Over the weekend, I was able to trade in a small bag of unwanted games and DVDs for $25 worth of NES games– once again, all games that I’ve never played. And again, most of these are relatively common.
My five year game plan to complete my collection was to find 40 percent my first year, 25 percent more my second year, 20 percent the next, 15 percent the next and then spend my final year on the last ten games that I know will be difficult to hunt down.
This meant finding about 275 cartridges my first year collecting, or about 5 cartridges per week. Of course, I would love save enough unwanted games in my trade pile to pick up a less common game like Bubble Bobble 2, Snow Brothers or Duck Tales 2, which are all high on my wanted list. But I also want to focus on getting the cheaper games out of the way.
My game plan is altered a little bit every week. Earlier I had hoped to find stockpile large amounts of unwanted games to trade to a store that had a super rare game that I needed. Now I’ve decided to focus my attention on the cheap games, get those out of the way when I trade in games at various retro game stores and pay special attention to those expensive games when I’m hunting in the wild at garage sales, thrift stores and flea markets.
My reasoning behind this is that many of the games that I’m able to use trade credit for might be cheap, but many of them are still uncommon and have the potential to become super expensive later down the road.
Since I didn’t find any NES games in the wild this week, I was able to trade some boxed Intellivions doubles that I had along with some unwanted DVDs for store credit, enough for these four NES games. This put on course with my collecting game plan, and I’m certainly happy with these finds.
Captain Skyhawk is a scrolling shooter video game developed by Rare and published by Milton Bradley. While there are tons of shooter games on the NES, I somehow never tire of playing them. I remember as a kid, SolarStriker was one of my very favorite Game Boy games that I played almost every day.
Similarly, RoadBlasters is an arcade game released by Atari Games where you use weapons to race through various tracks without running out of fuel. Matchbox even developed some tie-in die-cast cars that could be customized with armor, lasers, machine guns, and rocket launchers and jet engines.
Kickle Cubicle is a puzzle game developed for the arcades and then ported to the NES in 1990. And Adventures of Lolo is a similar puzzle game with similar graphics. I’m glad to go ahead and add Adventure of Lolo to my collection, before I begin to search for the two harder-to-find sequels.
I still had money left over the trade, but since I was in a hurry, I didn’t get the chance to pick out another game. But I’ll definitely remember how much trade credit I have at that store for when I come back. And garage sale season winds to an end, I’ll have to begin refocusing on thrift stores and indoor flea markets to add to the NES collection.
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This brings my collecttion from 116 loose NES games to 120. For the rest of the entries of NES Quest, check them out right here on Retro Chronicle.