Robot Claw

The Australia Postcards

June 30th, 2025

During my recent trip, I sent 27 postcards home from Australia, which was two each day plus an extra one to document the (temporary) loss of my hat. In previous years I’ve documented here all the cards and stamps, but that’s a lot of work so I’ll be showing highlights only in this post.

The most common card theme was animals, with a full third of the cards I mailed being kangaroos or koalas, and a few extras of other Antipodean beasts. You’ll see from the excerpts above I went ‘all in’ on a new series of AI art cards I found in Sydney, since I believe in the future they’ll be an amusing snapshot in time 🙂

The middle card above is a Delta airlines card, perhaps given out on flights decades ago? I wrote this in multiple parts while in-transit to Oz, and posted it as soon as I arrived. The other two cards were brought with me to Australia; I always bring a stash with me when I travel due to the potential difficulty of finding cards in shops these days.

Sue gave me several retro cards she found in an antique store and the two rural cards above were part of that stash. They’re wonderful, and it’s my dream one day to find an antique shop in Australia with a massive display of old (70s/80s) cards to buy!

The Men At Work card 40 years old and when I found it in the postcard shop not far from our house I knew I’d be sending it to myself from Australia one day. The Mickey Rourke card was purchased in Japan years ago, and Warren Beattie was found in a PA antique store a couple of years ago. I like finding (and buying) unusual postcards since I always know I’ll have the chance to send them home or to someone else one day.

As usual I did my best to make the stamps on each card unique, and this was helped immensely by Sue also giving me a bunch of retro Australia stamps she had purchased from ‘an old man’ sometime last year. The spaceship one above is one example, and here’s some more:

The middle strip above is nostalgic since I recall having them in my childhood stamp collection and loving that they formed a continuous image. Now I own them again!

Australia issues lots of stamps, and I didn’t come close to running out of variety. Even beyond the ‘normal’ stamps there were a dozen or more packs of collectors stamps available in post offices, of which I only purchased the Gremlins set. Did you get a card with a gremlin on it?

The above is an a true story of the time Sue and I saw a wild emu during our road trip, written one evening in a hotel room in Wellington. As usual I wrote a mix of what I did, ate or saw on the card backs and collectively they make for a fun diary of my trip.

It’s a lot of work writing and sending these cards, but apparently more than two per day in Australia wasn’t enough work since I sent even more from Japan. You’ll see what I mean in the next post…

Posted in Australia, Postcards, Trip | No Comments »

Japan Pickups: Gamebooks

June 27th, 2025

It was a good Japan trip as far as my gamebook collection goes, with both old and new products found. This post lists everything I bought.

I’ve got a lot of Japanese Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (about 2/3rds of the original run) but somehow the third book – Forest Of Doom – had eluded me. I was surprised to find a copy for very cheap (¥1000) at Mandarake.

According to the publication history, this is the 17th edition from March 1986. For a nearly 40-year-old book it’s in astonishingly good condition, as if it just came off the press.

Japanese FF books included pull-out adventure sheets and this is perhaps the best example I have yet seen. I don’t think this book was ever opened, much less read, and it’s now got a permanent home in my collection.

I also bought the book on the left, which shares the cover art of Dungoneer, the first rulebook for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy RPG. The Japanese book has a different title (Advanced Fighting Fantasy volume 1) and is slightly shorter, with some material removed. It seems Japan compressed the three AFF volumes into two, but there’s detail here I have yet to discover. Again this book was extremely inexpensive (¥500!) which shocked me since I wouldn’t have hesitated to pay twenty or more times as much.

I finally found the 4th Group SNE FF reprint box set, which allegedly published early in 2024 but I had never seen in my previous three trips. This collects the Sorcery! set and Secrets Of Salamonis, which receives its first Japanese printing here.

These trade-sized reprints continue to be definitive, with beautiful presentation, paper quality and reproduction. The bonus book in this set is unsurprisingly the Sorcery Spell Book.

Even though I already owned five (!) complete sets of the Sorcery series (including the Japanese versions from 1985 and 2004) I’m happy to add this new set to my collection.

To my surprise there was also a fifth reprint box set available! I later learned this one was only just released, which explains why I saw it in many bookstores. It contains a collection of five books, including two new to Japan: Howl Of The Werewolf and Crystal Of Storms.

Two of these are particular interesting. Starship Traveler hasn’t been reprinted in over two decades, and it’s long been rumoured the reason was due both the cover and internal art. This reprint seems to confirm both, with a new cover and new internal art:

The copyright page reveals the art was taken from the TinMan digital version of the book, and while the style is different from the line art common to the series, the reproduction is excellent and overall I think it suits the book well.

Scorpion Swamp has never been reprinted (in any language), and there have been a few theories as to why including art or the author not allowing it. And yet here it is, with a new cover and internal art:

The above picture contains the original art on the left and the art from this reprint on the right. As you can see the artist (who also did the art for Secret Of Salamonis) has drawn new versions of all the old pieces, and his style matches the series perfectly. The art is copyrighted 2025 to Ian Livingstone and I suspect this was done to enable future reprints, possibly including in the new American Steve Jackson Games versions? Let’s hope this means the other books that have never been reprinted will see new versions as well.

Moving away from Fighting Fantasy, to my surprise I found this:

This is a gamebook based on the Xevious arcade game! I would have thought this was somewhat well-known amongst hardcore gamebook collectors (how many exist?) and therefore I was surprised it only cost me ¥1000.

Flipping through it is most definitely a robust gamebook with inventory and systems, almost certainly modeled after a FF book. Even though it’s a different publisher, the back of the book even includes ads for other gamebooks including FF and the Back To The Future one I bought a few years ago.

What a strange beast this book is! The art inside shows almost no space battles, instead seeming like a standard adventure with fights against monsters and villains. Xevious also had some novels written about it, but I don’t know if there’s any connection between those and this gamebook.

Speaking of space-themed Gamebooks, the above was almost inadvertently found in a bargain bin at BookOff and cost a mere ¥100! I thought it was Star Wars related at first, and was shocked to realize it was a gamebook.

This is an interesting CYOA style book where each section has at least a half-page illustration. The text seems simple enough that I think this will be playable with a translator. While it’s not licensed item, the Star Wars ‘homages’ are obvious, from the cover to the hero’s robot which looks exactly like R2. Based on an add on the final page, this seems to be the first in a series of two books; I’ll be looking out for the other on future trips!

And lastly we have a Queen’s Blade book, Alicia the Dark User of Wonderland. I’ve got a lot of these two-player books which sprung from a US series called Lost World but took on a life of its own when rebranded with anime girls in Japan. I see these occasionally in Japan but often skip them since they’re a bit heavy and I don’t want to fill my suitcases with them 🙂

Posted in Books & Comics, Gamebooks, Japan | No Comments »

Can Collection Update (& Japan Pickups)

June 23rd, 2025

It’s been a couple of years since my last can ‘collection’ update, and since I obtained some on each of my last three Japan trips, now seems like a good time. I’ll try to list these additions in chronological order of when I got them.

I did a bunch of attic sorting last year and unearthed the above two. They date from 2019 and were part of series of five cans to promote the Far From Home film. I have no recollection of where or when I got these.

Some more Chinese Ultraman (in this case Tiga and Mebius) cans, purchased from a shop in NYC a few years ago. The contents were sickly sweet and instantly disposed of.

These are both mysteries. I think I got the Bumblebee one during my solo 2023 Japan trip, but perhaps I found it in NYC as well? The Qdol can features Kyo Kusanagi, a character from King Of Fighters, and was found at a local Asian grocer. They only had this character but looking online he was one from a series of six cans.

Last year Coca Cola did a worldwide series of commemorative Marvel cans featuring what I personally think was mundane art of dozens of characters. Above are six of them, five from the USA and one (Groot) I got in Japan.

The Australian cans in this series were different – taller and thinner – and didn’t feature as large a range of characters. I picked these two up in Oz last year.

Back in January I bought the Ultraman coffee can in Nagoya, and despite looking never saw them (there were six different ones) for sale anywhere else. The Ultraman can was bought at a local Asian grocer.

Jessica brought both of these cans of beer back from Japan – still full! – and they feature beautiful art by Hirohiko Araki, the mangaka of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. I don’t read the manga so I don’t know if these are original characters or from the story.

And lastly we have these four. The ENHYPEN can was purchased from a drink machine in Hakodate a couple of weeks ago, and was one of a series of eight cans that I never saw anywhere else. The second is a Hololive energy drink, and was bought at a konbini. The third is a Hokkaido souvenir coke can, which was available almost everywhere in Hakodate. The Digimon milk tea can was purchased at a local Asian grocer.

And that’s that for this update to a ‘collection’ which I don’t take seriously and just sits forgotten in the attic. Come back in a few years for the next update to find out if I get any of the new Jurassic Park Dr Pepper cans available in stores right now 🙂

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Japan Pickups: Wizardry

June 20th, 2025

My Wizardry game collection is close to complete and it’s been a while since I’ve found anything I didn’t have, so finding four items on the recent trip was a pleasant surprise.

The special edition of the remake of Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord comes with an art print and two booklets. Wizardry The Five Ordeals released just a couple of weeks before the trip and was widely available everywhere (it’s a port of a Japanese PC game). I’m looking forward to playing this one!

Elminage is a game series that is Wizardry in all but name and was developed by some of the same people that made the Japanese Wizardry games. I already owned two of the games and with the addition of Elminage II and Elminage Gothic I now have the entire series. Both of these games were quite expensive, and it’s worth mentioning that I can’t play Elminage Gothic since it’s a 3DS version and my 3DS’s are religion locked to USA games.

Incidentally, my collection of Wizardry games now exceeds 50! I believe I own every game in the series including all the Japanese ‘gaiden’ games, so from this point expanding my collection will only happen via new releases or if I manage to obtain more of the original computer versions.

I also purchased on this trip the above three Wizardry guides. Each of them are full colour with dozens of pages of monster and item art, and detailed maps of each game level.

As with the dozens of other (Japanese) Wizardry guides I already own, these are beautiful books with production levels that far exceed what we had in the west at the time. It’s evidence of how popular this series was in Japan that I now own multiple comprehensive guides for each of the first few games, each released by different publishers and yet I’m not aware of a single western guide for any of the first five Wizardry games!

Lastly I found this Wizardry fanzine in the retro game section at Shosen Book Tower in Akihabara. As you can read on the translation at right, it has a lengthy interview with Superdeluxe games about the collectors edition mentioned above, as well as a wealth of other wizardry-related articles and artwork. This book is obviously a work of love by dedicated Japanese fans and will require close reading via translator since I suspect there’s some good information in its pages 🙂

My Wizardry book collection exceeds 50 titles now as well, and continues to expand via novels, manga, game guides and RPG manuals. With hardly any information on such books available online I have no idea how much else is waiting to be found on future trips…

Posted in Collecting, Games, Japan | No Comments »

Time For Me To Fly

June 16th, 2025

My flight boards soon. In about 22 hours I’ll be home.

You are often interviewed by security on the way out of Tokyo, and the girl that interviewed me said I’ve seen more Japan than she has. I said I’ve got lots more to see and she laughed and said she hopes I can return soon.

So do I.

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Closed