EarthBound Central Live: June 1, 2015

I thought I would say something about the “amiibo” spelling:

According to Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe, “amiibo” is always rendered entirely in lowercase, even when at the start of a sentence, and its plural form is identical to its singular form. English grammar could use an amendment to account for all similar words like “iPad”:

-If the first word of a sentence is a common noun not based on any proper noun or not a noun, then its first letter must be uppercase. This rule does not apply to proper nouns or common nouns derived from proper nouns, most of which are already capitalized.-

By “common noun derived from proper noun”, I refer to nouns that are spelling variations of proper nouns and have meanings related to said proper nouns, such as “European” (common noun) to “Europe” (proper noun).

So, Mato, you’re a Lord now?

Shouldn’t the plural of amiibo be amiiboes? Like potato to potatoes, mango to mangoes, tomato to tomatoes. I’m pretty sure adding es is just how you pluralize words ending with a vowel.

Reproduction carts, even at their very best (making new copies of rare games) are still way too close to the shady side (counterfeit copies of rare games) for me to ever really support them. Some like them because they have that sticker that makes it look like an official release, but that’s the best one can say about them.

My problems with reproes:

1. All too often, they’re profiting off work they didn’t do themselves. This goes both ways. They’re both selling illegal copies of the original published game (so it’s still piracy) and profiting off the free work a fan put into whatever mod may be on the cart. Especially in the case of games that are being sold on virtual console or something similar, the whole enterprise comes off as theft, plain and simple.

2. They tend to crib parts from working games to make these reproes. There are exceptions, but by and large far too many will just pull the ROM chip off a cartridge board and solder in their own ROM chip. This is how so many look so “authentic”, but the cost is that with every repro they make, there’s one less copy of whatever they scavenged the parts from out there. Ultimately, they’re making “new” copies by destroying some other game’s copies. To be fair, the vast majority of the time, we’re talking about EA Sports titles no one cares about, but as more and more of those get swallowed up, they start grabbing whatever other games they can get. The worst are the reproes of things like Star Fox 2, which in order to “mass produce”, requires gutting copies of Doom for SNES to get that newer Super FX2 chip, and that makes that game rarer all the time.

3. Those ROM chips are one-time writable, and as Mato mentions, can never be updated with newer versions of fan patches or, say, swapped for a different game. You end up having to buy a repro cart for every game hack you want to play, which is just feeding them more unwarranted money and exacerbating the scavenging cycle.

So for those reasons, I say cut them out. Get flash carts instead. Do your research and find high quality ones, but there are many of those to be found. You’ll pay less than these vultures are charging for their “repro” copies, and you’ll be able to fit pretty much every single ROM hack you could want on a SINGLE one of those. Better yet, put every game you already own on a flash cart for that system and you’ll never even need to swap the cart out. Now, addon chips like the Super FX are tricky, but there’s a lot of repro carts that recreate the various addon chips to make sure the cart is compatible with the games that need them, and that’s a lot better for the collecting scene than destroying copies of games just to harvest their chips.

The only thing you miss out on would be custom cart labels and manuals, but you can still order the printed manuals by themselves or make your own custom label for your flash cart (using the sort of sticker that isn’t really adhesive so it peels right back off).

For Mother 3, I can’t recommend the EZFlash IV enough. Make sure you use the special program designed for it to move the ROMs over, and it’ll work great. Mother 3 fits perfectly inside the flash ROM space it has set aside for larger games. The only caveat is that to save on it, you need to restart the system and then it’ll write the stored battery save to a file on your mini-SD card. This cart also worked on every system that played GBA games, from original Advance to Gameboy Player, so I can recommend it no matter which system you intend to go with.

Sorry to rant, but repro carts have been bugging me for a while, and I think us collectors need to work together to put a stop to this practice.