Call me Ishmael.

Not quite what I'm on about, but it fits the analogy quite nicely.

I've done it! I have harpooned my white whale. Although unlike in the famous novel from which the expression is taken, I have survived to tell the tale.

The gaming Moby-Dick to my Ahab is an incongruous one. A classic MegaCD game, purchased eighteen years ago from a bargain bucket in a ratty Cash Converters. It's hailed as a classic now, and fetches mega money on eBay if it's in good condition. You might know it as Sonic CD.

Over the years, although I cherish owning it, I've come to love and hate Sonic CD in equal measure. It's become a symbol of both my early good taste, and my complete inadequacy at certain kinds of game. I love it for its great soundtrack, its opening cinematic, its time travel mechanic. I even love it for giving us Amy Rose and its retina scorching special stages. I hate it for one infuriating, annoying, impassable level. Stardust Speedway Act 3. Or as those who haven't played Sonic CD know it, the level where you race Metallix.

How on earth is it possible that I became stuck on that one level for eighteen years? I don't know. The difficulty was extreme. The idea is that you race Metallix through the level to Amy, while all the time, you are chased by Robotnik in the Egg-O-Matic who is sweeping the ground behind you with some kind of terrifying beam weapon. Touch it and you die. Lose to Metallix and get shut out of the safe area at the end of the level, you die. Get too far ahead of Metallix and he chases you down with a charge attack. If you get hit by it, you lose not only rings, but valuable momentum. Then you get hit by the beam and die. On top of all of that, there are a whole slew of momentum killing obstacles and spikes, which, surprise surprise, make it really easy for you to die. I've played that level again and again, sometimes losing by just tenths of a second. I bashed my head against it from the time I bought the game until my parents bought me my PlayStation the following Christmas.

Over the following years, nostalgia, and a sense of burning injustice at the state of the universe led to a cycle of me periodically breaking out my MegaCD and trying my luck on Stardust Speedway Act 3. And every time, my patience would slowly get ground away until the only alternative to throwing my MegaCD over a motorway bridge was putting it away and trying my hardest to calm down. The cycle continued until I gave up altogether, and let go of all hope of ever getting to the end of the game sometime around 2008. My MegaCD remains boxed up, with that incomplete save, laughing at me from the top of my wardrobe.

"But," I hear you ask, "how on earth did you finish it, if  your save is still incomplete?" The answer of course is a re-release.

Sonic CD popped up on XBLA, and like an idiot, I downloaded the demo on release day. I liked how they'd updated it, but still kept the game underneath intact. It was widescreen, a couple of slowdown bugs had been fixed but those were really the only differences. Continuing to be an idiot, I bought it, thinking that perhaps the game had been rebalanced, and that this time around, things would be different.

A few hours later I got to Stardust Speedway Act 3. Things were no different. Moby-Sonic breached the waves with alarming aggression, sailed gracefully through the air and crashed down through the rigging of the ship of my hopes and dreams, smashing it to matchwood.

Sonic CD had defeated me again, and went back to being left in the vaults unplayed.

This was a state of affairs that continued until last week. I'd found myself bereft of games after packing everything up ready for my move. All that is left to play is what is inside my 360. And pretty much the only uncompleted full game in it was, you guessed it, Sonic CD. Faced with this unfortunate reality, I resolved that once and for all, that I would beat this goddamned game if it killed me. Cue two hours of furious, swear filled retries of the same two minute level. I lost count of the amount of times I ran out of lives, loaded my save and kept going. Which was something which was impossible on the MegaCD version. If you ran out of lives, your save took you back to the first act of the zone. In the end, after two hours of total, complete and utter failure I got lucky. A mistimed jump became one of those fortunate accidents that eventually become the stuff of legend. The number of pixels between me and my metallic nemesis as I passed the finish line could have been counted on one hand. But it didn't matter. I actually cheered, out loud, as eighteen years worth of failure and anguish poured out of me. I'm not sure it's actually possible to put a measure on the elation of that moment.

I had vanquished my white whale, and went on to complete the game on the same night. The final boss was curiously easy. I beat it at the first attempt. However happy I may have been though, the game still had the last laugh. I didn't have all of the timestones, and had to watch Dr. Robotnik fly away with them in the ending cinematic.

As far as I was concerned though, that didn't matter. The timestones could wait. I'd just beaten a game after eighteen years of trying.

Dreams can come true.

Vintage Values

This week I spotted a tweet from Keith Stuart, the Guardian's gaming correspondent (@keefstuart). He'd bought an NTSC copy of the near mythical Snatcher on PC Engine. Despite not actually owning a PC Engine. Long story short, he replied to a tweet of mine about me looking for Snatcher on Mega CD saying that he was too, along with Sonic CD, which is fetching silly money. 

This surprised me, because I own a copy of Sonic CD, having picked it up from the bottom of a bargain bucket full of unloved games for unloved consoles for about four quid sometime around 1995, so I never expected it to be all that expensive. Yet somehow in the intervening years prices for it have shot up, so much so that a used copy of a twenty year old game costs almost as much as what it did when it was new. The first hit from a cursory search of eBay has it going at £37.00, with a sealed copy going for a whopping £499! This is madness! First of all, why are there any sealed copies of a game that old even in existence, especially a game as good as Sonic CD, and second, £499! Sonic CD isn't even all that rare, is it? What kind of insane nerd would pay that out that sort of money for a game?

Wait a minute, that would be me. I spotted Mickey Mania on eBay afterwards and the thought genuinely did cross my mind. Mickey Mania is a title I've wanted for years. I somehow had a demo of it and it was so far superior to the Megadrive version that it became a case of the Mega CD version or nothing. Unfortunately by that point, Mega CD games were already getting pretty hard to find, so I wound up not getting it. Now I've seen it on eBay though, I've wound up valuing titles already in my Mega CD collection, just for the kicks. They're mainly titles that I'd thought were pretty insignificant in the history of gaming, yet would never get rid of because they are some of the first I ever bought with my own money. 

So let's look at them. I searched Mega CD in ebay and arranged by highest price first so that I could pick out titles in similar condition to my own, ie, immaculate. After the initial shock of the £999 copy of Final Fight (which I don't have) the first find was Keio Flying Squadron. Would you like a copy? Why that would be a minimum £50 my good man, unless you want a sealed copy, then it would be £494.99. Paws of Fury, yours for the bargain price of £44.99. Battlecorps, £20, or you can have it sealed for £42.99. Ground Zero, frankly awful, yet a great investment, I picked it up when I didn't know better for a fiver in '95, today it's £35. Pugsy is going for £34.99, Microcosm, £18.99. Shockingly, even Road Avenger, Tomcat Alley, Thunderhawk and the Sol Feace/Cobra Command double Pack are going for a tenner each, and they're as common as a very common thing. Then there is Pitfall, which I couldn't find on eBay. I should hope so too, I spent eight years tracking a copy down. Perhaps it's a title so rare that I could name my price, but probably not. I've taken to Twitter to see what the retro gaming community I seem to have fallen in with thinks. 

Still, my collection of bad to middling Mega CD games is somehow worth a fortune and with the notable exception of Sonic CD, which is rightly considered a classic and one of the best in the series, I have no idea why. I mean it's not as if your life is going to be enriched by playing Ground Zero. It's wank. Really, it is. Great though I believe Thunderhawk to be, it's by no means a classic and although Paws of Fury is beautifully animated and a lot of fun, it's not a title that would ascend to the pantheon of fighting game greats. Also despite what I said earlier, after seeing these insane values and thinking about them like a rational adult, I've really been turned off trying to find the games I wanted so badly all those years ago and couldn't get hold of. They're all titles that are sort of considered in some circles to be their definitive versions. Titles like Flashback, which seems to be impossible to find anyway, Final Fight, Earthworm Jim, the Ecco games, Mickey Mania, Eternal Champions or even Shining Force CD. Really, I'd given up hope of owning Snatcher or Shining Force CD years ago, they're rarer and harder to find than traditionally mined, naturally sourced, billion year old Sea of Tranquility Moon Cheese after all, but somehow even Mickey Mania costs three figures now, and it's just a platformer whose defining features were a trip through the titular character's greatest hits and the level where Mickey gets chased by a moose. I could get it on PS1 for one figure. But I don't want to, I want it on the Mega CD because I had a demo of it, and that's probably why the values on games like this are so high.

Despite all the ranting, now that I'm starting to come to terms with the shock that other people besides me like the Mega CD, I now want to value my N64 collection. There's a boxed copy of Conker's Bad Fur Day in there, and it's in great condition. Like the Mega CD, I bought most my games cheap on the second hand market after the N64 became a defunct console. And that was mainly because I couldn't afford a PS2 but needed new games to play. It's quite likely that their individual values have appreciated greatly. I could be sitting on a fortune. While I'm at it, I might as well check out my stack of PS1 games too. There's a few esoteric titles in there that might be worth a bit as well. Sometimes I even wonder how much my Atari 800xl cassettes would be worth if I still had them. Really though, there's no point, because knowing the value of my retro games collections isn't going to matter a tiny bit. I'm not going to be selling any of my old games anytime soon. Perhaps I'm being irrational here, but they have a far greater sentimental value. They're like a record of my childhood almost, although that notion is perhaps no more irrational than the way some retro titles are valued on eBay.

Nostalgia it seems, is now worth an irrational amount of money.