Only English Final Fantasy 2 NES Cartridge On Sale for $50K 109
Croakyvoice writes "In what seems to be the 'in thing' at the moment comes another auction to add to last month's Zelda NES auction and that crazy million dollar collection. This time, for RPG fans, this could be classed as the Holy Grail of NES games. The game in question is Final Fantasy 2, which was never released outside of Japan, but luckily for the person who at this time is selling this on eBay for 50K, there was one made for the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by SquareSoft. Sadly, the U.S. version never had a release because they decided to work on the Super NES instead."
He should have sold earlier (Score:3, Funny)
Re:He should have sold earlier (Score:4, Interesting)
When did they do that? I personally hated 13, loved 12, liked 10, hated 9, loved 8, quite liked 7, and after (or before) this it's not about affection for the gaming public, because very few people have actually played 1-6.
You'll get loads of people disagreeing with my personal opinion about FF, but IMO FF12 was the best they've done. Yeah, they fucked up 13 (IMO), but they've fucked up in the past and come back. It's still a franchise I'll buy into.
Re:He should have sold earlier (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? Lots and lots of us in the US played Final Fantasy 1, Final Fantasy 4, and Final Fantasy 6. A bunch of us also played fan translations of Final Fantasy 5. I also played 7, but I haven't tried anything more recent... I just don't have the time or energy to play Final Fantasy games anymore.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a bit of a generational gap between those of us who played FF1-6, and those that play FF7+
My bet is that the guys who played FF1-6 are the same group who miss reading Nintendo Power. :)
Re:He should have sold earlier (Score:4, Funny)
I'm too old for nintendo power (there was no Atari Power).
However I did enjoy final fantasy 1 and 4 (or 1 and 2 as i knew them.)
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You're probably right about that. I love FF3, FF4, FF6, FF7, FF9; moderately like FF1 and FF5; and totally hate FF2, FF8, FF10, FF12, FF13. And yes, I miss Nintendo Power. =)
My friend and I made the FF5 fan translation you played, but I never actually played through the game until like a decade later. FF5 wasn't one of my favorites, but it didn't suck like FF8 and FF13.
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im 34, ive never played a FF title past FF3/FF6 except the MMO which was honestly kind of crappy.
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I actually loved the mechanics of FFXII. As someone who had never played an MMO, it seemed like a a fresh design that was a lot of fun.
Lots of incredible music on that game... just the intro theme got me smiling the first time I started it up.
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because very few people have actually played 1-6.
Are you implying that those people (including myself) are old? ;)
Actually, I played all up to 8 (in Japanese version first, and then in English). When I was 12, I played Final Fantasy 1 when it first came out (in Japanese) and I was hooked because the battle system was completely unique that day. I am an old school and I like cartoon more than real. I like them up to 7. Once 8 came out and I tried for a couple hours, I no longer wanted to play it any more because the game looked too real and not a single pa
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FF1 just ported to Android... (Score:2)
.... makes me think FF2 might not be far behind.
ff3 to ouya.. (Score:2)
which is droid so....
Re:FF1 just ported to Android... (Score:5, Informative)
FF2 has been available on iOS for a couple years now.
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FF1 and 2 have been available on BlackBerry for ages.
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Q: Can you please upload to ROM online, so the world can play it? There is no way publisher will release this, and if you don't it could be lost to time: Forever.
A: OK, I did it (9 years ago).
So, it looks like he dumped and uploaded the ROM as soon as he acquired the cart.
Re:Does anyone know if... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. The person auctioning the cart dumped it himself. (It's Frank Cifaldi, who's a pretty well-known video game historian and journalist.) While doing so kills the market value, Frank Cifaldi believes more highly in the preservation of prototypes and betas than in maintaining the value by letting a cartridge languish in a box and degrade.
I believe his site, Lost Levels (lostlevels.org) in fact offers the ROM for download for preservation purposes.
The translation is kind of rough, but I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.
Old NES translations (Score:1)
I seem to remember some of these existing in the wild on emulators quite a long time ago. There was a patch which could be run against the dumped ROM to translate most of the dialog etc. Some things that were actually graphics rather than text still retained Japanese letters/characters, but the character dialog was surprisingly well done.
Re:Old NES translations (Score:5, Informative)
Those were fan-created translations. This one was official.
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I believe his site, Lost Levels (lostlevels.org) in fact offers the ROM for download for preservation purposes.
There's a link, but it's a dead-end redirect =\
Is it worth it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I never really understood why these development cartridges fetch such high prices. Well, on a superficial level, I understand since it's a matter of supply and demand. But at a deeper level, it's a one off because it's an unfinished product. To me, I don't see any difference between a free fan-based english conversion vs an official "never sold to the public" version.
Would you pay millions of dollars for a test version of Windows 98 developed for esperanto? The answer is no, because nobody cares. However, the same logic doesn't apply when it comes to toys and games
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I would and you wouldn't, because you don't care and I don't care, but I bet someone would and does. People like to collect all sorts of things and some of them have a lot of money to spare. Collecting game cartridges is no more stupid than numismatics, philately, or even cartophily - some cigarette cards have sold for millions.
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition to a completist mentality behind wanting to own every variant of a record, there is also a demand (ranging from "mildly interested" to "i will mortgage the house to get this") for "test pressings" of records. These are just like what they sound. There are usually fewer than 20 of these made per release. Often less than 10 or even 5. Plain white labels or possibly a boilerplate label with "artist, song title, label" info handwritten onto the labels. No printed cover. A few go to the label, some to the band, for listening to and final proofing before the "go ahead and make us 1000 copies" order is put in. It's very rare that there is a change to an album once the test pressings have been created and they are almost NEVER available for sale to the general public. I've mostly only seen them for sale after the album comes out, strictly as collector items.
The $50k asking price may be ridonkulous, but the demand for this one-off game makes perfect sense to me in light of what i've seen people get stupid over in the vinyl world.
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Altho i'm loathe to use the word/admit it
No you don't. Damn hipsters!
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:5, Funny)
I don't think anyone will give you shit for collecting vinyl records, as long as you're not one of those nutters who claims they are better at reproducing sound than a properly mastered CD. "Vinyl collector" does not necessarily equal "Vaccine-shunning, astrology-believing, $5,000-power-cable-buying, moon-landing-denying audiophile."
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think anyone will give you shit for collecting vinyl records, as long as you're not one of those nutters who claims they are better at reproducing sound than a properly mastered CD
I haven't heard a "properly mastered CD" in years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ [youtube.com]
That's why vinyl sounds better... it's not that the medium itself is better, it's that it's not physically possible to press a record that's been as overmastered as the crap that they can do with a CD.
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Re:Is it worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)
People also pay a lot of money for an original Van Gogh painting, even though a good modern painter can make you a copy that only an expert would be able to distinguish from the original. If appearance were the only thing that mattered, the price difference wouldn't have been as great.
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Selling items that have no tangible value is what capitalism is all about. I wish the Soviet Union was still around to force this type of non-sense out of consumers.
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You answered your own question. Supply is rather constrained, and there's a lot more demand for a piece of Square and Nintendo history than there is for old Windows betas.
Re:never released in the US? (Score:4, Interesting)
It was FF4 that was released as FF2 in the US.
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50k is not the selling price (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've never figured out why people take some of that shit to a pawn shop instead of Christies.
Case in point, the Willie Mays uniform, or the George Washington Funeral Medal.
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because they want it back? That's what a Pawn shop is all about. Secured Loans. They hold the item and are responsible for security and everything else.
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Re:50k is not the selling price (Score:5, Informative)
That doesn't mean that its any less entertaining, but its a staged show bringing in far more interesting things than what the average pawn shop owner would ever see in their lifetime.
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I've never figured out why people take some of that shit to a pawn shop instead of Christies.
They explain it to customers all the time during their negotiations.
"Yeah it will sell for triple my offer at an auction, but you will have to pay $$$$ upfront for catalogue fees and appraisal, then a percentage after sale, and it may take 6 months to sell".
People go to a pawn shop because they need money TODAY, bills have to be paid.
They dont have any money for upfront costs, they cant wait months for the sale. They need that cash in their hand asap and thats what a pawn shop specialises in.
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There's a possibility of making more money at a pawn shop. Most big auction houses take fees of at least 30%, which of course is only worthwhile if you can get more out of the auction than the item is really worth. At a pawn shop you can often talk them into giving you 75%+ of the item's worth.
Remember, It's A Crime To Copy It (Score:1)
That's right folks, it's a crime! Don't copy that floppy, don't copy that ROM! You're only paying for the physical media, and once it wears out, it's gone.
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Too late, it's already been copied. :P
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I also want $50k (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I also want $50k (Score:5, Insightful)
Definitely Unfinished (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Definitely Unfinished (Score:5, Informative)
"Guy" is the character's name.
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From that example, the character was actually named "Guy" and he was dead.... But yes, from the other screenshots it seems that the translation is a bit rough... From what I'm getting one lady translated it for the trade show, so it wasn't the polished final results.
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What's silver? Is it yummy? [lostlevels.org] (The economy in their reality must be even worse than the one in our reality.)
King of Palakia said: "Anyone enters this castle gets my daughter!" [lostlevels.org] (Threat or offer of reward? You decide.)
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The character's name is "Guy". In Japanese it says "Guy" also.
Re:It's just the translation patch, it's a fake (Score:5, Insightful)
10 dollars says it's the US fan-made translation patch that some idiot programmed onto EPROMs and is passing it off as a "rare prototype".
While that's possible, in general, there exist ways to determine whether a game has been translated by force. Because of the lack of the original source code, many of the changes to the existing code will be done as branches to other areas of ROM.
If you change the size of a block of assembly code, you have to adjust pointers throughout that segment and beyond. This is the task of an assembler and linker, working on your source code. For ROM hacking, you don't have the source. It's infeasible--and provably uncomputable in the general case--to know where all these pointers are, so that you can adjust them when you rebuild with hacks in place.
Thus, patched ROMs are made by placing branches in one part of the code pointing at some previously unused area, then jumping back after finishing whatever needed to happen there. These jumps can be detected in a thorough analysis of a given ROM image in comparison to its Japanese original. If it is clear that the code adjustments made for the English version were made by reassembling from source, the probability that it is a translation from the original author is very high.
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If you change the size of a block of assembly code, you have to adjust pointers throughout that segment and beyond. This is the task of an assembler and linker, working on your source code. For ROM hacking, you don't have the source. It's infeasible--and provably uncomputable in the general case--to know where all these pointers are, so that you can adjust them when you rebuild with hacks in place.
It is possible, but it's a lot of work, and it grows with the size of the code. First you have to start with a disassembler that traces down branches and calls, then you have to keep looking for more code that didn't get traced because it was referenced from a jump table somewhere, and tell the disassembler to search that too.
It also depends on the instruction set of the CPU, and how pointers get represented in memory. In 6502 code, each byte of a data record is often put in separate tables, and jump table
Was the Sword of Ultimate Sorcery ever made? (Score:1)
I have an idea. (Score:2, Interesting)
Someone launch a Kickstarter project to buy this then put the ROMs out for the rest of the world to use on emulators.
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better idea, go get the ROM as mentioned in a comment above yours for no cost
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The Gooch makes a movie that isn't a breakout hit and they pressure him to leave, but Kawazu makes game after horrible player unfriendly game, which don't sell well in the US and is rewarded!
Kawazu should be fired! He's the Uwe Boll of Square,
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Why FF2, Kawazu and every other games he makes, sucks:
http://socksmakepeoplesexy.net/index.php?a=ff02 [socksmakepeoplesexy.net]
http://www.largeprimenumbers.com/article.php?sid=saga [largeprimenumbers.com]
Why selling secondhand games should be banned (Score:1)
A prime example of why studios think you shouldn't get to sell the games you bought, none of the money is going to the studio, which makes them very sad.
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Some editing from the editors, puh-lease! (Score:2)
"In what seems to be the in thing at the moment
Bit of a clunky opening. I'd hyphenate "in-thing" so it parses more easily.
last months
Jesus, really?
Zelda Nes auction
That would be "NES". And was it a NES that was sold, or a NES game?
and that crazy Million Dollar Collection.
Oh yeah, that! Wait, what?
This time for RPG fans this could be classed as the Holy Grail of Nes [sic] games.
This could be classed as the Holy Grail of NES games for RPG fans.
The game in question is Final Fantasy 2 which was never released outside of Japan but luckily for the person who at this time is selling this on Ebay for 50K, there was one made for the 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by SquareSoft, sadly the USA version never had a release because they decided to work on the Super NES instead."
65 words. Two commas.
on Ebay for 50K
Another example of the headline having more information than the summary - that's in $. But is it 50 kilo-dollars or 50 kibi-dollars?
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Also, it's "eBay".
8.99$ as an iPhone game... (Score:2)
Rather than spending $50K on a NES cartridge, you could just go to the iPhone app store and buy Final Fantasy II for 8.99$.
Just sayin'.
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It's authentic.
Re:I suspect this is a fake (Score:4, Informative)
They did. IT was on display at CES. The translation features Nintedoisms like censoring the religious symbology and so forth.
It's Frank Cifaldi. The dump's authentic.
Now Bio Force Ape... That's going to be one hell of a sale.
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http://www.lostlevels.org/200312/200312-ffan2.shtml [lostlevels.org]
With enough searching I believe you should be able to find screenshots and such from the game.
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17wkpxma1zym7jpg/original.jpg [gawkerassets.com] is an image of part of an ad that ran before its release.