Greetings from DenDen Town...

So I decided to hop on the Shink and spend a couple of days in Osaka....

DenDen Town looks pretty good. Pretty much the same stores and the same players... Softmap, Super Potato, Big Tiger, etc...

Super Potato is about to burst as usual. Barely enough room to breathe with all of the games around. Here's what I saw at one of their two stores:

Panzer Dragoon XBOX (<--- never seen that in a store before)
Super Black Dreamcast
Bandai Vectrex
Tomy Pyuuta
Mario Cart Gold Discs (x2)
PC Engine LT (x2)
Skeleton Blue XBOX (x3)
Doshin the Giant 2 (64DD)
Bandai Pippin
Darius Alpha

The other store had a glass case with a Famicom Box, Atari 2800, Bandai TV-Jack 5000 AddOn, Bandai Arcadia, and a boxed Othello Multivision all in a row. Softmap had a couple of Neo Geo Metal Slug carts stacked on top of each other. Not bad.

Prices were generally higher than eBay so nothing could really be bought. The staff were stellar as usual, real all stars today:

Me: What's the phone number to the shop?

Staff: (searches around for a minute) We don't have a phone number.

Lots of smaller CD and DVD shops are now closed, and some of the ones that are still open have switched to adult titles only. No PS3s but lots of software. Not much advertising or front placement for the Wii. Not much in terms of promo at all for it, actually.

Prices are down slightly, and some of the retro items are actually on sale now, but even on sale they aren't that great of a deal. Nowadays places like DenDen and Akihabara are more about selection than price.

Anyway, I'll see what I can find tomorrow. There was a shop called Magic Box that I didn't see there this time but it was a great retro place the last time I was there...

 

so almost nothing you also can't find in tôkyô. how about the prices? the super potato in tôkyô is selling a complete boxed near-mint looking DUO Monitor since a while.

 

I find the prices in Osaka a bit cheaper than in Tôkyô.But years after years the prices are getting closer to each other because Denden become more and more expensive(more gaïjins are going to Denden maybe?).
Maybe there is more choice in Osaka too,since Akihabara is not as good as before.

 

I wonder, do price really depend on foreigners buying them? I mean, are these shops not geared primarily at Japanese locals? Do locals not pay sticker price?

I know a lot of people here think Traders/Medialand/Liberty have bad prices but I think they are a steal compared to eBay and online shops. Especially considering the euro/yen exchange rate is getting better and better all the time. In that regard it puzzles me that Traders doesn't have a website that sells to foreigners.

 

In fact,I think it depends on the system.
Famicom and Superfamicom are definitely always very popular amongst japanese people (Famicom especially) and today people who buy games for these systems are 20/40 years old so they have a big purchasing power so the prices are increasing (it's the same in Western countries for Pal/NTSC US old games).
But for systems like Mark 3 or Megadrive (and maybe at an another level for PCE,Saturn or DC),which have never been popular in Japan I think the rise in price is definitely due to foreign buyers.
And today with Internet,more and more pepole are interested in retro games so the global demand for japan retrogames is bigger than it was in the 1990-2000 period.

Japan prices are actually way cheaper than ebay or online shops,there's no doubt about that.

 

1. the PCE wasn't a popular system in japan?

2. until you checked ebay.de, maybe you will change you statement :lol:

 

I'd say you can find some older Japanese games CHEAPER on EBay than you can in shops or Yahoo auctions over here. Don't forget the currency exchange as well.

Yakumo

 

Sure it was,but not as popular as Famicom or Super famicom.I don't know exactly at which level but I'm pretty sure that foreign buyers have contributed to the rise of PCE prices during 2000-2003 period.

It's the same on ebay.fr :lol: