Originally posted by: stardust4ever
I think the licensed set (official Nintendo releases) + the Tengen titles comprise a pretty complete set. I consider Tengen on par with the other 3rd party developers even though they're not licensed. A complete Tengen set is also relatively easy to obtain compared to most other unlicensed companies. Of course, I collect to play so I could care less about CIB titles or owning one of everything. CD based games are of course an exception to that rule.
NWC was never sold by Nintendo, and Stadium Events was recalled, so I don't count either of those...
What about the sucky Tengen titles? What about the Codemasters games? Some of them were better than many of the licensed titles. Hell, there are even other unlicensed games from other companies (some Chinese) that are of an excellent quality too, and better than a lot of the licensed stuff. People can collect whatever they want, and I respect your opinions on this matter, but for me it just seems a bit hokey to consider a complete set to be equal to the licensed set + the Tengen games, just due to the average quality of their games.
Also, I am not sure why the difficulty ranking of how is / hard the set is to complete would factor into whether it should or shouldn't be included in a "complete" set. This sort of logic or reasoning
st doesn't make sense to me (not pointing fingers at you specifically, btw, but to many on here as a whole).
Perhaps we should all take a step back and look at the term "the complete set" in a different manner, I dare to suggest that a truly complete collection would include the following items:
-All licensed NES games
-Region exclusives that don't fall into the above category for your own region
-Promotionals, service carts, Racermate, etc - the odd things that don't fit in anywhere else
-Unlicensed games (broken from this category into subsets by publisher)
-Homebrew titles
-Repros (omg, did tracker actually suggest this in a post?!?!)
If you collect PAL games, then I still think it would be necessary to have a full set of games if you just went ahead and bought the few NTSC exclusives, and vice-versa for the NTSC collectors. For the small number of exclusive releases, it almost feels to me that if one went that far with his or her collecting, why not just go the final step and get the last ones?
Though many here do not agree with the idea of including the service carts, NWC and stuff like that in the set, I personally feel that they should be considered part of a truly complete set. The games were designed for the Nintendo, and they were produced in reasonable quantities (unlike prototypes, where in some cases, maybe only one copy was even produced). Definitely a unique part of the set, but I still would find these necessary.
WIth the unlicensed games, I would just break it down by publisher. With the licensed set I would do the same thing too. Complete the Capcom set, the HES set, the Color Dreams set, the Konami set, etc. This removes a lot of the gripes from the equation, I think.
Homebrew titles, just get them all. Another unique category, but some of them are well done, and they were meant to be played on the NES.
Repros - I personally would stick to getting the repros of the unreleased games (Airball, Happy Camper, etc), but some others might even want to go so far as to get ENglish translations of Japanese-exclusive titles.
By the time you were done with this collection, you would basically have a copy of every game created for the NES. Now that is what a complete collection should be, imo, talk about being complete!