Nintendo – Page 5 – Nintendo Sega Japan!

Famicom Everdrive N8 replacement shell

March 29, 2015April 8, 2015D.Lo5 Comments

I use the Everdrive N8 for most of my game playing. While I love collecting physical games in boxes, I largely keep them in the box and use the Everdrive to play the games I own.

N8_1892

I bought it a couple of years ago with a shell. It’s a classy transparent plastic, but it always annoyed me how the shell was taller than a standard Fami cart. It seems these are still the shells being sold with the carts even today too.

N8_1893

N8_1897

N8_1896

However, I found a seller on Alibaba who sells knockoff Everdrives (Pirated piracy carts…), and he sells a shell separately as well. And it looked pretty good so I grabbed one.

It’s every bit as high quality as the real one, and even comes with an equally professionally printed label. But is the right height! So much better.

I got blue this time, because the red didn’t go well with the OG Fami. Blue looks amazing.

8/20 Konami Famicom Collector Cards

March 21, 2015July 28, 2015D.Lo6 Comments

At some point starting in 1987, Konami decided to include a collector card with all their titles. Each card had an illustration related to the game. Some cards had screenshots or pieces of screenshots, others had artwork of scenes in the game.

There were multiple cards for each game, so perhaps Konami thought kids would be encouraged to get the same games their friends had to trade cards? Apparently it didn’t work, so they stopped including cards a couple of years later, and only the following 20 titles ended up with the cards:

Ai Senshi Nicol
Arumana no Kiseki
Dracula II (Castlevania II)
Contra
Do Re Mikko
Dragon Scroll
Exciting Baseball
Exciting Basketball (Double Dribble)
Exciting Billards
Exciting Boxing
Exciting Soccer
Falsion
Getsu Fumaden
Konami Wai Wai World
Majo Densetsu II (Knightmare II)
Meikyujin Dababa
Metal Gear
Salamander
Tetsuwan Atomu (Mighty Atom aka Astro Boy)
Top Gun

I have the bolded ones already, and I always like the idea of complete sets of something (when the goal is achievable) so I’m on a mini-collection quest to get one card of each game that had one.

Of the ones I have, I like Arumana no Kiseki and Astro Boy best.

So now I have 12 to go. Some will be easy to get (there are plenty of cheap copies of Konami Baseball and Basketball), some will be harder (popular titles like Salamander and Metal Gear). Do Re Mikka will likely be hardest, it’s a very expensive music game that came with a piano keyboard controller.

My pilgrimage to Nintendo’s headquarters in Kyoto

March 15, 2015January 20, 2019D.Lo3 Comments

I’ve been a Nintendo fan for 30 years, and I was in Kyoto for the first time. Well I had to go to Nintendo, didn’t I?

First stop was very hard to find, and Google (at least in English) was very little help. I wanted to see the oldest surviving Nintendo building, buried in the backstreets of a now largely residential area of Kyoto.

KyotoNintendo2_0009

After some research (largely machine translating Japanese walking tour maps), I worked out it was somewhere near here, which was around 15 minutes walk from the apartment we were staying in.

So we set off the next morning. After a lot of wandering in the freezing cold winter air, we found it!

Built in 1933, it sits on the same land as the original headquarters from 1889. While nicely designed with lots of detailed flourishes, it’s an otherwise relatively nondescript building. Except for two plaques:

The sign references Japanese playing cards ‘Karuta’ (かるた) and western playing cards ‘Trump’ (トランプ – Toranpu)

This was their playing card factory and distribution centre before they became a larger toy company, and it has stayed in company hands.

I took a peek inside as well, it is clearly well maintained and clean, and in some form of use.

It appears to have been maintained perfectly from the 1933 until today.

The next stop would be much easier to find. It was about 40 minutes walk away through residential and industrial areas, though we stopped in at a couple of Kyoto’s famous temples along the way.