/vr/ - Retro Games

We played them on our chadly emulators like God intended.

I imported in the 90s. You had to know the know of the know and know. It was much more fun, but much harder. It was you, alone, and you had vested interest in the object. All you systems needed a mod, and I did my own modding.

I loved it.
Just as anime was better back then so was importing.
t.40yo japanophile that has been getting stuff from Japan since '92 and has been watching anime since 88.

It was fun.
Visiting NCSX every day to see what’s new, checking ebay and a few Japanese online shops, installing modchips, sometimes modifying cartridge slots to fit Japanese games, using an Action Replay to play import on Saturn, finding ways to bypass software lockouts on Genesis games, watching all the cool shit come out during the Dreamcast years, keeping an eye on Japan-only stuff during the PS2 years, getting into PC Engine when it was uncool and cheap-ish.

kys anime fag

>>8585627

>>8585628
>kys anime fa-

>>8585661
gotta love when they drop the mask and reveal what scum they are

>This game is authorized for use in Japan only. Use elsewhere is prohibited.

Mysterious, and beyond comfy.

>>8585661
Based

>anime girl
Thread hidden

>>8585807
>one less tourist in the thread
What a blessing, wish you all had this much self awareness.

>>8585620
Based. I'm 33, and the first game I ever imported was Pokemon Gold. By the early 00s (when I was entering my teens), I was importing all manner of older games, prompted my interest in the Famicom Disk System. Wish I'd grabbed more, but I was pretty young so I had to rely more heavily on shit like getting Japanese MSX games for Christmas. First current-gen console I imported was a Midnight Black PS2, a few years after it came out.
Props to people like you who were importing in the 90s before ebay and the like pushed it more into the mainstream.

>>8585598
In the early days, 80's maybe early 90's, it was more amazing than you could possibly imagine. Many systems, accessories and games were released in Japan long before they were in burgerland, if they were ever released there at all. Playing PCE CD games for years while nintoddlers bing bing wahooed on their NESs was pure gold. Piracy devices not readily available in the US made it even better. Most faggots here are too new to remember when zoomies thought Neo-Geo fash carts didn't exist and were impossible to make, but I had one 30 years ago. Downloading floppy images of games the day they were released was the epitome of soul.

>>8585627

GameFan magazine use to be one of the sources to go to for buying Japanese imports, as the magazine would cover/ review a lot of them, and they would also have Japanese importers like Die Hard Gamers Club (connected to Die Hard Game Fan) and Tommo mail order sections in the back pages.

https://archive.org/details/GamefanVolume3Issue10October1995ALT/page/n127/mode/2up

>>8586389
>Die Hard Gamers Club
Did they have physical outlets? Or mail order only?

>>8586395
>Did they have physical outlets? Or mail order only?

I think they did have a couple retail outlets, but they were mostly located in America and around California? I'm from Canada, BTW and Die Hard Game Fan magazine was available at most magazine stands/ book stores/ grocery stores, etc. I would buy the magazine, but I also did get a subscription. Though at some point Die Hard Gamers Club lost their affiliation with Die Hard Game Fan magazine, which changed the name of the magazine to just Game Fan, and they were replaced with other retailer called Game Cave. Which did the exact same thing. Game Cave did show photos of one of their retail outlets in the magazine. Never actually ordered anything from them, though. As it was expensive to ship things across the boarder. But I enjoyed the magazine.

>2002
>import FFXI from japan
>don't understand anything
>try to talk to people in english, get cursed at in broken engrish
>stop playing

>>8586423
>Game Cave.
I think Game Cave was Die Hard Gamers Club under a different name? Not really sure, though,
https://archive.org/details/Gamefan_Vol_5_Issue_04/page/n117/mode/2up

>>8586448

>>8586449

>>8586395
>Did they have physical outlets? Or mail order only?

This is from the same issue of GameFan, and Die Hard Gamers Club claimed to have 10-14 locations.

First imports I bought were Thunder Force IV and Tokimemi Memorial Taisen Puzzledama that were at the used game shop near my college in 1999. Ebay existed then, but it hadn’t been around for long. I bought FF8 on import not too long after that. But I had played the FFV fan translation a few months earlier and was sort of a fan translator wannabe.

>>8585598
I remember hmhaving emulation when I was 13 in 2002 or 2003? Those are vr days now right?

>>8586496
>Plano, TX
Damn, I thought I remembered an anon mentioning that location some years back. Wish I'd been aware of it when it was still a thing, but based on those dates I would've been too young. Even still I'm surprised I never noticed it, since even as a kid I'd go to the nearby CompUSA.

>>8586389
I always used to call the Die Hard store after hours, because the answering service was PC-Engine CD music

>>8586560
>I always used to call the Die Hard store after hours, because the answering service was PC-Engine CD music

Nice! I never saw Die Hard location. Lived in Canada.I only knew of them through Die hard Game Fan magazine, which was directly tied to Die Hard Gamer Club. Plus at times, I am pretty sure the magazine would inflate scores for some games that would be sold in the Die Hard Gamers Club mail order section. Battle Monsters for the Sega Saturn is one that comes to mind. But at some point, either Die Hard Gamers Club folded, or they change their name to Game Cave.Early (Diehard) GameFan from 1992 - 1996 had the DHGC adverts, while later
(with no Diehard in the title) GameFan issues from 1997 to 2001 had GameCave affiliation. It was always interesting scanning their adverts though, to see what weird shit they were selling from Japan.

>>8585820
>tumblr_inline_p2z876k3xr1r2vvqk_400.png
Tourist calling other people tourists, gold.

>>8586758
>if you find an image on another website that nobody uses anymore, you're a tourist
autism.

>>8585598
Something kind of special I guess. Playing games (and systems) months or more before they hit the US. Not to mention stuff that never released here. The web was just being born, so no websites yet. Just usenet discussion; that is if you had internet access. I imagine for most others, they had to rely on the likes of EGM and GameFan.

I suppose I had the fortune of being in the cross section of being in school for CS (giving me internet access,) in Hawaii (lots of Japanese shit here,) and having game nut friends willing to spend their money on imports that cost 2x domestic.

When SFII came out for the SFC, I knew like a dozen people who paid out $130 for it and ripping the tabs out of their SNES cartridge slots.

>>8586395
They did. They had a shop in Canoga Park before the magazine. The magazine took ages to get off the ground so might have been as early as late 80's.

>>8586758
It couldn't possibly be from Google images, could it?

I played a lot of PS2 games from Japan at the time, in hindsight I ruined my PS2 using the Swapmagic's card thing that pulls out your disc tray.

>>8585620
>>8586509
Based Boomers. Do your friends/partners still play vidya and watch anime? Or are they baffled by your hobbies?

>>8585598
I went to the local TBS Comics shop and bought a Gold Finger cheat device for the PSX, and picked up the 3 DBZ games for it at $50 each. Few years later I got SD Gundam G Generation F for $80 and then Gunnm Martian Memory for $30 online. A fucking hurricane delayed Gunnm for like 3 months due to the main bridge being fucking toast, but it did get here. Better than the time I orderred a bunch of Japanese DBZ figures and the fucking factory that made them burnt down, so my order was on hold for a year until the made more. That's the extent of what I actually bought, but those games were a fun time back then.

>>8587341
I have friends online who still play games, mostly old games. My friend from college doesn’t play any games anymore.
My partner likes games but she mostly plays newer stuff. She really likes James Pond 2 for some reason. She doesn’t mind my retro game stuff, because it doesn’t get in the way. I have a small CRT setup in my office/studio.

>>8587341
But I have a group of friends who still like to watch anime, especially older stuff.

>>8585598
Because I'm from Quebec, I think most French PC games were just imported from Europe.

>>8586525
Those emulators are /vr/ for sure now.

>>8585598
Like arcades, it was like a preview to the future. As all the games (and Transformers) I liked had the "made in Japan" marked on them, plus they got the games first, it was natural to seek the games from the source. Magazines would often show off stuff from Japan, and I started with the SFC. It was pretty much known by Sega Saturn owners that they had to import back then, every person I met which had the system imported, so that was normal. It was even better when the PS2 came along, since the games got real cheap in junk bins.

One time I saw a bootleg VHS anime fansub of Dragon Ball pre-internet and it felt next-level. Just a few years later, high-speed internet was everywhere and you could torrent pretty much anything. That was next-level as well

>>8587878
whats the one with the completely white label with black text

>>8587994
Umihara Kawase

>>8585620
I remember browsing the black and white mail order catalogue of import games as a teen that would only list game names and not knowing what almost all the games were with their Japanese names but being amazed how many had [ADULT] after the name.

>>8585623
One of my biggest regrets was selling my PC Engine Duo when I was in a tight spot and just before they massively jumped up in price. Lesson learnt I guess.

Didn't have the model of PlayStation you can plug shit into so I had to use one of these bad boys to play Japanese discs. Shit was so cool to have a DBZ fighting game to play with my frens.