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 America 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.

Yu-Gi-Oh: Early Days Collection Review: Part 1

As I already stated in my review of Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links, I’ve been a fan of the original Yu-Gi-Oh ever since it arrived in America through the anime from Studio Gallop.  When Kazuki Takahashi wrote his manga about a kid gaining Egyptian magic and playing games, he couldn’t have predicted the phenomena that it would become, let alone that his little one-off Magic: The Gathering knock-off would be at the center of it all.  When Shonen Jump gets a hit manga on their hands you’d better believe they’re going to merchandise that sonbitch.

Inevitably that meant games across all manner of consoles, in particular Nintendo’s handhelds.  The Yu-Gi-Oh Early Days Collection puts the first 13 (the marketing says 14, but I’ll get to that) Nintendo handheld Yu-Gi-Oh games into one package and I was hyped to get to both replay games I used to love and play games I never got to before.  The enhancements and new translations made it all a big deal, but I swear you wouldn’t know just how big a deal it was if you read the reviews.

I was going to get the collection anyway, but I’m disappointed by the reviews of it I’ve read thus far.  Regardless of whether I agree with them or not, most give a general overview of the collection and come across as though they only played each game for a little while before writing them off.  Understandable, since there’s 13 games and they only have so much time, but I’m of the mind that even if one were to recommend the game, readers might want to know which games are more worth their time, how many are any good, what to expect from each game in more detail and what the cheats included in the collection can do to enhance their enjoyment.

The other sentiment I see is that it’s a collection made only for the old-school Yu-Gi-Oh players and that the only people who will enjoy the games are the ones nostalgic for them.  I think that’s both a reductive way of thinking and not true.  There are games in the collection that, even today, are a fun time, outdated cards or not.  I would love for younger people who weren’t around for them to experience some of these games and maybe get invested into the card game’s simpler times.

I’m going to review the Yu-Gi-Oh Early Days collection more thoroughly, less at the package as a collective whole and more the parts that make it up so that readers can make a more informed purchase.  I’ll look at every game in the collection, give some context of where the source material was at the time of each game’s release and some context of where I was at the release of some of these games.  I am writing this as a fan, but I’ll try to keep the nostalgia goggles off.

Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links Review

Before I named myself the Shonen Otaku, I grew up on a lot of the shonen anime for the younger audience in the 90s and 2000s with 4Kids and Saban dubs.  The Pokemon anime in particular took the world by storm and while I was definitely a big fan of that for a while, the series that stuck with me the most was the original Yu-Gi-Oh, or at least the original for America, since season 0 wasn’t dubbed.

I loved the fun dubbed dialogue, the monsters battling each other through the finesse of a card game (even though rules were loose in the anime), the way each character’s deck reflected their personalities and the high stakes with the magic and sci-fi elements that kept me wanting to see what happened next.  Even today I can watch it and enjoy it and I highly recommend giving it a watch either on the official Yu-Gi-Oh website or Netflix.

Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles Review

I love game remakes.  Classic games of old can be made even better using modern resources and dated aspects can be ironed out for a much better experience, usually more in line with improved later installments, in the case of franchises.

Left: Cheesy.  Right: Scary.

I also love compilation re-releases for the simple fact that you're getting more than one game for the price of one and having them all in one package makes getting previous installments of certain games less of a hassle for newcomers.

With this, the Samurai Shodown Anthology and Orochi Saga Collection, I have 17 SNK games accross 3 disks.

Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles for the PSP is a combination of both by having three games: A 3D remake of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, the original version of it, and the extremely beloved Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, all from happier times before Konami lobotomized themselves.  Like how Samurai Shodown 6 was first released in America through the Samurai Shodown Anthology, this is the first international release of Rondo of Blood and the only one until a Virtual Console port a few years later.