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 on hand, so we decided to turn my wife's car into a Bullet Bill.  In this post, I'll show you what we did. But first, some background.  Recently I've been stopping at 100 Yen s ..read more

  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 hobby.  In fact, I think it is inevitable.  It occurred to me when my 6 year old son discovered some of my rarer Famicom games the other day.  I found myself telling him that w ..read more

  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 by a company called Amada 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 cross between baseball cards and pogs and have a long history in Japan as kid's toys.  In the same way that American trading card makers like Topps ..read more

  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 today.  But to me the interesting thing is that since that sale and a couple of sales of loose copies in the two years after, Air Raid has completely disappeared from our r ..read more

  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 password  onto a postcard and sent it to them they would send you one of the above members stickers.  Oroti at Famicom no Neta wrote a really great post about this a couple ..read more

  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 kind of 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 of time playing it for about a 3-4 years period. During the entirety of that period I was able to accumulate a collection of.....(drum roll) Six games. That was it ..read more

  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 it looked pretty cool so I took up the challenge. First step, stop at a 100 Yen shop and peruse their selection of Petit Blocks.  The one in our area it turns out has a lot of the ..read more

  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 were distributed back in the day, these big ones weren't sold but rather were prizes given out to kids who bought the little ones and hit a winner ("atari") card whi ..read more

  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 find 40 more boxes, each containing a random puzzle of a Famicom game inside: The outside of each box looks the same.  It has Super Mario Bros artwork on the front, City ..read more

  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 them is quite striking because it is unique and doesn't just mimic the art on the cart labels or anything.   I don't know which milk company released these ..read more