January 3, 2017

Financial Straights? Don't Declare Bankruptcy JUST yet...

>become self-made AH mogul on illidan-us after transfering with under 1000g
>start by just buying and reselling cheap stuff that I can at least sell at large profits
>things are going well
>gaining digits
>one day twilight jasmine is going fucking nuts
>keep buying it and the fucking botters keep flooding it
>my pride is at stake
>all of my AH profit is being dumped back into the herbs
>shit is filling my banks, mailboxes, can't contain it all
>something's gotta give


After a while I thought all my hard work was wasted, but finally I broke through and became probably one of the richest people in the game at the time when I realized the cash cow that was mysterious fortune cards. I controlled the AH hard from then on. I'd take robitussin and trip all night while just grinding the fuck out of the AH. Most of the fun was just seeing my name all over it and getting hatemail, or ramdomly sending some noob a gift of more gold than he'd ever seen like it was nothing to me

January 2, 2017

CAMPUS CHALLENGE '91 (NES), CAMPUS CHALLENGE '92 (SNES), POWERFEST '94 (SNES)

Any game collector worth his salt knows about the 1990 Nintendo World Championships and the associated cartridge. Considered the single-most sought after game in existence, the 26 gold and 90 grey editions of the cartridge were distributed to the winners of a Nintendo Power contest and the finalists of the 1990 championships respectively, and they continue to fetch top dollar at auction. 

Considerably less attention is paid to the 1990 NWC's successors. In 1991 and 1992, Nintendo hosted the "Campus Challenge", a tournament that travelled to university campuses across the United States in an attempt to market video games to older gamers. Nintendo apparently took a break in 1993 before returning in 1994 with the Powerfest '94 competition.

Similar to the 1990 championships, each of these competitions had its own unique cartridge, which was a hybrid of three popular games for the NES (in '91) or SNES (in '92 and '94). Contestants had to play through specific scenarios set in each game for ~6 minutes with the objective being to get the highest score possible. However, unlike in 1990, the cartridges used for the contests were never formally released. Instead, at the conclusion of each of the competitions, the cartridges were scrapped for parts, with only a few escaping the purge.

Today, only a single copy of the '91 and '92 carts exist. The 1994 cartridge fared a little better, with two copies having been unearthed (though, oddly enough, the scoring mechanisms for the two copies are slightly different, making each cartridge unique). All four carts are now owned by collectors and, though they have occasionally been placed on auction sites (usually with six-figure asking prices), none have changed hands for a number of years.