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.

Yu-Gi-Oh Early Days Collection Review Part 5

 In 2004, the original Yu-Gi-Oh manga ended and America, being as late to the party as we possibly could, only then started getting it translated in 2005 while the anime was going into the filler arcs.  You would think the original series would be wrapping up with the story ending, but if you think that you clearly don’t know Shonen Jump.  The anime was such a money maker in America that 4Kids commissioned Studio Gallop to make a movie and the Capsule Monsters miniseries.  Even Japan wasn’t done with the manga because they made Yu-Gi-Oh R!  The original Yu-Gi-Oh was being kept around for at least a little while longer while the sequel to the anime, Yu-Gi-Oh GX, was starting to take off.

Recommended read.

That means more original-era games and the last game included in the Early Days Collection.

Yu-Gi-Oh: Early Days Collection Review: Part 4

A player might notice something around this time of Yu-Gi-Oh game releases; there were no new characters introduced in them and, barring the game-original Reshef of Destruction, there hadn't been for a while.  That's because Battle City was the last part of the manga to center around the card game.  After that came the final part with exploring the pharaoh's memories, where only two card games would be played for the rest of the story, none of which was between any new characters.  By 2004, in Japan, at least, the original manga ended.  This means the games had to start using the same roster of characters in new ways.

Yu-Gi-Oh Expert 2 is the only game in the Early Days Collection that has no translation, at least for its original version.  After Eternal Duelist Soul borrowed Expert 2’s dueling system for the English release, Expert 2 as a whole would get a revision released for international audiences.  I call it a “revision” and not an “updated version” because it takes a handful of cards out, changes some art and tweaks a few things that could be considered either for better or for worse.  I guess Digital Eclipse threw the original version in there for the sake of thoroughness and for the Japanese gamers that care.  The game we got in America would be titled Yu-Gi-Oh: Worldwide Edition: Stairway to the Destined Duel.

Yu-Gi-Oh: Early Days Collection Review: Part 3

The Game Boy Advance era is where I think Yu-Gi-Oh games hit their first big stride.  Up to this point, the games other than Capsule Monster GB with cheats have only reached the level of “good enough.”  Dungeon Dice Monsters comes off like an experiment to see what the designers could do with the GBA’s increased power and memory, which would explain why the monster clashing graphics are the most visually interesting and system-pushing part of the whole thing in an otherwise barebones framework.  After that, they took a big leap and made the first Yu-Gi-Oh game to follow the rules of the real card game, the game that would be released in American as Yu-Gi-Oh: The Eternal Duelist Soul.

Yu-Gi-Oh: Early Days Collection Review: Part 2

 At the turn of the millennium, Yu-Gi-Oh started finding its footing and established what the franchise would become moving forward.  The official card game from Konami was taking hold and just as impactful was the premier of the Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters anime.

There was no stopping the Yu-Gi-Oh hype train in Japan and that meant there was no stopping the assembly line of Yu-Gi-Oh games to feed the hungry masses that couldn’t get enough of it.  It was another year and another Yu-Gi-Oh game, this time titled Yu-Gi-Oh: Tri Holy God Advent.  In Japan, that is.

It wasn’t until a year later that Yu-Gi-Oh made its American debut when the Duel Monsters anime was dubbed into English by 4Kids Entertainment, hot off the success of the merchandise fountain that is Pokemon.  Fitting that the 4Kids dub of Yu-Gi-Oh named a god after Roger Slifer because this thing exploded like the ending to Lobo’s Paramilitary Christmas Special.

I could go on a long-winded old man monologue about how it was the hottest thing in cool and one of my first shonen anime ever that I still enjoy to this day despite its faults, but this is a game collection review so I’ll keep it short.  Yu-Gi-Oh’s anime became a monster hit, but the manga it was based on still wouldn’t be translated to English for a few more years.  If you look on the back of some of the English game boxes (they’re in the instruction manuals in the collection) they say they’re based on the hit television series, which is not technically true, and on the back of some manga releases, a bit of text tacked on says it’s the inspiration for the hit anime featuring scenes too intense for television, which actually is true in both languages.  In America, Yu-Gi-Oh was riding the coattails of the anime specifically.