racketboy.com

JoeAwesome wrote:If this guide is correct, Sapphire could be a bootleg.

Still, it's not a bad price at all for the lot if it ends up being high-quality reproductions.

Actually, comparing the guide to his pics, it looks like he's probably got an authentic copy and not a repro. A clear, detailed image of the back cover would help cement things, but the colors and details look much more like the authentic images than the bootleg images.

marurun wrote:

JoeAwesome wrote:If this guide is correct, Sapphire could be a bootleg.

Still, it's not a bad price at all for the lot if it ends up being high-quality reproductions.

Actually, comparing the guide to his pics, it looks like he's probably got an authentic copy and not a repro. A clear, detailed image of the back cover would help cement things, but the colors and details look much more like the authentic images than the bootleg images.

Huh. The orange in the Arcade logo looks like the bootleg, and the placement of the inner disc writing seems off to me. I'm in no way an expert on it, so I could be dead wrong.

The coloring of the outfit is purple, not blue, the silver ring on the disc is more narrow, leaving more transparent plastic, and the image appears to be sharper and more color-correct in most areas. So if it's a repro, it's a more carefully tailored one that was meant to pass much stricter muster than the original bootleg. Even the text on the inner ring is correct. Even the orange color you point out matches the original better than the bootleg. The original has a lighter orange, whereas the bootleg has a slightly darker, more saturated orange. If that's a reproduction it's a darned good one, at least based on that guide.

Images aside, if you read the descriptive about the disc itself and the ring, ring code and the rest they're a 100% match for his $5 pick up. The artwork looks right there too, doesn't look like a fraud to me at all, and even if the color is off a hair we're looking at an old image where a photoshop app could have messed with saturation a bit, and if not the newer image could also have a color shift to the game just having seen a light touch of UV at some point too. It really seems to be a match and I've seen enough examples of boots pop up in the history of that pcengine fx forums before. I'm no expert as I don't own it, but all the others who point out obvious vs less obvious stuff makes me think it's a steal of a lifetime there at $5.

The option of fakery is possible, but it would be like the latest run of GBA stuff from an external view in the last year. The newest boots compared to 2-3 years ago are indistinguishable from an original. The lazy fools finally got the clamshell lined up, the molded lettering front and back 1:1 in size and style with no slop to the edges, and the pins and Nintendo ink on the bottom have gone from little holes and missing to 1:1 too. Stickers even now are getting it down to the single bubble of paint in the matrix of spray that hits it all getting every little nuance perfectly. The only way to sniff out a fake game made in the last year or two is to crack it open because while using high quality parts finally, they're not trace for trace or chip to chip accurate and I question if they'll take it that far yet or stop while ahead as the outside is a winner. The same could be said of the sapphire art and disc here too, but at that point you're into a prove-it lost cause situation unless you care to micro analyze the sucker with a microscope or some carbon dating type style testing for age. I would think any collector at that point would succumb to paranoia and give up caring or give up and quit.

Tanooki wrote:The same could be said of the sapphire art and disc here too, but at that point you're into a prove-it lost cause situation unless you care to micro analyze the sucker with a microscope or some carbon dating type style testing for age. I would think any collector at that point would succumb to paranoia and give up caring or give up and quit.

You're over analyzing it. For me, it would be about piece of mind. It looks off to me on first glance, but it could be the pictures, the light, or plain skepticism.

The people that care about provenance or "carbon dating" are hoarding loons, not collectors.

The repros are ALSO going for easily more than 500 yen at this point, so while I don't think it's a repro, it's a good deal even if it is.

You'll get no argument out of me on either. I intentionally went overboard to just show as you put it, the non-collectors/gamers type but the hoarding loons. They'd be that crazy and I've seen that kind of crazy and it's not healthy.

marurun wrote:The repros are ALSO going for easily more than 500 yen at this point, so while I don't think it's a repro, it's a good deal even if it is.

Exactly. Real or fake, it's cheap enough to buy. The price just elicits the question to me "is it fake?", not the statement "it is fake."

I hope the poster enjoys it regardless. It's a fun shmup with some clever graphics for the time.

I don't know. I'm not skeptical of it at all, personally. The disc itself is legitimate, which doesn't necessarily mean that the manual and back artwork have to be, too, but I just can't see someone going through that hassle to sell it to BookOff for pennies.

I think the case looks far more like the original in the link you provided than the bootleg. Any difference in color I would chalk up to lighting. It doesn’t have the orange that the bootleg has. If anything the orange logo appears a little lighter in the picture he provided, which would tell me it’s just a lighting difference.