Some folks are new to gaming... but then some have been playing "Since Spacies". I'm one of those older gamers and this is where I'll be uploading my rants, views and general views on what is happening with gaming.
My name is Brian Costelloe and my username online is "SirBargeArse". I'm a former Sega employee and also use to be a writer for the Megazone magazine and Hyper magazine in the 90's!
Twitter: twitter.com/sincespacies
Facebook: facebook.com/sincespacies/
Also add me to either Xbox, PSN or Nintendo. My username is "SirBargeArse". Game on!
Find me also now at Patreon: www.patreon.com/sincespacies
Wow. What an awesome video. I remember the SMS and Mega Drive in the nineties in when I was very young. So many great memories 🇦🇺 I saw the hotline number on game boxes and never really thought too much about it. There’s videos about the US NES call vented but amazing to see inside the SEGA Aussie hotline!
One very big thing I'm thankful for is that even though we're poor from a country where supply is already limited to begin with, I had the sense not to destroy, throw or trade in all the items I figured I truly like since I was young. I don't have a lot, miniscule even compared to a spoiled, well off, zero responsibility trust-fund bum but at least I don't have to ransack another country's second hand aisles to make it look like I have foresight and learn to appreciate things for what they truly are.
Yeah I never do trade ins and I have rarely sold anything that I have collected up to this point. However, given that my house is limited in size I am re-evaluating my collecting habits. My future trips to Japan will still involve the odd visit to Book-Offs etc, but my future purchases will be even more selective.
Oh crud. I'll go through the emails and make sure it's put into SSS35. Just think of it this way, you don't need to bother sending in a new question. LOL
JB Hi-Fi DOES NOT CHARGE FOR PERKS! Where are you getting this ridiculous information from? It's free, always has been. Do you even conduct any research before spouting off half baked lies?
Hilarious that no one saw this grifting bullshit coming. EB cleared out the competition in Australia by being ruthless so they could have a monopoly & pull stunts like this. As they are on their last legs & becoming desperate shit like this is now being trotted out in the hope of getting braindead mouth breathers who shop at this place to sign up when the staff pretend to be their friends (as long as they can stand the body odour). I'll just stick to my favourites like Big W & JB Hi-Fi. Big W give a standing 10% off with their sub. Imagine that? An actual discount off merchandise. Astonishing!
Sonics left arm is missing but not on the floor???or sallys limbs aren’t there either I’m assuming that sally was beaten up and vandalised before being put there many years ago,cuz that isn’t weather decay,sonics left arm must’ve snapped off too.again before the junkyard,and got sold to the junker in 2008
I would dare say that they are on par with the Sonic and Sally Statues. This is not surprising given that they were all intended to be displayed at the same theme park.
@@OceanlinersAndCruises Well I was not able to get as close to the Sonic/Knuckles statues as the Sonic/Sally statues thanks to two large dogs but they did seem to be of the same size.
To add to your all very valid points, there's also one more thing to consider: As things get older, things become more scarce. It's completely normal that there's less offer now than 10 years ago; add a surge in demand and therefore you get emptier shelves and higher pricing. If you had 100 Super Mario 64 cartridges in the past, since then 20 have gone wrong and ended up in a landfill, 50 have been bought by people who keep them and the other 30 are still part of the market, and guess what: Nintendo isn't putting new Super Mario 64 cartridges. Therefore: Prices go up. Add to that the sense of opportunity for people who want to flip cartridges and there you go. In the case of Japan, I think most of the "fault" comes from a very weak Yen + stores going online. I personally stopped caring about retro consoles a long time ago and switched to emulation and never looked back ever since. I also get why other people collect these things as it brings back to memory so many good moments in our lives. Also, the situation should "calm down" at some point and then move on to newer systems as people who grew with their Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 get the money to collect for those systems, then eventually move to PS4/Xbox One/Wii U and so on. I think even eventually all this stuff (probably useless by then) will go back to a garage sell at some point a few decades down the line, when millenials start dying and their families don't know what to do with their collections :D
Damn camera just would not focus on me in this whole video but I was so happy with the take otherwise I just thought "ah stuff it... no one clicks to see my beautiful face anyway". LOL
If its on the shelf its fair game. Most of the stuff I want is quite expensive as its mint condition this and that in CIB. I have a wanted list I ignore everything not on that list, unless its something so expensive I wouldn't buy it, but find it much cheaper than anticipated, which happens like once every 5 years.
Yeah you don't sound like you are part of the problem. I'm more pointing out the locust approach to buying up EVERYTHING in one transaction for re-selling purposes only.
@@SinceSpacies The stores love me over there. I don't go to the book offs I find them a waste of time as I get everything I want on ebay thats common. I go to Japan to get the minty stuff out of the showcases. Last year I had 50 items on my wanted list and I came back with 20 items. 2 of them cost £500 I think. Battle Mobile and Spriggan Powered.
I had to stop collecting Saturn and Dreamcast games because the prices have got far too high to justify the expense. The problem is, there is no appetite to re-release many old games at an affordable price. They either want to paywall them (Nintendo Switch Online), refuse to sell legal disc images for emulators at an affordable price, make you go without or people go on the Jolly Roger.
Am I glad about 5 years ago I got all the Japanese games I wanted lots sealed from Japan. Paid very reasonable prices. So yeah if you’re trying now you missed it big time.
As business stand point, to sell make money, pay rent, pay staff is Win Win. The store operators are there to make money thats all. People outside of Japan is now just buying them to either resell the make a quick buck or collector just trying to fill their rooms like trophies. Will all that stuff being gathered, thee store don't make money with products sitting on shelves so I 1000% support the shop to sell whom ever comes in with $$$.
I knew before the pandemic that this would happen. A friend at the time who constantly traveled to Japan told me Japan was running low on games and Laserdiscs. They also told me they noticed a few shops overcharging certain games to foreign tourists because they knew they'll never see the games again. The gaijin tax is real. Me personally, I invested in EverDrives and ODEs because I don't have the space anymore for games. Nowadays I'm focused on buying console systems. Now they are tricky to find even in beat up, junky, needs to be repaired condition (Hello PC Engine/TurboGrafx).
Western "Collectors" are just greedy sh*ts at this point! The amount of japanese consoles and games i see on my european version of craigslist all of a sudden is INSANE! And it doesnt stops there, also seeing japanese stuff for insane prices in local stores. An american friend sent me a pic of a japanese Mario 64 in box being sold for 800usd in a store in Texas, .. that games sells for like 400yen in japan, .. its beyond dumb at this point! Lowkey feel like it should be illegal for them to buy out japanese stores and resell in the west, ngl!
It's not like there is an infinite supply xD It has to dry up at some point.... TBH by now retro is already trending down, nowhere near as popular as it used to be couple years back to the point that I don't even want to stock any games because games no longer sell at all and out of consoles I pretty much only sell saturns and dreamcasts nothing else sells anymore so as it looks to me the retro is pretty much over and I mostly now try developing my own mods and accesories for retro systems
That's really great insight from a shop owner. As a buyer, my problem is pricing. It's gotten so inflated that I have been turned off of retro collecting. I bought a few ever drives and was done with it. I use to pay a few bucks for a nes carts but now commons are even upwards up to 10 to 15 bucks. So I stopped collecting. I'll still buy physical but it's games that I want to play. I think collectors are burnt out by the mainstream nostalgia and it's inflated prices. I know I am but again, it's wrong of me to speak for others.
@@DanNguyen-ey5tw The US is probably much easier place to do business but in the EU if I buy a console in Japan for let's say 30€, sell it off in here for 60€ then I'm basically still at a lose just counting the console + tax but then if you add in your time investment, some systems not working, needing some investment to repair or simply being a total trash junk, all the selling fees, shipping fees, cables, power transformers and other accesories you need to include selling that system for 90€ you are still probably doing it at a lose so to make any profit that makes it worth the hassle is at least 6x the original puruchase price. The simple story is if it's any cheaper then I won't bother importing it, fixing it and reselling and so I gave up completely on systems that don't sell good enough, knowing a lot of people in the industry, most of us have engineering degrees (I have actually 2 and doing masters) so we might as well go do something else but people who know nothing about electronics and programming won't be able to do much fixing and modding to give people that extra value.
I remember when I lived in Japan around ten years ago it was so easy to find tons of brand new sealed top titles of super famicom, psx and saturn for super cheap. Why? Nobody wanted them. They were literally collecting dust in the corner. It seems these influencer retro collectors are so late in the game and spoiling the experience for everyone else.
My first trip to Japan was back in 2000, and I've returned to the country to visit or live many times since. I remember living over there at a point where games stores were everywhere and you could easily pick up a retro system plus a respectable starter library for $100. For so long, Japanese copies might be the ones that you'd go for because they were the cheaper option, but the population of people who did so was small, because those were buying Japanese copies were actually playing them, and thus cared about how heavy the "gaijin protection" (the degree to which a game would be unplayable if you didn't know the language) was. So, while there were those of us who were going there to shop or ordering online, we were never a serious dent on the local supplies, and Japanese companies usually didn't care about trying to sell to those outside the country. Even during my trip back in 2019, I could definitely tell that things weren't quite what they used to be, but there were still a lot of good games to find and bargains to be had. As someone who now desperately wants to rebuild their childhood Mega Drive/Genesis collection, I'd give anything to even go back to that point in time for a shopping trip, because I had no idea then what was to come. During my most recent trip in 2022, I was shocked at how much had changed. For so long, Japan was a place where I could still find joy from shopping (or even just browsing) as retail both big and small crumbled here in America, but so much of what I'd once knew was gone. I'd seen the landscape of Den Den Town (Osaka's Akihabara) change over the 20+ years since I'd first visited it, but it was so different on my last trip. It wasn't just that retro gaming was harder to do-ALL gaming had changed. Where as the first floor of a Sofmap might have once been all about the latest releases and interesting peripherals, now it was a showroom for having a home eSports setup. Toys R Us, a place that once showcased all types of games and platforms, now didn't even have a single PS4 offering, with Switch being the only resident of the store's smaller gaming section. And, of course, the insane decimation of the retro market. Where once there had been a few well-stocked shelving units of Mega Drive games for years, now I'd be lucky to find more than a handful of offerings. I'd see Famicom and SuFami section that looked stocked with games, but the closer I looked, I noticed that it was filled with countless copies of the same dozen or so titles, providing quantity but little variety. Want something that now goes for big bucks in the West, like PC Engine games? LOL, good luck. As someone who went and bought those games for so many years now, it might just be me trying to defend myself, but I really don't think those like myself were the cause of the problems we're now seeing. A few cows left to graze in a field won't destroy the grass, because it will have the chance to grow back. The problem is that now, the field is overrun by huge corporate farmers. Open up Whatsapp and watch as channels, on a daily bases, sell hundreds of games that they've picked up from Japan. Who cares if the games or good? It's stock to sell, pulled from the market at a rate that now can't be replaced. The COVID boom that completely screwed up game prices here has had repercussions around the world as well, as now ANY copy of a game is wanted. Who cares if you can ready or even play it? It's just going to be sitting on a shelf anyhow, so that matters not. I think the only fix at this point is for our generations to die, our kids to not care about these old games, and for the collections to flood back into the market in huge waves. There are indeed still chances to find good deals outside of the big cities, but even those are being hit as well. Just after I returned home from my 2022 trip, one of my favorite local (to my "home" area in Japan) junk stores closed for good, after having been there for as long as I'd been stepping foot in Japan. Even with the prices as they now are, I'd gotten some great deals on Mega Drive games during my last and final trip, and now I regret not just buying out their entire selection myself. Sure, I'd be doing what I hate others for doing-but hey, at least I'd be playing and loving those games.
Was in Japan last October and here's what I noticed... Osaka was just crowded... It was easier to get around Kyoto and Tokyo in comparison. I think the most games I bought at 1 time (surugaya Yokohama) was about 10, all for me to play. Everything I bought was for me... 4 consoles, and like 20 something games and have been slowly going through them. Greedy bastards that are buying games by the ton to resale are garbage. They should limit the amount of games... What should they limit to? No clue, maybe 10-15 titles max? If a reseller has to leave and reenter a store often, they may get tired by it and will go elsewhere... I don't know, but yeah, clearing out stores quickly mean people will stop going to those shops assuming they would be cleared out and artificially raising pricing since people buying whatever games by the ton makes it seem like they are in demand.... Humans suck sometimes
I went to Japan in 2006 and had a blast. I didn't even buy a ton of stuff (maybe 20 games?), but really enjoyed just sight seeing. I import a lot from Japan, so I don't feel super compelled to go back soon. Would be nice to take the family, though!
