Nice haul! What's the deal with the VHS cases? Some type of collectors edition style packaging?
All manner of silly stuff inside. Both have a PCE Hucard of the game, windows versions, splatterhouse as an FM Towns repro inside, stickers, postcards, metal pins, and so on. It's nuts.
I'll post pics of all the loot later.
Just an FYI to folks, a lot of people feel PCE Works should not be supported.
First of all the guy (Tobias) started out making Sapphire bootlegs and tried to pass them off as legit. He would sell them for very high prices and many people got ripped off.
Now days many of his games are not clearly labeled from the outside that they are repros so many are still getting ripped off on ebay and you have resellers/flippers scamming people.
He also has taken fan translations and homebrews and created bootlegs for profit against the translators wishes or without permission. Xak III and Rockman are two of them, there are a few more. This has caused some fan translators to stop working on new games. Imagine a group spending thousands of hours of hard work translating their favorite game and releasing the patch for free, only to have some guy start selling overpriced bootlegs of it.
Well, I’m not an expert on the wrong doings and shadiness of PCE Works, this is just what I picked up on over at pcenginefx forums, if you want to know more about it, head over there and search the forum. Just thought I would give a heads up.
Yeah, I know about the beef that some people have with Tobias.
I can't speak to him trying to pass off repros/bootlegs as legit. I've personally never heard anything about that before.
But with regards to using translations and whatnot without permission, who doesn't? That's pretty much the motto of 99% of repro makers out there. The way I look at it, if you put all that work in and released it for free, then why does it matter if someone else is using it to create a salable product? He clearly puts a TON of work and time into these games himself. It's not like the guys out there who slap a label on a crappy snap together SNES cart shell and sell em for $50+, having spent about $15 and put in virtually zero time or creative effort.
It's sad that this alone has turned people off of translating these games.
As far as over-priced goes, hardly. You truly getting what you pay for with his products.