The hunt is the game

(tags game, remake, 1980s, PlayStation, shopping, PlayStation 2, failure)

I'm hanging out irc channel #insertcredit for the fun of it these days. There was one discussion about a new PlayStation 2 game coming out based on that famous PC 80s text adventure game Rogue, called Rogue Hearts Dungeon (ローグ ハーツ ダンジョン). It was recently announced (Impress GameWatch).

This new one is from Compile Heart and will retail for 6000 yen. It has character art with "ahoge" (アホ毛) hairstyles. Then again, the main character in the original was represented with an @ (at) symbol. Look at that symbol closely. Now that's some old school ahoge there.

Then jiji from namakoteam showed up in the chat and proceed to school us on the Simple series take of a Rogue remake. He mentioned the Simple 1500 Vol. 28 The Dungeon RPG for the PlayStation 1, and Simple 2000 Vol. 20 The Dungeon RPG (The ダンジョンRPG 忍 ～魔物の魔物の棲む城～) for the PlayStation 2. The Amazon reviews of the latter pointed out the former was a better title.

I wanted to see if I could find this game in the shops. It turns out it was harder than I thought.

I was not able to find it new or used at my local stores, so I travelled to Nipponbashi "Den-den Town". None of my usual haunts had it new. In fact, there were little if any new PS1 games displays. I lucked out at a place called A-too! next to Ninomiya's struggling hobby store. There were two copies in a glass case with a prominent 500 yen sticker on each. Obviously this was their last new games for the PS1, hurrah hurrah.

The glass case also held things normally considered rare, such as that Famicom Mini Series (for GameBoy Advance) with Club Nintendo only binders (only 30000 yen each! 90000 for all thirty games and the 3 binders!). This is the same place with the Tecmo Classic Arcade for the Xbox at 10000 yen. Since this place is so expensive, I never go here.

So I asked for both copies but the stupid clerk enforced their 1-copy-per-customer rule. Come on, who else is going to buy this Simple game?

Next time I go there I'm going to bring another 500 yen coin and grab that other copy, yeah.

Thus the picture above. Like I'm going to play a PlayStation 1 game now, yeah right.