For the first time in many years one of the rarest GX4000 carts surfaced on eBay, and sold for an impressive EUR 116.00 (approximately £95.75)!!

Dick Tracy is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up with baddies appearing in front of you and from windows a bit like the classic Robocop game; but on a couple of stages involves some basic jumping and platforming styles. Overall though it’s not a very good game and hardly worth the value it goes for, but is now extremely rare and collectors will splash out! There’s a longplay video in my YouTube channel if you fancy checking out what your missing – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylQkJz8NNfo

The tape/disk original on the CPC range of computers was extremely poor which probably hampered sales of the GX4000 version which is a little shame given they completely re-programmed it to make use of the new Plus/GX4000 features like hardware sprites and scrolling, with the graphics also completely redrawn. So on the positive it looks and moves a lot nicer and ultimately this makes it a sought after cart – even if the game is still rubbish!

Well folks, it was the day of reckoning for this saga and auction… and it’s finally been sold – auction ended.

So you ready for the winning bid? I’m sure you’ve already been following the auction and know already but in case you missed it…..

FINAL PRICE – £908.67

Yikes!!!! That’s right guys, over £900 … so at last we know the top value for this game. Maybe this will spur a few other people out there to put their copies up for auction as there must be several more at least out there. At least we know that now. All that’s left is to hope and pray the winning bidder will dump the ROM for everyone in the Amstrad community to play this game via emulators. Over on the cpcwiki.eu forums a respected contributor there has developed the hardware to safely dump this cart without any danger of causing damage to the cart and avoiding the old/common method of cracking the casing open.

Please, we urge whoever won this auction to get in touch with us here and we’ll arrange delivery of hardware, instructions for use and an easy quick way to do this. Email me us here – xyphoe [ at ] gx4000.co.uk

Well after all the fuss we investigated nearly 2 weeks ago HERE which ended in the auction being withdrawn and seemingly the Ebayers account closed, nigel17031971 is back on Ebay again with a new auction for the same game – with proper photos taken this time and an explanation why!

So here you go – http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270649526052&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Bidding starts at £200 finishing on Sunday 24th October at 6:21pm (GMT). With the new photos added of the game in action, the box and instructions which I’ve not seen being used elsewhere this does, after all that, appear to be a legitimate auction.

Nigel explains the situation around this especially as the original auction looked so dodgy considering what a rare item it is and also mentions this very site –

“There it lay until early 2010 when I finally decided to move, and was clearing out my loft. Initially I was just going to chuck the lot away, but decided to keep it, after I discovered that the console and all the games still worked. Becoming bored with the few games I have I decided to try the internet to see if I could get any more, reasoning that as the console was so old, they would be very cheap by now. It was then I discovered the Amstrad GX4000 web site and found just how rare the game that I had in my possession was. It was around this time that my internet went down, and I had to wait three weeks to be reconnected. During this time I just wanted to list my game on e-bay and so used my sister’s computer to do so. I copied an image of the game from a web site (reasoning that it was exactly the same as the one that I wanted to sell) and listed the game).I was then overwhelmed with e-mails from people asking to see actual pictures of the game I had. I was unable to do this, as neither my camera nor scanner worked, I therefore decided to wait and sell the game when I could do so. The images (above) are actual photos of my game and I am now able to e-mail further images should you require to see them before biding.“

Well happy bidding peeps, lets see how this one goes…

One final note however … PLEASE … whoever does win the auction do get in contact with the people on the CPC Wiki Forums and let them safely dump the game ROM – there is a method to do this safely without damaging the cart in any way. Please don’t get it for your collection and leave it collecting dust on a shelf somewhere and deprive thousands of Amstrad fans the opportunity to play this game. Thank you.

Well it looks like the holy grail of Amstrad carts, and indeed games across all the Amstrad platforms generally has surfaced for sale on Ebay!

Here’s the link to the auction –

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270644070376&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

Unfortunately it looks rather suspicious – the seller “nigel7031971″ has zero feedback(!!) and no other auctions up, and there’s only one photo shown for the item that looks rather familiar….

Compare with – http://gx4000.co.uk/gamebase/games.php?game=specialcriminalinvestigations

Here’s the photo used on the auction –

http://i.ebayimg.com/21/!B4ecj4Q!Wk~$%28KGrHqUOKjkEyP+QVwDHBMqE,oUlmw~~_35.JPG

Now the photo we have on our site –

http://gx4000.co.uk/gamebase/images/specialcriminalinvestigations/pack1.jpg

Hmmm!!! Note that photo was put live on this very website in December 2008! The photo was originally taken by the only known owner of the game James Bridges several months previous which he posted on the old cpczone.net forums (now sadly defunct) – of course that is where we got it from.

Seems this Ebayer has then taken it from our site!

We will try and contact the seller to clear this up, but for the time being …. our advice is to be very cautious.

*UPDATE* 06/10/2010 09:10am

A forum member “ukmarkh” on the cpcwiki.eu forums has contacted Martyn Carrol of Retro Gamer magazine who wrote the article on the Chase HQ 2 cart and personally viewed the game that James Bridges owns. Martyn was able to contact James who replied -“Hi Martyn, it is not my one. I will be very interested to see how much it sells for! James”

So at least we now know that it isn’t James selling the cart under a different name to protect his identity.

*UPDATE* 06/10/2010 20:30pm

The seller has replied to my email. It seems that he will allow collection in person and testing on his own GX4000 console – which is good news. The worrying part of his reply is that he appears unable to take any more, or should I saw ‘new’ photos. Come on … who at least doesn’t own a digital camera or mobile phone that takes pics these days??

*UPDATE* 07/10/2010 00:30am

The auction is no longer available and has been removed.

The seller is also no longer a registered Ebay user –

http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/nigel17031971

Draw your own conclusions. What a shame and waste of time, getting everyone hopes and expectations up! Oh well …. welcome to the murky world of collecting/trading rare retro games!

Over the years I’ve managed to purchase all the GX4000 games off Ebay. I’m only missing boxes and manual for about 3 games, the Trojan Light Phazer, and of course the legendary Chase HQ 2 (more on that another time). I’ve been watching Ebay at least once a week since about 2000 and have traded many GX items to achieve my collection, which is still yet to be completed, but I believe I have a good enough level of experience here to share what I think you should be paying and what they should be valued at.

Recently there have been many ‘bootleg’ games appearing – I own some of these, and it is great to have some games on cart that were never released on this format like Gryzor, Fluff and Chase HQ, unfortunately it has led in the last few months to rarer games that were officially released being bootlegged (is that the right word?) so are you being ripped off? Does it matter they weren’t the original game that was on the cart? Again another topic for another day, but in the mean time I present you with my cart rarity and Ebay guide for you…

Click HERE to view.

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.