The Game Scammer Days of Reckoning

Good used game sellers are an important part of gaming.  It’s thanks to places like Ebay, Gamestop, Half-Priced Books and smaller retail shops that we’re still able to buy games long out of production at generally reasonable prices.  Say what you want about Gamestop, because they deserve it, but there are several used games I couldn’t have gotten without them, one of which was a big contributor to my Namco vs. Midway series (sorry I haven’t gotten back to that, but I hit a snag with one of the games).  Without these decent sellers I would have never gotten games like Neogeo Battle Coliseum, Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword or the King of Fighters Maximum Impact games.  These are the people that should be supported.

The evil twins of these sellers are the scammers.  Also commonly called scalpers, scammers do not care about selling games at a reasonable price.  They care solely about fleecing as much money as they can out of people who just want to play them.  These scammers attempt to force people to pay more than the original game’s initial retail price even though a used game is degraded and thus worth less than when it was new.  They treat games like they’re some kind of collectible rather than a mass-produced product that’s the same as any other copy of the game that was sold for 50 dollars at launch.

To be clear, someone selling a limited version of something or a curious retro antique is not necessarily a scammer because those can be considered actual collectibles.  I know the thing on the cartridge sucks, but someone charging through the nose for one of the golden Nintendo World Championship cartridges has good reason to do so.

It’s the ones selling regular retail games that are the second biggest blight on gaming just behind Capcom.  It’s thanks to scammers that many games are completely unplayable.  They essentially hold games hostage for outrageous ransoms, hoping that at least one person will be stupid or desperate enough to fall for their scam and buy their 40 dollar game for 80 dollars or their 50 dollar game for 600 dollars.  Yes, it can get that bad.

If a game is in the hands of scammers, chances are good you’ll spend decades of your life regularly looking in stores both in-person and online just to find someone morally sound selling the game at its original retail price or less, all the while you’ll build up an imaginary version of the game in your head, hyping it up for all those years and only having how good you think the game is without ever being able to play it to satisfy that curiosity, leading to existential dread and depression that will make you die inside more and more as time goes on.  Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.  These are swindlers who should not be supported (though I might have to if one of my readers requests me to with enough money).

The advent of the digital distribution of older titles, like the Virtual Console and PS1 Classics, was a major blow to scammers because, thanks to those, nobody had to rely on getting the originals and could download the games they wanted for a few dollars.  Not every game ever can be on digital distribution platforms all at once though and because of that, scammers never went away.  In fact, I think they might have gotten worse over the years, doubling down on trying to scam as many people as they can with the few games they can still hold hostage so long as they’re the only ones who have the means for others to play it.  Of course, they probably don’t actually play the games themselves because they don’t love games.  They’re soulless reprobates.

It’s because scammers are such lowly parasites on society that it’s immensely satisfying when their attempts to keep people from playing a game comes crashing down.  See, virtually nobody buys what scammers are selling.  I’m sure there’s at least one person stupid or desperate enough to fall for one of these scams every once in a while, but most of the time you’ll see the scammers try to sucker someone in for years, holding onto the hope that eventually they’ll find the one unicorn of a sucker that will give them 150 dollars for their used 50 dollar Gamecube game.  Then an announcement trailer comes, showing that the game they’re banking on is being re-released at a fraction of the price and immediately all hope they had to scam someone vanishes.

If almost nobody was buying into their scam before, literally nobody is going to once an option that isn’t a scam becomes available and it is euphoric to hear, or even just imagine, the wailing and crying of scammers across the world on that glorious day of re-release.

I like to consider those days to be scammer days of reckoning.  They are the exact dates that scammers have the major cons they have going utterly destroyed and the thought alone is just as much fun as getting to play the games themselves after god-knows-how-long of being unable to because of these shitheads.  If the opportunity arises, such as if you see a one at a convention’s vendor hall, it is only polite to inform a scammer that you got to play their game without having to give them a cent, flash it in their face and then do a dance in front of them.  I recommend The Mario.

There have been a lot of these scammer days of reckonings in recent years, where gamers celebrated in jubilation and scammers cried with self-pity while being pointed and laughed at.  Their tears are probably delicious.

In this article I am marking some of the most significant of these days.  I think it needs to be emphasized how big of a deal some game re-releases are.  It was effectively the first time the games were made playable for the majority of people, regardless of what game systems they had, and by making them available it completely fucked over the scammers that tried to hard to keep people from playing, resulting in maximum schadenfreude.  There is no mockery that goes too far for a scammer.

It's not just video games either.

I’ll start things off with a few brought about by Nintendo.  Nintendo is infamous for not making their older games more available, as well as currently being a company of con artists in its own right, but every once in a while there’s a re-release from them that shakes the world.
 

July 18^th, 2013: Earthbound on the Wii U Virtual Console

The Wii Virtual Console had a large library of games from all kinds of systems, but one that never made it on there for some reason was the hit JRPG Earthbound.  For decades the only people who could play Earthbound were the scammers trying to sell it off for hundreds of dollars and, as I’ve established, they probably didn't play it.  Everyone else could only speculate about the game, watch a scant few people online play it and use Ness in the Super Smash Brothers games without ever experiencing his origins.  People would consider themselves fans of Earthbound even though they never played it and it was looking like they never would.

That changed forever when the WiiU released Earthbound on its Virtual Console.  A speculated reason it took so long for it to come out digitally is because of some of the game's flashing light effects.  I've mentioned it before with regard to SNK arcade games that Nintendo has a paranoia about rapidly changing colors causing seizures and any game that has them needs to change them so that the color changing is either gone entirely or slowed down.  I guess Earthbound was trickier to do that with than most.

Let the following meme set a precedence for the rest of this article.

You can replace “Earthbound” in that image with the majority of the games that will be mentioned in this article.  Being able to play Earthbound was a system seller for some.  All the people who had been trying to get the game for a reasonable price at last could leave all the scammers that kept it from them in the dust.  That carries over to today, where Earthbound is available on the Switch’s library of SNES games and the SNES mini.

Gee Mr. Scammer, I could pay 400 dollars for your copy of Earthbound, but I think I’ll just get the version with save states and some visual options for 8 dollars instead.

May 23^rd, 2024: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door Remake

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door is widely regarded as the best Mario RPG ever made.  The Paper Mario games before and after it are also well-regarded, but Thousand Year Door is the most beloved.  However, while the first Paper Mario was available for download on the Wii, Wii U and later the Switch, and Super Paper Mario was available on the Wii U eshop, Thousand Year Door didn’t have any alternative means of playing it outside of the original Gamecube version.  Scammers, noticing this, held it hostage for a hundred dollars at the lowest, knowing that it was the only way anyone could play it if they didn’t know anyone with a copy they could borrow.

Around 20 years after the game’s initial release, Nintendo came out with a faithful, but improved remake of TTYD on the Nintendo Switch.  The remake features improvements like a more faithful translation in some areas, a new optional soundtrack, features to some of the original’s minor annoyances and being on the Switch meant it could be portable.  It cut the framerate compared to the Gamecube version, which kind of eats, but overall the remake is considered a suitable replacement for the original.

Well gee Mr. Scammer.  I could buy your used copy for 150 dollars or I could buy a largely better, portable version that has everything your version has and more for 60 dollars instead.

January 8^th, 2026: Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the Nintendo Switch 2

Alongside Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and another game later in this article, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is the ultimate shorthand for “game that is unplayable due to scammers.”  Until the Switch 2 came along, you were never ever playing Path of Radiance.  Scammers have tried to sell the fucking thing for anywhere from 100 dollars to 300 dollars because, just like Paper Mario: TTYD, it never got a re-release and scammers are worthless sleaze who see that as the opportunity to prey on the desperate.

The announcement of the Gamecube classics as a whole was a humongous bomb for the scammers dealing in Gamecube games.  Path of Radiance is the most prominent, but a lot of the Switch 2’s Gamecube library so far has hit the scammers where it hurts, probably deliberately, by mainly featuring games that have been held hostage by them for decades, such as Chibi Robo and Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness.

It speaks to how badly scammers affect gaming, and to how bad the Switch 2 is, that Radiant Dawn is its killer app.  I only see the Switch 2 as “the one that lets you play Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance.”  The Gamecube should be the one I see in that way, but thanks to scammers the Switch 2 is the Path of Radiance machine now.  It might as well be a Switch 2 exclusive.

Gee Mr. Scammer.  I could pay 300 fucking dollars for Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, but I think instead I’ll get the overpriced Switch 2 online subscription for 60 dollars and then play Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance through that.  It’s a lot, but it’s still cheaper than buying the game on its own from you so have fun with your scam.

September 3^rd, 2023: Dokapon Kingdom Connect

I don’t know what happened with Dokapon Kingdom.  It was a modest and unpolished multiplayer adventure board game for the Wii and PS2 that I got for about 35 dollars and a few years after that scammers suddenly got a hold of it and were trying to sell it for over 120 dollars.  If you were waiting to get Dokapon Kingdom later, those scammers ensured you couldn’t.  There were, and still are, many more desirable games on the Nintendo Wii that are easy to find for a fair price and I have no idea what made the scammers latch onto this one.

Then, out of nowhere, Compile Heart and Idea Factory, two companies that are not known for making especially high quality games, ported the game to the Switch and PC as Dokapon Kingdom Connect.

Not much was changed for Dokapon Kingdom Connect.  The original version was published and translated by Atlus so the new owners didn’t have to do much of any work themselves.  The only notable changes made to Dokapon Kingdom Connect are covering up a few costumes that weren’t risqué to begin with and newly added online play.  Since the game is turn-based, it was probably hard to mess up online play because lag wouldn’t affect much.  The most important thing, of course, is that it was made available for a price less than 100 dollars, much to the delight of people interested in playing it.

Something I noticed with both this re-release and the Thousand Year Door remake is that right after they came out, outrageous prices for the original versions became dramatically less common, almost as if the scammers knew there was no way in hell anyone is ever going to buy it from them now that they have a second option.

September 12, 2024: Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection (Mostly MVC 2)

All the games in the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection have a history of a lack of playability and imperfect home console ports.  Notoriously, the PS1 version of the first Marvel vs. Capcom was sold for over 40,000 dollars.  That was not a typo.  I did not accidentally add an extra 0.  Forty Thousand dollars.  It’s not even a very good port to begin with!  Honestly the game selling for that seems to me like less a scam and more like part of a money laundering scheme.  Youtube user Guilewinquote did a video about this version that’s pretty interesting.

Some of the other games had a lack of good console ports too, most notably the Punisher game, but that one isn’t the fault of the scammers.  The reason Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has been so difficult to play actually is because of the scammers.  Them and Disney.

Console ports of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, the most hyped game in the collection, have always been in the hands of scammers.  As far back as the mid-2000s Gamestop was trying to sell the PS2 version of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for, if I recall, at least 90 dollars.  It was the game everyone wanted, but few could play.  The PS2 and Dreamcast versions were sought after because the only other way to play was by going to the arcade and playing it on a cabinet.  Scammers knew this and very quickly took those versions to hold for ransom.  Some continue to do so to this day.

It looked like the scammers had their day of reckoning with the Xbox 360 and PS3 digital re-release of the game (alongside the first game, separately) that allowed for online play in the PS3 version.  Those versions, while looking very sharp in HD, appeared to be made from the Dreamcast version, but with a few issues in the emulation.  I think it has some input lag, but still it was either that or paying over 100 dollars.

That scammer day of reckoning was undone after the infamous Disney purge, wherein after buying Marvel, Disney took every Marvel-related game off of digital storefronts, Capcom crossovers included.  Unless you downloaded MVC2 beforehand, it was back to your choices being scammers or an arcade.

As far as accessibility goes, at least original arcade cabinets of MVC2 aren't hard to find.  If you go to a few retro arcades, I promise someone is going to have it.  It’s not The King of Fighters 11.  MVC2 is a big attraction to customers and, if there are no original cabinets, Arcade 1Up made their own..  It costs even more than what the scammers are charging, but the Arcade 1up machines are more for the people investing in something for their public lobby or clubhouse.  For the average player, it means there are more arcade cabinets of it around, which is a net positive.

A place I go to has the Mortal Kombat one.

The scammers became truly and irrevocably fucked when Capcom came out with the Capcom Fighting Collection 2.  I already wrote about what’s in the package, but the important part here is that it has an arcade-perfect version of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 with lots of gameplay and visual features as well as online play, making it the definitive version, better than any version to come before it.

Gee Mr. Scammer.  I could buy your inferior PS2 port of this one game for 150 dollars, but I could also buy a collection that has a much better version of that with 6 other games for 50 dollars.  It’s such a hard decision.  I see you also have Project Justice.  Well…

May 16^th, 2025: Capcom Fighting Collection 2 (Mostly Project Justice)

If you thought Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had it bad, Project Justice had it 5 times worse.  At least MVC2 had some home ports.  At least MVC2 cabinets aren’t that rare.  At least MVC2 had a digital release, even if it didn’t last.  Project Justice cabinets are a myth and it got exactly one single port on the Dreamcast.  That version is exclusively sold by scammers in the 100 to 300 dollar range!  Most scammers don’t even try to sell MVC2 for 300!

Like the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection, I also went over what’s in Capcom Fighting Collection 2 and addressed the previous availability of them.  Capcom vs. SNK 2 is the marquee title for the collection, but it can’t be understated how monumental it is that people can now play Project Justice.  The only other game in the collection to come close to Project Justice’s status of unplayability is the first Capcom vs. SNK, but I’ve at least seen a cabinet of it before!  Nobody could play Project Justice at all!  Capcom may be a miserable failure at releasing their games in English now, but they are on top of making their older games available.

July 18^th, 2013: Shantae on the 3DS Virtual Console

They redrew her for it.

This is a shorter, more straightforward story.  The original Shantae was well-liked when it came out in 2002 on the Game Boy Color, but almost immediately scammers got a hold of it and tried to get people to pay between 200 and 1,000 dollars, in typical scumbag behavior.  Thus, nobody could play it.

Shantae as an IP was shelved for several years until Wayforward brought her back with the sequel, Risky’s Revenge, initially for DSiware.  I think Wayforward was well aware that the scammers made the original unplayable so the plot of Risky’s Revenge is almost completely unrelated, meaning nobody had to play the first one.  People still wanted to, but you had to take what you could get.

A few years later, Wayforward rectified the problem thanks to the 3DS’s Virtual Console, which made Game Boy and Game Boy Color games available to purchase for 5 dollars.  Ever since, Wayforward has been making sure the Shantae franchise is readily available on all manner of systems and that includes putting the first one on the Switch Online service, where it can be played to this day.  There was also a limited re-print of the Game Boy Color cartridge, fucking over the scammers even harder.

Gee Mr. Scammer.  I could spend 500 dollars getting the game from you, but I'm kind of a penny pincher so I'll save a few bucks and get it on the eshop for 5 dollars.

August 27^th, 2024: Castlevania Dominus Collection (specifically Order of Ecclesia)

Order of Ecclesia front and center.

With the other games I’ve gone over thus far, I either already had the games before the scammers got a hold of them or I didn’t care too much about them, even if I was aware of how impossible to play they were and the pain scammers were causing fans.  This one affected me.

I love the Castlevania games on the Nintendo DS.  Dawn of Sorrow and Portait of Ruin are to this day two of the best metroidvania games ever made and with how well they do storytelling, presentation, music and gameplay, I wasn’t terribly impressed with Symphony of the Night by comparison when I finally played it.  I was so satisfied with those first two DS games that I decided to hold off on getting the third, Order of Ecclesia, until later.  Later never came.

Only a year or two after it came out, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia fell into the clutches of scammers and they tried to sell this 40 dollar Nintendo DS game for twice its original price in used condition.  When I was finally ready to play it, I couldn’t.  Order of Ecclesia became the second Twin Snakes.  It became another game I would spend over a decade trying to find for its original price or cheaper just so I could finally play it.  No matter how much I looked, no matter how many used game stores I went to, I never found it for 40 dollars or less.  Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin were always easy to find for 30-40 dollars, but the only people who could play Order of Ecclesia were the scammers.  I could only read about the game in Nintendo Power and secondhand accounts from people who were lucky enough to rescue copies before the scammers ruined the game for everyone.  Just like with Twin Snakes, Order of Ecclesia shows what these scammers do to a person.  It shows you that FOMO is real and it turns people into impulse buyers.  Never tell anyone “it’s not going anywhere.”  It is.

After well over a decade of searching and further adding accelerant to my burning hatred of scammers, out of nowhere, that fateful trailer was posted online and the game collection it was for came out on digital storefronts on the same day.

Seeing that trailer is forever etched into my memory.  It was madness.  Konami had already made a collection of the Game Boy Advance Castlevania games and 2D Castlevania games before that, but there was no news that they would be making one for the DS games and I wasn’t sure if they could translate the touch screen utilization onto modern systems.  I am rarely fazed by anything that goes on in gaming and yet it was one of the biggest shocks of my life.  Seeing that trailer, for me, filled me with overwhelming happiness.

I was in for more of a shock when I actually went to download it the instant I got the chance.  Remember, the three DS games in the collection were sold for 30-40 dollars each, disregarding scammers, and they were all worth that price.  The Dominus Collection was 25 dollars!

I was willing to play twice that!  That price is absolutely insane!  These aren’t half-assed ports either!  The Switch version allows use of the touch screen!  The 3D visuals have no pixilation!  The translations are tweaked to be closer to the Japanese script!  They made some of the best Castlevania games even better!

The collection also comes with the arcade game Haunted Castle, which is pretty bad, and a brand new classicvania remake of Haunted Castle, which is one of the best classicvania games I’ve ever played!  I would pay 10 dollars for the Haunted Castle remake on its own!  The day the Dominus Collection graced gaming is one of the greatest days in gaming history!

The ironic thing is that Order of Ecclesia, for me at least, is the weakest game in the collection.  It’s still very good, but I know I would’ve gotten frustrated at several points if I didn’t have the collection’s save states.  That doesn’t matter though!  What matters is I played it!

Look, Mr. Scammer!  I’m playing Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia!  I’m fucking playing Order of Ecclesia!  I got Order of Ecclesia with 3 other kickass games and it cost less than a third I would’ve had to pay you to get just this one game!  It’s so much fun, Mr. Scammer!  I think I’m going to do a happy dance to the tune of Jamiroquai’s Canned Heat!  I implemented liberal use of the middle finger into it just for you!

It upsets me a little that the Dominus Collection isn’t getting a lot of attention.  When Earthbound and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 were released on digital storefronts, people treated it like a new national holiday.  It seems to me like the general consensus of the Dominus Collection is that it’s just another quality collection of Konami games among an ongoing string of Konami game compilations.  It’s not.

With the exception of Kid Dracula, every single game in the previous Castlevania collections were available in some form through the Wii or Wii U Virtual Consoles.  None of the DS games were and that meant Order of Ecclesia was unplayable.  The Dominus Collection was a savior for gamers everywhere and people like me got to experience Order of Ecclesia for the first time after over a decade of desperate searching for a fair price.  In the words of Mace Windu, “What happened here was a miracle and I want you to fucking acknowledge it!”

December 9^th, 2014: Suikoden 2 PS1 Classic

This is the big one.  This is the ultimate scammer day of reckoning.  That Marvel vs. Capcom PS1 port selling for tens of thousands of dollars was crazy, but that can be blamed on market manipulation and at least there were other options to play the game.  With Suikoden 2, there was only one way to play it and scammers made damn sure that players would never have that one way.

From what I can tell, it wasn’t too hard to get the first Suikoden and it became a non-issue early into the introduction of PS1 Classics for the PS3.  Its sequel is another story.  Scammers clamped hard onto every single copy of Suikoden 2 they could find and didn’t let go unless people paid them up to 1,000 dollars for it.  I didn’t care about Suikoden back then and even I had heard of Suikoden 2 solely because of how impossible it was to get.  It wasn’t “that cool JRPG that people really like.”  It was “that one game that absolutely no one has a hope in hell of playing.”  Suikoden 2 was Earthbound all over again.

Things stayed that way for such a long time that it seemed like Suikoden 2 was going to forever be known as the lost game, forever damned to eternity in the grubby mitts of con artists, unplayed and unloved.  For 14 years after its release, Suikoden 2 was a myth you could only hear stories about, but never play.  14 years of speculation and only a select chosen few being able to share the game with others.  For Suikoden fans, it was 14 years of being stuck with the first game and never getting to see a follow-up even though they knew it existed.

Then it happened.  The turning point for Suikoden 2 finally came.  It was added to the PS1 classics on PSN just like the first game and it was only 10 dollars.

We did it.  We finally won.  We can all play Suikoden 2.  Suikoden 2’s release on PSN was the ultimate triumph over the scammers.  It was a death blow to every scum sucking cockroach that tried to force people to pay for the price of 10 full price games for just the one.  I haven't played it yet, but remember how I described my joy over playing Order of Ecclesia and multiply it tenfold.  That must have been how the Suikoden fans felt.

That was enough, but it didn’t stop there.  Last year Konami doubled down on their decimation of the scammers by releasing a remastered bundle of Suikoden 1 and 2!

This remaster adds lots of improvement to the gameplay and re-does the visuals with HD character portraits and redrawn environments, making for a better experience of an already lauded game.  With that and the PS1 version still available for the purists, now there’s even less reason to buy those thousand dollar copies from scammers!

I don’t think there’s ever going to be a re-release that can hurt game scammers as much as Suikoden 2, but it's uplifting that so much progress has been made in the war against them.  It's priceless to see them have the basis of their con be swept out from under them, but it's far from over.  There are still many games that scammers have captive.  Rule of Rose, Cubivore, Haunting Ground, Metal Gear Sold: The Twin Snakes and both Pokemon Heartgold and Soulsilver to this day are unable to be enjoyed because of these greedy pigs and they must be saved.  I want to be able to mark more of these dates.