Video Game Collecting

Some of the search parameters for Nintendo NES games were updated to include better results today.  Some of the games included:

Ghost Lion (including “Legend of” prevented finding additional copies)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (Too many words as part of the search)
Conan Mysteries of Time (Sellers were too lazy to include “Mysteries of Time”)
Duck Tales II (which should be Duck Tales 2)
Town and Country Surf Designs II: Thrilla’s Surfari (Not sure why zero copies would come up, but the search was changed to Thrilla)
Magic Johnson’s Fast Break (the apostrophy delimited searches)
Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom (removed “In the Salad Kingdom”)
The Adventures of Rad Gravity (Dropping “The Adventures of” yielded many more copies)

You should now be able to find more copies of these titles and a better estimate of their value and rarity.

With 2009 finally coming to a close I thought I’d mention some of the forth coming changes you’ll be able to see in 2010.

1. On the game price pages the “additional” page links will be added to the bottom.  No need to scroll all the way back up to the top to see the next page of listings.
2. The YouTube videos will be moved back up to the top as well.  They were moved to the bottom for testing purposes.
3. The prices will update from the game-prices page and not the period.  This was simply a matter of logistics.  Clicking the game-prices page will update everything in the database.
4.  A recommended title feature.  Imagine looking at one game and getting a recommendation for a nothing title to look at.  IE: You’re looking at Ninja Gaiden and their is a recommendation to look at Ninja Gaiden 2.
5.  Games by price: Rather than looking for games by title you can get a listing of games within a price range.  This will be perfect for bargain hunters or budget conscious visitors.
6.  Expanded game library:  There are a lot of systems and titles that still need to be added.
7.  Comments and ratings.  Why not?  Every other site seems to have them.

So there you have it.  There is actually a soft timeline in place to get all 7 of these implemented by the end of the first quarter.

The hard part is over!  After the moving of a ton of files, changing configuration files and a million other things, http://www.videogamepriceguides.com/ is finally resting in its new and correct home.  What does this mean?  It means that Google will soon be able to see more of the 7000+ pages of content that are available on VGPG.

Here is proof of concept: http://www.videogamepriceguides.com/nintendo/game-crisis/21/1/old/false/2/adventure-island/

Notice there are no “?=” parameters.  Whew!  There is still alot of coding that needs to be done on the back end but the hard part is finally over!

What’s going on with VideoGamePriceGuides.Com?  Well, if you’ve visited the site at all this Monday evening you probably noticed that it’s re-directed to a weird JudgeVegas.Com site.  Although this wasn’t intentional, in a small way, it kinda was.

You see the hosting for VGPG is shared with other domains that I run, including this one.  Way back in the day I started the judgevegas.com site and any additional site I created was technically an extension to judgevegas.com.  Well fast forward four years later and not only is it time to retire JudgeVegas.com, I also wanted to expand the functionality of VPGP.  This required VGPG to become the primary domain for my hosting.

Well, I asked the hosting company what all was involved in doing the switch.. and well, rather then giving me the details they decided to go ahead and do it!  DOH!.  So right now as I type this a backup of VGPG is being created, and will be migrated to the root domain.  So this time tomorrow it should be fixed.

Sorry for the delay!

Here’s an idea: let’s keep a historical record of video game prices. I was inspire by my previous post about a Game Pro Magazine Scan that had an advertisement for “current” (current meaning 19 years ago) prices for Nintendo NES games.  Once a month I’ll do a master update of the games and post the prices here.  Consider it a historical record.

Nintendo NES Prices for November 2009

There is a whole bunch of new features coming to VideoGamePriceGuides.Com.  As mentioned in an earlier post eBay is changing the way data is pulled for sites such as the video game price guide.  As such, I’ve started to rebuild the system that pulls that data.

This has led to a couple new features.  For example, you will be able to limit the list to auctions or BuyItNow only items.  You can filter out only Free Shipping items and you will be able to see up to 100 pages of items instead of the 6 that the original site allowed.  You can still sort by Ending Soonest, or by Newly Listed.

Some of the other great features will still be there.  The Google calendar reminder will still be there, as will the YouTube videos.  The flames that indicate an auction is ending: within the hour and the two men arguing over a price to indicate a BestOffer item will still be there as well:
 

There are few other features coming as well including the Seller’s name and a possible count of additional items they have available as well.  We’re also looking to make BestOffer auctions a delimiter (or filter) as well.

Although the changes are not fully operational you can use most of them…. right no!  However, they are currently only available on the Nintendo NES price guide.  Simply go to that portion of the site (http://www.videogamepriceguides.com/nintendo/) and notice the periods after the names of each of the games.  The name of the game will take you to the legacy VGPG.Com site, and the period will take you to the new system.

When researching the implementation of a new feature for http://www.videogamepriceguides.com/ it was brought to my attention that eBay is changing the way searches are done on the backend.  The notice was vague indicating the specific feature I currently use to pull items for the price guide is going away July 1st, 2010.

So what does this mean for VGPG.Com?  Is it going away?

Yes… at least the way you see it now.  I haven’t read through all of the documentation available from eBay and although it seems many of the search features will be still be available… they will just be available differently.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but finding the time to rebuild everything is going to be difficult.

There is one positive note to this… with this change over being 9 months away I’ll have the opportunity to re-code everything, and to re-code it in a way that will make more sense to me.  The original code was a mashup I had found from a variety of sites, and although it works and works well it is not documented in any reasonable format, and thus adding features can sometimes be a pain.

Anyways I’ll start pecking away at the new version as my time permits, but will not be adding any new features to the existing price guide, nor will I make changes or corrections to the database until the version is functionally implemented.

Today I’ve added the SEGA Dreamcast price guide and the Nintendo Gameboy price guide.  The SEGA Dreamcast guide looks pretty accurate.  There are alot of games that are obscure to me (which would probably be expected since I’ve never owned a Dreamcast).  The Nintendo Gameboy list is huge.  It contains the original Gameboy games and Gameboy color.

There are few more price guides I hope to add over the next couple days including Nintendo Gamecube, Colecovision and possibly PSP.