Hungry Goriya Used Acquire: Art Books, Game Guides, and Posters

This is the nineteenth post in a series called “Hungry Goriya Used Acquire” that serves to highlight the contents of a large game collection I procured from an old high school friend of mine, Joe.  Read here for the backstory.

Along with the bounty of games we received from my friend back in April, I think one of my very favourite parts of the collection were the books and posters that came along with everything.  As a bit of a completionist, there was always a part of my younger self that wanted to 100% every game I played, and I always found myself attracted to game guides as a result of this. Unfortunately the guides were always too pricey, and I bought games instead of guides.  Since those times I’ve managed to collect quite a few used guides, but nothing I had up until this point can quite compare to the huge pile of paper I got in this collection acquisition.  It would have been completely overwhelming to sit down and itemize every single one of them with photographs, so instead I’ve highlighted some of my favourites and the ones that mean the most to me or my boyfriend.

I’ll start with the art books.  There were plenty of these, many of which are for games that I haven’t gotten around to playing myself by this point.  There were art books for some pretty solid games like Mass Effect and Half Life 2, both of which my boyfriend was very happy to take a look through.  He is also a tremendous fan of Doom, so reading “The Making of” was a pretty fun venture.

Some other art books that were more up my alley were for RPGs on various consoles.  I haven’t played any of these games yet, but when I do get around to trying them out, these will definitely be something I’ll come back to.  Much of the art work in games from this era is strikingly beautiful, and I’m proud to have a way to enjoy it in a different way outside of the games themselves.

There were at least 50 game guides in total.  I added a few new Zelda guides to my collection (yay for The Wind Waker!), as well as many of the other Final Fantasy ones I was missing.  I’ll have to double check, but I think I’m pretty close to having a complete guide set for Final Fantasy games.  I’m especially excited about the one for Dawn of Souls.  Though I don’t own that particular iteration of the game, I’m sure that it’s similar enough to the PS1 version (Origins) that I can see if I’ve missed anything when I finally do decide to go back through FFII again.  I also won’t complain about owning a guide for Super Smash Bros. Melee since in the few times I’ve indulged in Smash, I could never quite seem to figure out how the finer points of the game worked.  What are the percentages about?  Why can you go well over 100% before you get blasted into the atmosphere?  So many unanswered questions that I might now have the power to answer!

There were so, so many full-size posters to be had here as well.  Some were from store-front displays, and others were probably just packed in with games when they got shipped out to stores (Joe used to work in a game store back in the day, which is where many of these things came from.)  Again, with the number of posters there are in the bunch, I only picked and chose a few that I personally liked or thought might be interesting for people to take a look at!  Many of them I picked are for Working Designs games, and as far as I’m concerned, Working Designs can do no wrong in the world.  These are a real treat to personally own, but I need about a million more walls in my house to fit all of these beautiful works of art!

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this visual treat!  I’m not sure if this will be the last entry in this series because there is some more stuff left, but I’m not entirely sure how to categorize it or chronicle it in a meaningful way.  For example, there are press kits from E3 2005/2006, lots of merchandise from those events, as well as demo games and other miscellaneous things of that sort.  A lot of it I don’t have any personal context for since I wasn’t at the events myself, so I’ve been struggling trying to think of a way to present that here.  For the time being I will leave it be unless there’s a huge stir of interest here to see some of it.

I will likely do a wrap-up post in the near future about what this entire experience was like for me, so stay tuned for that!  In the meantime, I truly hope you’ve enjoyed this trip through a venture that essentially doubled my game collection in a day.  There are some real great things here that I’m so blessed to be able to eventually experience, and I’m greatly looking forward to the challenge of working through my now ridiculously backlogged game collection.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all! I will be celebrating with various turkey dinners over the weekend, followed by The Soup-ening, 2017.  Thanks for reading, as always!

-GG