An old Japanese video game console sits in my living room and I write things about it here.
I discovered a neat DIY Mario related crafts idea the other day. All you need is two magnet sheets (the type you use to write messages on fridge doors), a pair of scissors, a dry erase marker and a spouse who owns a black 2017 Toyota Sienta that they are willing to let you mess around with. Fortunately this past Saturday my son and I found ourselves with a bit of free time and all of those things…
I noticed something alarming the other day which is a problem I think a lot of retro gamers are having these days. I can’t play with a lot of my retro gaming stuff anymore. Its just become too damn valuable. This is a weird problem that most people would probably like to have, but its still a problem worth having a talk about because I think it will eventually completely destroy retro gaming as a…
One of the cooler and also (for some reason) least known Mario "things" out there is a set of round Menko cards that were released in Japan in 1985 and feature artwork inspired by the first Super Mario Bros. game. As you can tell from some of my recent posts I've become interested in tracking down and collecting all of the Famicom related menko which came out in the 1980s. Menko are kind of like a…
To put the recent $660,000 sale of a copy of Super Mario Bros. for the NES in context, I'd like to ask if anybody remembers how a decade ago there was a similar buzz about the below copy of Air Raid for the Atari 2600? It made headline news for selling for $31,600 which seemed like such an insane price for a video game back then (ah 2010 was such an innocent year). It seems quaint compared to…
A really interesting and very rare thing sold on Yahoo Auctions a couple of days ago. A copy of Lot Lot without the game! But this was more notable for the sticker it contained: A Lot Lot Silver Members Sticker. Back in the day Tokuma Soft had a little contest with both this game and Exed Exes. If you finished the game with a certain score a password would flash on the screen. If you wrote that…
My kids have built up a pretty decent sized collection of Famicom games over the course of the past year. I mean, just look at all these suckers: And they also have a little pile of Super Famicom games too. This got me thinking about my own NES collection when I was a kid. My parents gave me an NES Action Set for Christmas when I was 13. It was great and my late sister and I spent an insane amount…
I was on Twitter the other day when I saw this post by RuiReiChannel, had written about building a DIY Famicom out of Petit Blocks, which are these super cheap block sets you can buy at Daiso, Japan's biggest 100 Yen store chain (100 Yen = about $1). These are a big thing for Twitter users in Japan I discovered after going through the ＃プチブロック (petit block) hashtag rabbit hole on there. I thought…
This is another recent pick up - a Super Mario Bros 2 menko that is about the size of my head! This is from the Famicom Disk System's Super Mario Bros 2, NOT the American Super Mario Bros 2 (which as we all know is Super Mario USA here, or Doki Doki Panic). This was released in 1986 by Amada and is considerably larger than their other Famicom menko cards . From my general knowledge of how menko…
Agh, I'm so excited about these! Amada Famicom Puzzles! I decided to pull the trigger on a big ticket item that was up for sale on Yahoo Auctions a few days ago. This beautiful box arrived in the mail from the seller yesterday: Open it up and you find three more boxes, with jigsaw puzzles for Super Mario Bros, Pooyan and City Connection: Picking them up, they are so beautiful: And under them you…
One of the cooler and rarer Famicom things out there to collect are these guys: Famicom milk caps. These things are awesome, yet very little seems to be known about them. They were distributed with bottles of milk for Japanese kids back in the 1980s, you could pry them out of the top of the bottles like this: They feature characters from well known Famicom games from the mid-1980s. The artwork on…
I picked these up the other day, a big pile of Famicom menko. They are spectacular. Menko are cards that Japanese kids use to play a game that mainly involves throwing them at other menko on the ground. It is very similar to pogs, though menko have a much longer history in Japan. There are a few different kinds of Famicom menko out there which were sold in the 1980s, all of them I think produced…
I haven't been posting much recently, mainly due to just being busy. I did hit a milestone in my Famicom collection that I thought was worth mentioning though. 7 years ago I did a post detailing my attempt to put together a complete CIB collection of the 18 little Namcot Famicom games. At the time I was just three short of finishing it - Burger Time, Valkrye no Bouken and Galaga. I was able to…
I had this idea last night that I played around with after the kids had gone to bed. We have this big advent calendar that my mom made for us after my son was born. It hangs on the wall in our living room and has little candies in it. I was absent mindedly staring at it when it occurred to me that most of the pockets would be the right size to hold Famicom carts. So I took the candies out and put…
As I've documented in a few posts this year , 2020 has been the year of the Famicom in my house. I gave my AV Famicom to my son back in April and we've played it together almost every day since. I've gradually increased his game library with little presents here and there for good behavior and he has about 30 now. That only represents less than 5% of my own collection, but its a pretty impressive…
I picked up these on Yahoo Auctions recently: four Famicom jigsaw puzzles! I already had a couple of Famicom game jigsaw puzzles featuring Star Force and Yie Ar Kung Fu which I picked up a few years ago and look like this: Those ones were produced by Amada, a company which put out a lot of Famicom related odds and ends back in the 80s. The ones I got this week on the other hand were put out by a…
I was browsing Yahoo Auctions earlier when I stumbled across an auction for a CIB Famicom Disk System game called Sexy Invaders which I had never heard of. Actually it seems most of the world has never heard of it either, except for this brief FAQ on Game FAQs there isn't really much out there about it. Its kind of weird to see cover art like that on a Famicom game. It may come as a shock, but…
I recently decided to do something I'd been waiting six years to do: break out my Top Rider inflatable motorcycle controller! Back in 2014 I remember buying a big lot of miscellaneous Famicom stuff off of Yahoo Auctions and discovering this in it. I had never seen one before so I blew it up and gave it a go, as documented on this post here . If you read that post you'll notice my main take away…
These are some happy Famicom games inside a happy Famicom. They have an interesting story which began back in the 80s. A mom and dad bought them for children who had seen them on the shelf in the toy section of their local department store. Ice Climber came first, SMB 3 a couple years later. The kids loved them and played for hours. They had pride of place in the family home, the Famicom nestled…
There was a very interesting thing that sold the other day on Yahoo Auctions: Super Mario Brothers Ice Cream Bar Wrappers . Without the ice cream. According to the listing these were originally sold in 1986 and were produced by Yuki Jirushi, a famous Japanese maker of dairy products. There are two of them, which originally had peach flavored ice cream bars in them. Actually I'm not sure if they…
My kids are really getting into Mario stuff since I introduced them to the Famicom a couple weeks ago. The characters have gone from zero to the top of their "childhood fascination" list at break neck speed, displacing Pokemons who were briefly at the top of that list until the beginning of this month. So I've started to do something I haven't done in years: look for Mario related toys . Only not…
I was playing Lego with my kids on a rainy day over the weekend when I decided to try out an idea I had been toying with for a while: making Super Mario Brothers characters out of Lego blocks. I wasn't sure how it would go, but its surprisingly easy to do if you have a massive pile of Lego bricks lying around. I just did a Google search for some 8 Bit Mario pixel art grids and then went to town…
Hope you all are doing OK out there. I’m doing fine. We are under a kind of light lockdown here in Japan now. No school and I’m mostly working at home, and glad to still be working! On a lighter note, the greatest Famicom related thing that has happened to me since i got my first one almost 12 years ago occurred over the weekend. I introduced another little human being to my Famicom. Its hard to…
Holy crap, I just realized that last week was the 10th anniversary of my first ever post on here! Time flies when you get old! I haven't really been keeping up with the blog so much lately. By which I mean the last five years or so. I've become a father twice over during that time period and I haven't even touched a retro video game in two years. Not because I don't like them, I love them now as…
I made a pilgrimage out to the Osu neighborhood in Nagoya, which I've highlighted on this blog before. It is Nagoya's version of Akihabara in Tokyo or Den Den Town in Osaka - full of electronics, toys, cosplay, manga and other shops including of course retro games. I fell in love with the place on my first visit almost 7 years ago, but yesterday I fell out of love with it. Terrible things are…
One of the more popular holy grails out there for Famicom collectors is the Archimendes version of Gradius. It was released in 1985 as part of a promotion by Otsuka Corporation which sold a cup ramen called Archimendes ("men" is the Japanese word for noodle so its a sort of word play, I see it accidentally written "Archimedes" in English a lot). Here is an absolutely fabulous 1980s commercial for…