Somewhere I have the SNES cart for chrono trigger with the price label of $10, if its not faded.
I bought it in the mid-90s. You have to remember that before Final Fantasy 7, RPGs in America were NOT popular. People always cite the poor marketing of Earthbound as the reason it failed. I always say it’s because it released in 1995, at a higher price than most SNES games, at a time when RPG popularity was at an all time low. If it had released in 1997, and at a standard price, it may have done gangbusters.
Even Super Mario RPG wasn’t a hit at first, but then picked up sales as the months went on.
The guy selling Chrono Trigger at a games/music/video resale shop said “I’m surprised you’re buying this game. You sure you don’t want to play it a bit first? Save you the hassle of returning it later”. He meant well, but I actually did mean to buy it.
I also bought earthbound, with book, for $10 from the same place. It always smelled like weed in there. Mostly because the employees would smoke weed, pick out cds they wanted to hear over the stores speaker system, and then play video games stoned out of their minds.
Then they got bought out, and now it’s a corporate run store. Same resale model, but SUUUUPER corporate. You cannot fimd deals, and they give you gamestop prices for your trade-ins.
They didn’t even used to have reciepts. They would just stamp the price sticker with a stamp that they adjusted the date on. And they weren’t super strict on dates either. If your sticker said you bought it 19 days ago instead of 14 days ago, they’d usually be like “aw man, it’s cool.” As long as it wasn’t some bullshit like 3 months. Basically as long as you weren’t trying to game the system.
One time I went to a grocery store that sells closeouts. One of todays items was a huge stack of game boy games. $5 each, but it was the same game. So I buy one, and I take it there. I explain the situation. I say “hey, will I get the same price in resale each copy?” He says yes. So I traded in my copy for $15. Then took that money, bought 2 more copys (tax), traded those in for $30, took that money, bought 5 more copies, traded those in, and then went and bought 2 more copies traded those in, and bought a brand new game boy advance from them. I took $6 and essentially turned it into a brand new GBA which had only been released a few months prior.
I miss that store. It technically still exists, but I miss the spirit of what that store used to be.
That’s the first of the US released Aki games! It went in order of release:
WCW/NWO World tour
WCW/NWO Revenge
WWF Wrestlemania 2000
WWF No Mercy (considered to this day to be the greatest wrestling game of all time).
I only mentioned them because I had fond memories of couch co-op with my friends. It’s one of those games that started with a starting point (the one you played), and each new game they added more and more content to the new game, while keeping everything from the old game.
I was just hoping with your son getting that appriciation for anticipating a new game, that you could start him with the first game, and end with the 4th.
But it’s one of those games that new people tend to struggle with, due to not holding your hand at ALL. It was just assumed you knew what you were doing…and the fighting system is sooooo complex, yet simple once you “get it”.
Short tap A, weak grapple. Long hold A, strong grapple.
Same with B and punches.
You CAN try to just so strong punches, and strong grapples, but if your opponent hasn’t been weakened they’re likely to reverse. They MIGHT still reverse a weak punch or grapple too, but they need much more precise button timing. The worse they’re beaten up, the harder it is to reverse. And eventually you might land a strong punch or grapple. You can taunt to raise your spirit meter. Your spirit meter also raises as you do well in a match, or lower if you do worse.
Throw your opponent down and do a short taunt before he gets up to stop your taunt, and you get an instant small boost in spirit. Do a long uninterupted taunt, and get a big boost in spirit.
But if you attempt a taunt, you leave yourself open to an easy attack against you, and if that happens you lose spirit proportional to what you were attempting to gain.
Its a very balanced game where every action has an appropriate reaction. It’s up to you to time those actions, and choose what you think you can get away with.
It’s such a weird game that an experienced player vs a rookie will result in an unfun lopsided match. But evenly matched players might have 1 match last an hour.