventually destroy all that remains of that once proud and mighty company. :_(

June 2, 2015

Maybe a bit related, once I got my VCS and games, after long playing of Phoenix, Enduro, Ms Pac-Man and Super Cobra, I was getting ready to purchase my next game.

I went to the shop, looked around, oh this game looks good, purchased it, went home, it didn't fit. I had purchased Beauty and the Beast for Intellivision.

I didn't know Intellivision was another video game system. I thought it was just the company name for an Atari game. Yes, I got it exchanged.

I did the same kind of thing. As a kid I bought a used copy of Zaxxon at a consignment shop that turned out to be Colecovision. They let me swap it for an Atari game but the respective cartridges for Atari and Colecovision were and still are nearly identical. Aside from the label, which didn't always make things very clear if you weren't "in the know".,the only physical difference is the Coleco cartridge connectors are a tiny bit wider - just enough so that you cannot put a Coleco game into an Atari.

June 2, 2015

"Target games, tank games, space war games..."

I love how back then, companies like Atari or Intellivision would brag about how they had space games, sports games, tank games etc. but wouldn't necessarily mention actual titles. I specifically remember intellivsion doing this in a commercial with 'space games'. It's funny to me how the actual titles being offered wasn't considered important, just the fact that "we have lots of generic space games you can play that may or may not be any good" LOL.

This was a few years before I was born. Anyone remember this commercial?

June 2, 2015

I'm a new collector and for me it's $15 for video cube. Not terrible but meh for me. I knew that was a decent price so I bit on it. For Atari, Activision, and Imagic I'm willing to spend a bit more freely since I consider them the big three and would like to get reasonably close to getting all of their titles (that don't cost an arm and a leg anyway). There's no way I'd personally drop Quadrun or Pepsi Invaders money on a cartridge, and I won't lose any sleep about 'missing' them either.

June 1, 2015

Warning - I only played most of these as a kid and may be looking through rose colored glasses.

Of what I have played Dungeons of Daggorath is what I consider to be the best game on the system. Be aware that it's not a game that can be played without reading the manual or some sort of FAQ to learn the controls and mechanics. It has some odd mechanics and probably isn't for anyone. Keyboard control only and you type in commands (<m>ove, <A>ttack <L>eft etc...) For me it's also the scariest game of all time because of the minimalism, sound effects, heartbeat, torches which burn out, and getting jumped by powerful monsters etc. it's a very memorable experience to say the least. The only problem was it was so 'scary' me and my friend were often to afraid to play it. A ( I also played it as an adult. It's archaic and obtuse, but these elements give it a ton of atmosphere like no other game ever made and I think it holds up).

Temple of Rom - Kind of like Pitfall in a huge overhead view maze like world and you have a laser. Like pitfall I don't think it can be 'beaten'. Unique and memorable A- ( I also played it as an adult and it holds up)

Starblaze - very good space shooter / strategy, a bit like Defender with a little strategy thrown in. B

Downland - Sorta like Donkey Kong. Your Character looks a lot like Mario. Freaking hard and unforgiving but good. B

Spidercide - Think blasting spiders while they are building a Tholian web around you. Enjoyable enough. B-

Microbes - Decent asteroid clone with interesting two player mechanic. Very simple game. Not great but not bad. Very good control for your ship C+

Color Baseball - If you would like to play Baseball on your coco it's not bad. C+

Androne - First person shooter meets Bezerk. Meh. You are in a multi floor endless maze (I think it's endless anyway) C

Slay the Nereis - Shameless centipede rip off, but not a bad one. If you like centipede you'll like this. I don't like centipede so I give it a C

Pyramid - This was a game that came on cassette instead of a cartridge. Think stripped down Zork in Egypt. Text only. I say don't bother with this one unless you enjoy interactive fiction games D-

June 1, 2015

I have a question for anyone who can remember buying or shopping for Atari cartridges in the early years:

How did you know that games like 'Pong Sports (Sears)' and 'Video Olympics (Atari)' were actually the same game with different titles? Was the assumption that if you bought a Sears Tele-games branded VCS you would only get your games from Sears? Was it even common knowledge that 'Tele-games' and 'Atari' was the same thing, or were they trying to create an illusion that they were different consoles?

By the standards of today, just having a separately branded version of your console exclusive to a single retailer would be odd, but releasing games with multiple titles seems like a recipe for huge amounts of confusion, crying kids, and pissed of parents. It seems like the only 'benefit' would be for collectors 35 years later who appreciate the challenge of collecting variants. Thanks!

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