Odds & Ends

Things have been pretty busy gaming-wise for me the past little while.  Spending time playing through my games rather than collecting them has been an interesting shift in my life, but I’ve been happy doing it.  Thankfully I’ve still been finding a few things here and there on the collecting front, and on an even brighter note swap/yard sale season is just around the corner!

Some highlights of things in my recent gaming life are:

1) Putting out some video reviews.  I’ve really been shifting my focus to video-based reviews on my YouTube channel, and I feel like I’m starting to hit a stride with that.

2) Helping out a local event with a retro video game expo.  We lent them a bunch of monitors and consoles to round out their abysmal selection, and it felt pretty good to get kids and parents together to play some old games.

3) Streaming so many  great games. I’ve been really active on Twitch over the past year and a half just enjoying the games I’ve been collecting.

Now to the collection additions!  Our local thrift stores have been a thorn in my side over the past year or so with their changes in policy around how you can get discounts, but very recently one of them has rescinded its evil ways and you can now get a 20% discount coupon when you bring a grocery bag of items in to donate.  Please bear in mind that these are big box chain thrift stores and not non-profit stores like the Salvation Army… I have absolutely no problem paying more to directly support charity, but I’m talking about for-profit stores like Goodwill and Value Village.

When I popped in the other day to look for something entirely different, they had a few Game Boy games in their case that I was instantly interested in.  The first was a good copy of Final Fantasy Legend III that I wanted to replace my current absolutely horrendous version with a its torn-to-shreds label.  Alongside that one was Captain America and the Avengers with a price tag of $40.  There aren’t too many Game Boy games that fetch such a price, but after comparing to the internet’s going rate I decided to jump in on that one.  When trying it out I died pretty much instantly since beat-em-ups aren’t my strength by any means, but my boyfriend fiddled around with it for a bit, and he was excited about the purchase. Both these games were in absolutely gorgeous condition and it was a no-brainer to pick them up.

In a local online auction, I was lucky enough to win a few more Game Boy games, including a second copy of James Bond 007 and Tetris DX.  I had to double and triple check my collection before bidding on the Tetris game because I already own at least two or three other versions of Tetris for it.  It’s amazing how many variations they’ve put on that old formula, some better than others of course.

For NES and Famicom, I picked up a few games online and via local auction including Pinball Quest: The World’s First Fantasy Pinball, Bad Dudes, and The Wing of Madoola.  Pinball Quest looks really cool and mixes up Pinball with RPG elements, two things I never thought I’d see in the same game.  It looks tough but fun, and hopefully it’ll also play that way.  Bad Dudes with its reputation obviously speaks for itself, but I was lucky to find it with its manual.  The manual felt greasy and dusty all at the same time and I really hate touching it, but I’m not really sure how to tidy it up very well.  I want to put it in a plastic bag and observe it rather than ever physically interacting with it again.  All I know about The Wing of Madoola is that it’s supposed to be a difficult platformer/adventure game that is English-friendly, so I jumped all over that.

I was also told of another English-friendly Famicom game called Dragon Buster that I should consider looking into.  I watched someone’s gameplay video on YouTube and was laughing awfully hard in the first few seconds at how the main character swings his sword around, if you can even call it swinging.  It’s more like flailing!  I went to eBay to purchase it but accidentally bought the second game instead.  I didn’t actually realize my mistake until it arrived in the mail, but I remedied the issue and purchased the first game as well. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if the second game is playable with no Japanese knowledge, but I will look into it.  Either way, the two of them are together in my collection now!

I also enjoy the screenshot from Dragon Buster on the front label. That yellow monster with the grossest-ever bellybutton is the stuff of nightmares.

Staying in the 8-bit generation a little longer, I also snagged three more NES games from that local online auction I’ve been mentioning.  MTV Remote Control was a game I’d never heard of before and still don’t know too much about, but with auctions starting pretty cheap, I figured it’d be worth picking up.  Nobody else bid on it, so I was an instant winner (not sure if that’s good or bad…).  I had to fight a little bit to get my hands on Quattro Adventure, a game that’s comprised of four games in one.  I’ve had the pleasure of watching games like Boomerang Kid and Super Robin Hood streamed by friends of mine, and I couldn’t help wanting to try them out myself.  I had actually been eyeballing a copy of this game at a flea market over the past year or so, but it was priced at $40 and there was no way I was going to pay that.  This one came to me for a smooth $7, so it was quite the deal!  Deadly Towers was not a game I was actively looking for, but nobody dared place a bid on it.  I felt bad and brought it home too.

Although I don’t usually make too many purchases for PC, I recently played through King’s Quest V on NES and had King’s Quest fever for a bit.  I stumbled into some copies of three of the games at the thrift store and scooped them right up.  One was the PC version of KQV which I’ve never had the pleasure of owning, and the others were King’s Quest 7 and 8.  I’ve heard mixed reviews about the latter two but it doesn’t hurt to have them and try them out for myself.

On the recommendation of a few different people, I also picked up Castle of Illusion for the Sega Master System.  I’ve been wanting to expand my Master System collection beyond RPGs for a while now but really never know where to start.  This version of the game has often been touted as its best version, and I got a great copy from overseas that was significantly cheaper than the North American version and will play just the same in my console.  If there’s one thing I love about the Master System, it’s its lack of region locking for the most part.

It’s rare that I have two Master System-related thing to share at once, but I did buy another game off of eBay recently called Asterix.  I had tried waiting out the game swap to see if I could find a copy there, but my luck ran short with this one since it’s a PAL region-exclusive.  There are usually so few Master System games at swaps to begin with that it was highly unlikely to find this one anway, but I figured I’d try.  I’m pretty excited to give this one a whirl since it appears on many different Top Master System Games lists.  It’s missing its manual, but I hope I’ll be okay without it.

I also picked up Wheel of Fortune for PS1 and Barbie and the Three Musketeers for Wii.  Most of you are probably familiar with the former, but the latter looks like a genuinely interesting adventure game that I was instantly into when I saw some folks playing it.  I really hope my copy works well since it’s a bit scratched up, but I really couldn’t say no for $3.

Switching back to a bit of Sega, I recently bought a copy of Gadget Twins for the Genesis.  This one looks pretty cute.  It’s a shooter with little submarines that are fighting other submarines that are sometimes in larger, angrier-looking submarines… if it sounds too cute to be true, you’re probably right!  This isn’t a genre I normally saunter too far into, but it was the right price!

Last but not least, I bought a Virtual Boy game called V Tetris.  This was a Japan-exclusive game that is very different from the Tetris game that was released in North America, 3D Tetris.  I’m also in love with the fact that the Virtual Boy is region free and hope to continue to take advantage of that as I round out my collection for this console.

And there it is!  Lots of new games to add to the pile and a few more blog posts coming.  There was an impromptu game and antique swap this weekend and I was pretty successful at those as well.  I’d also like to share lots of the Super Famicom games I’ve been slowly hoarding, so expect a post about that soon as well.

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend, and enjoy Monday tomorrow!

Thanks for reading!

-GG