The Quiet of Winter

Most of winter has come and gone without too much action on the collecting front. In-person meetups are still not safe given the state of the world at the moment, and store availability has been touch and go over the past many months. As a result, about 85% of what I’ve purchased has come from the Great Internet. While I’m hopeful for some kind of game swap in the near future, I doubt it’s going to happen.

The first game I bought was Jackie Chan’s Action Kung Fu for the Famicom (which I think was just shortened to Jackie Chan in Japan). I first discovered this game on a multicart ages ago and was immediately smitten with the graphics. Your sprite is enormous and also very expressive, and even though some of the gameplay is a bit janky, I’m excited to finally be able to play it since no English is really required. The North American version of this cartridge is quite expensive so the Famicom version was the way to go.

I was tricked into buying Legendary Wings for NES after I finished up The Guardian Legend this past fall. I did a tag-team playthrough with a wonderful friend, TheRenesance, who insisted I should try out Legendary Wings if I enjoyed the shooter parts of TGL. Well, while I could certainly manage some of those sections, Legendary Wings completely destroyed me within about 5 seconds of playing. I haven’t tried again since just because of how difficult it felt, but maybe I’ll come back to it sometime and get in a bit more practice.

Ultima The False Prophet (also known as Ultima VI) had an SNES release that I was told would be good to try. There are so many Ultima console ports out there, some with worse reputations than others, but after falling in love with Ultima IV on the Master System, I hope to have a similar experience here some day. The game was in really great condition too, which is always a plus when things arrive as described.

I’m always looking out for new and exciting Game Boy games, and Zen Intergalactic Ninja looked promising. The NES title is totally out of reach in terms of price for me, so the Game Boy game was a nice fallback plan. I found out about this Who Framed Roger Rabbit game from a YouTube video by NES Friend and bought it right away after seeing what it’s all about. I still have yet to play the NES game, but I adored the movie growing up. The more ways to experience this world, the merrier!

The Jungle Book for Sega Genesis was an occasional rental for me when I was young, and unfortunately I had forgotten just how terrible I am at it until testing out this cartridge! It has all of the high points of other Disney games of the time like great graphics and music, but it’s far from my favourite of the bunch. I’d love to find a copy of Pocahontas one of these days… for now, this will have to do!

At one of the brief points when some local thrift stores were open, we checked in to see about any potential games and stumbled upon a few titles for the Playstation. For a few dollars each and with their nearly pristine condition calling to us, it wasn’t a hard choice to take these three home. I think the winner of the bunch from what I’ve been able to find out is Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire. I’m admittedly very curious about Super Star Dance Club #1 Hits though…

I finally added another Sega Saturn game to my collection: Panzer Dragoon. Prices for the original came down quite a bit with the release of the recent remake, and that was just the break I’d been waiting for. This is just like a much prettier version of Star Fox… maybe I’ll finally sit down and play more Saturn!

That just about does it here. While it’s much less exciting buying things online than finding them in the flesh in some form, it’s still nice to have added a few things to the shelves. Hopefully things will get back to normal in the coming months. I hope you’re all keeping safe.

Thanks for reading!

-GG