goatdan

I almost brought it back to even... To me, it's SMB3 all day, every day. I never really found the same love for SMW that it seems like so many did. For me, they took away things that I thought were precise and intuitive, and replace them with things that were difficult -- like the difference between the tail and the cape. I know that you can learn the cape pretty easily, but I never felt like I had to "learn" the tail. It just worked. The different land themes in 8, the different ways to get through the lands, the music, the little secrets that you could figure out how to do without a strategy guide, and then the deeper secrets that usually you might stumble across but would need help to figure out (White Mushroom houses, I'm lookin' at you!) are just amazing. The entire progression is about as perfect as I think it could be done. For me, the order would easily go: 1 - SMB3 2 - SMB 3 - SMB LL 4 - NSMB DS 5 - NSMB Wii 6 - SMW All great games, it's just SMW is the least of them I think. Oh, and I *hate* the 3D incarnations.

I've spotted a ghost everyone! http://www.goatstorepublishing.com If you want one, please go order one ASAP. If you do in the next 24 hours, you get a free copy of Cool Herders. We've also pre-sold more than 60% of the entire run, and we don't expect these to last long!

That was me No problem on anything -- I really enjoy trying to find unique stuff for other people once a year and sending it to them. I'll admit -- you were one of the most stumping people I've ever had in a Secret Santa type thing with your responses, so I spent like a day cyber-stalking your old posts to try to figure out what to send. If you have never played NES PinBot before, it's amazing and one of the reasons that I got into pinball to begin with. Real PinBot on the other side of the basement can thank it being here because of NES PinBot. Also, just so you know -- those NEX controllers do need a NEX system to play. They aren't perfect because of that, but you said interesting oddities, and those are definitely that, if nothing else Finally, with that Lynx, I purposely picked one of the defective ones that I have lying around that I thought was the easiest to fix. Enjoy getting it working -- and, did you have one before? I didn't think that you did, but I couldn't quite tell... Really glad you got it!

Shipped today Just for the record, I really enjoy doing these. I read through a ton of my receiver's posts trying to find stuff that he or she didn't have but that I knew of and thought that they might enjoy. With these, I always find trying to figure out exactly what to do the most fun part. Now, I hope that the person who receives it enjoys it!

I don't know what happened with those USB cables, but from our perspective buying 100 USB cables that should function flawlessly isn't something we would normally test before sending. I apologize for it, and would be happy to try to work out a solution if you contact us about it.

The GOAT Store also has AC Adapters in stock

Yeah, it's tough to suggest stuff without knowing what you currently have and what sorts of games you enjoy. In a nutshell, some games I would suggest for anyone though: Joust, Robotron, Qix, and Crystal Mines II. All can be found pretty easily (I know I have them all at the GOAT Store). Some other easy-to-find games that I think are great if you like similar titles -- Chip's Challenge, Hydra, Paperboy, Batman Returns, Battlewheels, Ishido, Super Skweek, Batman Returns, STUN Runner, XYBots, Shanghai. Again, all easy to find titles. That's one of the nice things about the Lynx, they made a bazillion of most of the titles, so you can find them pretty easily to this day.

I contacted you back earlier. For whatever reason, the site seemed to be having issues last night. If you get an email, it did work

Weird. Comcast sometimes eats our emails I know (WEIRD thing with them, it used to be I couldn't even email those with Comcast with normal emails and when I wrote them they said that someone reported us as "known spammers" and even though the person I was emailing asked them to allow it, they said no. That seems to have been cleared up, so I don't know. I guess make sure you aren't blocking anything from goatstore.com, and sign into your account and make sure that you are signed up both for "Site News" and "Member Specials". We rarely use member specials, so "Site News" is the key one to sign up for. Sorry about that, but glad you got one!

I am Dan, and what I probably said was that you should become a GOAT Store member and sign up for the mailing list, which is where we sent info out to first when we had about 10 from the last batch to sell, and now with this batch. That was really all that I could say then. Now that this is confirmed, I'm sharing it here so that people know. If you want one, please head to http://www.goatstore.com, head to Jaguar and pre-order a Skunkboard Rev. 3 Ghost. That's it As for the dates in the emails saying Feb 2011, I apologize, I thought that it was a generic email stating that we would ship them as soon as they were complete, and it must still be our ORIGINAL one when we thought we were on track for a Feb 2011 date. It will be Feb 2012 or, hopefully, sooner

Wanted to make sure that everyone knew about these... if you haven't heard about the Ghost Skunkboards, head to http://www.goatstore.com and you can see them there. What Tursi said in the post above this is exactly right -- we wanted to have some stock inventory of these to last in the store for a while. But, that is what we planned on the first run too, and those sold out 100% way before we ever got shipment. We had pre-order for that open for a few months, and could have run many more if there was demand, but we didn't see it. When we started shipping, we got absolutely bombarded with people asking us about these boards and if they could get on the list for more of them. As of right now, we have sold over 20% of this run in the first 48 hours since opening pre-order for it. There is *absolutely* no guarantee that we will have these in stock even at the end of this week, much less in a month or two. As Tursi mentioned, this is the last time this current board design will be available to be ran, so if you want a Skunkboard, please don't wait and order yours sooner than later. We both really want everyone who wants one of these to be able to get this -- which is why we did the long pre-order period last time -- but beyond this, our hands will pretty much be tied. Thanks for the support everyone, and happy deving

Oh yeesh - this is how busy I've been lately. If you call them and ask today, they would give it to you. If I have time to set up the link, within the next couple days. I know that I won't have time tonight, but I might have time tomorrow... I've had the link in my email for a while now. Oh, and we should start having announcements roll pretty quickly after that. I've approved the 2012 shirt design logo for the pre-orders and we're using a different company this year so that won't be all screwed up, hopefully, and we've got a TON of awesome things planned or refined already for this next show. I'm really excited to start putting it all together, I just need my life to calm down just a bit so that I can actually start making the announcements!

There are actually I think 5 variations, if you include the plastic differences with the first one. The difference between the 2MB and 1MB game is the sound and title screen. No one else has ever found anything else that I know of that were changed. Doing something like changing the draw distance or other minor changes wouldn't have saved them any space, so there would have been no reason to have someone spend time removing it. As for the different batches, this happens with games all the time. You run what you think is enough to satisfy demand. If demand is higher, you run more and often add a small change to the product to denote the run. A LOT of SNES games for instance on their instruction manuals end with -01 or -02 because they were additional batches. Cybermorph was ran as a pack in, and then run again as a 2MB to save money, and then ran again when they figured they could sell it individually after taking it out from being a pack-in, so it makes a lot of sense how there are three revisions on it.

The plan right now is that there will not be -- the road trip that we put together last year was something special for our tenth anniversary and truthfully took a TON of time and effort to put together. If there seems to be a ton of demand for it, we'll look into it again, but as of this moment, there are no plans to even explore it this year.

Yes -- last FULL weekend in March. In fact, that is the same dates until like 2016. If I ever get more than 10 minutes of free time, the announcement will be up, as well as the start of the announcements for the 2012 show! It's looking like it's going to be a great one already -- display-wise, we've already lined up even more people who will be filling up even more space than last year!

Here was the major problem with the commercials though -- they basically said stuff like, "Anyone can see that 64 bits is better than 16!" The problem was that if you took, say, Cybermorph and compared it to Star Fox, or Trevor McFur and compared it to Donkey Kong Country, no one could really tell what 64 bits meant. The whole NES is 8 bit, Genesis / SNES are 16 bit thing worked because the games really looked a heck of a lot better, but it wasn't like Sega and Nintendo were trying to actually explain to people what those additional 8 bits did. So, people just sort of blindly believed that power was associated with the 'bits' of a console, so when Atari came out with this 64 bit system that looked moderately better than the 16 bit systems instead of four times better than the 16 bit systems, people didn't understand what the hell Atari was talking about. That is the reason that to this day, people come out and say that the Jaguar wasn't really a 64 bit console. It was, but that particular fact is only one of about 50 different factors determining the graphical prowess of a system, and I would strongly argue that processor speed and available system RAM are MUCH larger factors affecting the way that a system can display graphics. Otherwise, the Jaguar could output better graphic than the 32 bit Xbox could.

Articles like this that don't explain their reasoning behind their picks are always just stupid in my opinion. I'm not one to ever say that someone is wrong for having a list as this stuff is always just opinions, but to have a list without explaining your reasoning is strange. As others have pointed out, there is a few 'not console' consoles on this list. As people have pointed out, the line about the Jaguar being obsolete doesn't make any sense -- it wasn't obsolete to the SNES or Genesis. Based on what he has said in others, I think it would have made more sense to pick the 3DO and carp about how it was $699 (or was it $799?) at release? It also suffered from a lack of quality titles like the Jaguar, and it would fall into the same 'obsolete' category if you're putting it up against the Playstation and Saturn (which is still unfair, but whatever). Also, while the Jaguar marketing for the most part was pretty stupid, *all* video game marketing from that era was pretty stupid. The 'Sega Scream' commercials were just as dumb if not more dumb. So I don't blame Atari for being out of touch with those at all, more of just a sign of the times. So anyway, yeah -- it might be worth being on the list, it might not be worth being on the list, but with absolutely no backing up of the decisions nor explanations why they were picked, it's pointless to try to argue with it.

Wouldn't have brought it up if 1993 hadn't been used as an excuse for Checkered Flag and Supercross. To be fair, the Jaguar was built to do 3D with flat shaded polygons, while the 3DO was built to do 3D with texture mapping. Comparing the power of the two isn't really fair, as the Jaguar can push more polygons -- but they aren't texture mapped and vice versa. To me, the flat shaded look ages a LOT better than the texture mapped look, but that's a personal thing and if we're all going to be honest, 99% of the 3D games on both systems look pretty miserable today. I like the Jaguar for the end of the 2D era, not the start of the 3D games... excepting Tempest 2000. And really, Checkered Flag doesn't look horrible, it just controls horrible. Supercross 3D definitely does look horrible, but they were trying to texture map the Jaguar which wasn't it's strength at all. Tempest 2000 looks great to this day and controls well too.

I don't know what it is, but I have tons of systems hooked up to a 32" HDTV here, and while almost all of them look noticeably worse with the conversion, for whatever reason the Jaguar just looks crisp for lack of a better word. I'm also running composite, as is nearly every other classic system that I have hooked up, and for whatever reason it just looks cleaner. I have no earthly idea why that is...

Unless you really want to open them, don't go new on either of these. Neither of these are had by any retailer "in quantity" that I know of, and because of that the prices on them are generally quite high for new games. Instead, get a used copy and save half the money on it

I feel like for the 2600, you practically need third party joysticks. The originals are all right, but there are a number of them that are way, way better than the originals I think. The N64 is a definite that it needs third party controllers. The originals absolutely suck, and no matter how nice you treat them, they will fall apart. Personally, I like the ones made by Hyperkin... that I know I have in stock at the GOAT Store but they aren't on the site, hmmmm... darnit, I'll have to update that I guess. I bought them after trying a bunch and they are the best sort of original-like controllers, but they have a metal joystick so they are actually responsive and they don't wear out. Beyond that, there really aren't too many consoles I think third party "standard" controllers that are any good. I tried a TON for the Dreamcast for fighting games, and never found one I liked beyond the fighting sticks. The dogbone NES controllers are still the best, as are the original SNES controllers. 6-Button Genny, Jaguar Pro-Controller, Saturn Gen 2, any Playstation dual shock... Oh, I guess I also did like the wireless Xbox controllers from some company I'm forgetting now. And I do like the Tron PS3 controller

Cool manual variation - but isn't it weird that Atari was still sitting on 2mb version of this game? Unless perhaps they were finally getting around to gutting and "refurbishing" old inventory that was returned for whatever reason from retail stores. Buy-backs, customer returns, warranty claims, etc. That would actually be my hunch as to what a lot of that stuff was / is. I also pulled a 2MB version from the box I opened, but it was a not-shiny overlay. My guess is that what happened with these was that Atari took the game out of a bunch of the boxed consoles they hadn't sold and then boxed them separately to sell them as games. I don't really know, but like I said, I do know that the company I bought these from wouldn't have bothered to try to put one over on people, especially on a game as cheap as Cybermorph.

Hey everyone, thought I'd toss this out there... We bought that copy (and a bunch of other stuff) from a company that bought a big bunch of stuff directly from Atari. For whatever reason, they decided to re-seal their new copies of Cybermorph before they sent them to us, but they aren't original seals, so that is why we had it listed as no shrinkwrap. I didn't open the game though because I figured everything was normal. As someone already mentioned, the overlay is original. The manual is confusing though -- my best guess is that very near the end of the lifespan of Atari, they decided they wanted to sell the rest of their stock of Cybermorphs, and they made a cheap manual for them. The reason that I think this is that the manual is like a condensed version of the big manual, is a more impressive manual than a usual photocopy rental version type thing, and I know the company we got these from wouldn't have bothered to make them. Anyway, so I think it's a new variation. I promptly took the other copy that we had of Cybermorph out of stock, opened it, and put the manual into my collection If anyone wants another copy, PM me and I can see if I can talk to the supplier about getting more.

What's your time worth to you? This is just an example, but I think it pertains pretty closely: If you spend let's say 10 minutes per game listing it, and 10 minutes per game packing it, and you were selling them at let's say $4 / game, after eBay fees and whatnot you'd be making like $9 / hour. For that much merchandise, let's just pretend it took 1000 hours to sell it all, for $9000. That's half a year where your full time job is selling on eBay and you're not exactly making a ton of money. If instead, you could pass it off for $5000 to a buyer, but the transaction took 20 hours total, that might be a lot more interesting to you. If you spent $3000 on the merchandise, the option is to make a difference of $4000 by spending 980 more hours trying to sell it. Based on that, you're paying yourself $4.08 an hour to sell the games at the higher price. When it comes to dealing with that much merchandise, it definitely makes sense to sell it bulk and not try to sell it individually. If he could actually get something close to his retail prices for the games, it would be different -- if you could spend 1000 hours and make $75,000 with $72,000 of that as profit, that would be amazing -- but there aren't enough Jaguar / Lynx / Game.Com fans out there to make that happen.

I just don't think he understands how many bridges he has burned. Keep in mind that I placed an order with him six months ago, never got it and he never replied to multiple e-mails. Finally I had to do a Paypal chargeback to get a refund. Apparently, he thinks this is no big deal as he felt no concern about sending me an e-mail directing me to his website to make an offer on everything. Many people had horrible experiences with him when he was selling on Ebay and getting insulted when people were offering the current value of the items. I don't think he understands the reality of both the Lynx and Jaguar market currently. The vast majority of the Lynx library can be purchased for $5 a game sealed mint from various vendors. Similarly, most Jaguar games can be purchased for $20 or less sealed/mint/shipped. Yes, there are some more valuable games, but he only has a few copies of each of them. He would literally have to drop most of his prices 70%-80% just to get down to current retail and that doesn't include the fact that the new purchaser will want a good wholesale price so they can make a solid margin given the shipping and storage costs for a lot of junk that will sit for years. He doesn't have to have bridges with too many people -- He's looking to sell it all in one huge lump. How many people have the: 1) Want for that much merchandise 2) Ability to fund buying that much merchandise 3) Storage space available for that much merchandise 4) Ability to move that much merchandise for a dead system There really aren't that many vendors out there who would have any interest in doing it. I've found in the past that it seems that a lot of vendors incorrectly value their merchandise. I knew another vendor who I really liked who was shutting down, and I was talking with him about wholesaling a bunch of stuff from him, but he wanted in "clearance" prices more than what we were selling the games for on our site. I'm not saying that is what Go Atari is doing, since I don't know. What I do know is that if he's not willing to work with someone to make the sale, there is no way that anyone is going to be hopping on the sale of that sort of stuff. You're right on with your 70-80% off quote, and then you need to add to that that a high percentage of that stuff (95% of the Game.Com stuff, anything that there is more than 100 copies of) you're going to sit on for practically forever before selling...