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Conkers, Milkies and Cats-Eyes

Sunday, March 5th, 2023

I got the usual things for my birthday (games, books mostly) but here’s something KLS got me:

It’s a little bag of marbles! Not new ones, but vintage ones from the 1980s. These are more or less identical to the ones I used to play with 40 years ago 🙂

This arose from me reading about an auction recently in which individual marbles from the 1950s – 1970s sold for thousands of dollars. Aside from the fact these once ‘worthless’ items can now be very collectible, reading the story triggered a lot of memories about a hobby I’d all but forgotten!

Back in primary school marbles was one of the go-to games at school. We’d all bring little bags of marbles with us to school and play endless games of marbles with each other. Rain or shine this was a game that could be set up and played very quickly and it was so easy to learn that anyone could participate.

Kids all over the world played marbles, and a quick google search shows the rules varied everywhere and in some cases were different enough to almost be a different game! Here are how we played our schoolyard tournaments:

– Select a hole in the ground, a gap in a wall/fence or if nothing suitable exists choose a big marble (we called them ‘conkers’) and place it about 2 meters away from where we’d roll the marbles.
– Each player selects the same amount of marbles from their collection. They need to be the same sizes and the same assortment of glass or metal ones.
– Each player takes turns rolling their marbles until they get them all in the hole or all of them hit the conker. The first to accomplish this is the winner.
– If playing ‘for keeps’, the winner chooses one of the losers marbles and it becomes theirs.

A search online suggests this is a variant called ‘marble billiards’ but as far as I remember this is the only way we played. I wonder if this was just the Newcastle rules, or if this version was popular throughout Australia?

Everyone seemed to have marbles, since they were able to be purchased inexpensively almost everywhere. We had names for all the different types and styles: ‘milkies’ were opaque glass, ‘cat’s eyes’ were like the ones I got for my birthday, ‘steelies’ were metal balls (usually just repurposed bearings), ‘tiger’s eyes’ were orange and black cat’s eyes. There were others as well that I forget, and again a quick search shows the nicknames were as regional as the game.

Marble collecting seems to be a popular hobby these days, and an entire industry has arisen around identifying and trading rare marbles. Although we had our favourites, we were never precious with ours and after we got a bit older aside from using some of them as ammunition in slingshots I don’t really recall what ever happened to our marbles?

I suppose we gave them away to younger children? Maybe we just threw them away? Maybe Bernard still has them to this day? I just don’t know. Marbles were fantastic in those primary school days, but then they just seemed to fade away very quickly. That said, I think it’s a perfect children’s game, and maybe it’s time for the worlds children to rediscover marbles 🙂

Posted in Blog, History, Retro, Toys | 4 Comments »

The Magnet-Mages

Thursday, February 16th, 2023

It’s time for the second installment in my magnet series! Sure it’s been almost five years since the last, but there’s been a development.

For the first time ever, I sorted through our voluminous abundance of magnets, discarding and rearranging them, and clearing some space on our fridge for new additions. In doing this – which took much longer than expected – I thought it a good time to showcase a few.

Some of the oldest magnets we own are Pokémon and Digimon ones bought almost 30 years ago. I’m surprised they’ve lasted so long since they’re so cheaply made: just a sticker on a plastic base. Even though they’re a little low-rent, now we’ve had them for so long they’ve endeared themselves to us.

Back in 2019 when I was in Tokyo with Bernard I picked up the above magnet of ‘Someity’, one of the two Olympic mascots. She was supposed to evoke a cherry blossom, and merchandise of her (and her brother) was abundant. She looks a bit like a Pokémon doesn’t she? The Rey is a large static cling we’ve had for about a decade but I no longer remember where I got it.

A few years back I visited Forster with Sue and picked up this magnet. Thermometer magnets like this are trash of course, and questionably accurate, but there’s a lot of good in a bad magnet! Apparently it is possible to take whale cruises from Forster… maybe I should investigate that more one day?

A recent purchase! I got this striking metal embossed magnet (it’s about 10 cm wide) from the Ultra shop/exhibition in Nakano. This is a wonderful magnet, but it was a tad expensive. I wish I’d bought more though.

Not a magnet, but the above is our first ever ‘digital photo print’. This photo of Daisy was taken and printed on a dot-matrix printer when she was a little kitten. Its wonderfully low-tech and quaint, and since it is over 25 years old now I recently embossed so it lasts forever 🙂

Can you guess where we bought this? I’ve read that tourists can’t get very close to Stonehenge anymore, since they’ve moved the barrier back even farther than when we visited twelve years ago. I’ll always remember that as a special day.

A few years ago Florence texted me a photo of the above magnet, so naturally I had to buy it. I laughed aloud when it arrived and was about five times the size I thought from the pic. There were two to choose from, the other being Putin. I made the right choice.

I don’t recall exactly where I bought the above, but they feel like they’ve been on the fridge forever. The Luke is permanently attached to the base, but the other two can be replaced with any minifig. I recently had a look in the LEGO shop to see if you can still purchase these magnetic bases and they’re no longer made. A shame, since I think they’re great.

One of my all-time favourite magnets! This was purchased in Nara (Japan) back in 1997. Nara is the city with all the deer oft visited by school groups hence the design (the deer is wearing a school backpack). It’s only about an inch high, and its smile is infectious! I want to return to Nara one day…

Two ‘home made’ magnets. The bottom I made, and the top was bought on Etsy. It’s a 3D printed skull painted black with gold accents. I bought this as a gift for Bernard but liked it so much I kept it 🙂

I wonder if these sort of magnets – funny ones with jokes on them – are made in other countries? This is one of the better ones I’ve got, and for a long while lived on the whiteboard in my office at school.

The traditional ‘lake monster’ magnet, displayed alongside a couple of others also from Inverness. I bought all these the day we went to see the loch. That was another great day, since it was a place I had wanted to visit since childhood.

These are extremely high-quality mini Star Wars magnets. These were a series of blind-box items from over a decade ago, and I first bought them in Japan and then at Target when they were (surprisingly!) released here. I’ve got lots, and they’re now all together on the fridge. Can you name all these characters?

The above are our front doors, now covered in magnets from all over the world. There’s still space though, but I’ve probably got another twenty or so years before I need to sort them again…

Posted in Art, Blog, Collecting, Home | Comments Closed

Japan Pickups: Wizardry

Thursday, February 2nd, 2023

This will be the last of my Japan pickup posts. While I have a few other items that will eventually be shown here, I’m going to end the series with my favourite items that I purchased during the recent trip: Wizardry games.

As many of you know, I’ve sold off a large chunk of my game collection these past five or so years. Amidst this I chose to focus on collecting one series, and it’s Wizardry, which I’ve been playing since I was a boy! I’ve bought games in the series before in Japan (all the way back to our first trip in 2002!) but this time I really hit the jackpot.

The game on the left is a Saturn port of an adventure-style Wizardry spinoff, which is apparently quite poor. On the right is the Saturn port of Wizardry VI and VII, two of the series best. It’s supposed to be a good port, albeit somewhat slow. I’d never seen either before and was surprised how reasonably priced they both were.

Here’s the PC Engine port of Wizardry 5. I now own four versions of this game! According to what I read it’s a fairly good port, but the slow CD speed makes the SNES version the one to play. This one was about the cost of a brand new game.

Here’s a couple of curios: Wizardry Empire II and Wizardry Dimguil, two Japan-only games. As I’ve mentioned on the blog before Wizardry continued in Japan long after it ended in the west and all sorts of weird and wonderful installments were made. Without getting into needless detail, the Empire games introduced certain innovations without straying too far from the old game design, while Dimguil is a faithful installment in the old style that also added polygon dungeons and enemies.

And here we have Wizardry Xth, Wizardry Alternative Neo and Elminage III. The first was the game that ‘modernized’ Wizardry and would eventually lead to the Class of Heroes RPG series (and it’s own spin-offs!). Busin-0 is the Japan-only sequel to the last Wizardry game ever released in the west (Tales of the Forsaken Land) and Elminage III… well let’s say it’s an important ‘Wizardry adjacent’ game 😉

None of these – or the preceeding PS1 games – were cheap, and in some cases cost more than a typical new game. All are in fantastic condition, complete with box and all inclusions. If you’re keeping track then no, I can’t play any of these since I don’t have the Japanese consoles. Except for Elminage of course (I still have my PSP), which I plan to play one day.

I also found these four hint guides! Two of them are for games shown above, but the other two are for games I don’t have. Throb of The Demon’s Heart is a SNES game, and if I ever see it for sale I don’t doubt the price will bring a tear to my eye. Likewise for Wizardry Xth 2, the PS2 sequel to the one I bought. Why are Wizardry games so expensive! It’s not like there could be many collectors focused on this series?

The books are all great, packed with details such as dungeon maps, monsters, items and strategies for building your party. The latter ones are full colour (and fairly lengthy) but the SNES one – almost 30 years old now! – is all black and white. The above pic is an example page, which shows a fiendish dungeon that appears to be mapped on the face of a cube!

Speaking of books, when I saw the above packaged as a set I was literally speechless. They were in one of Mandarake’s glass cases, tightly bound together, and I didn’t know what they were at first. The price was high, and when I asked for a look the cashier misunderstood me, took them out, and rung them up! Of course I bought them, and I’m happy I did.

They are a six-volume series of hint guides for the first four Wizardry games. The books seem to be written for computer players (they reference Japanese systems of the day such as the FM-7 and PC-88) although I’m sure they work with any versions of the games. The interior and cover art is beautiful, the the detailed contents astounding!

The first and third games have two books each, and the other two just one. The extra books (for games one and three) are dedicated ‘monster manuals’ with two pages for every beast! These books are magnificent and such an incredible find: a ‘grail’ item I didn’t even know existed.

Speaking of treasures, I also bought the Wonderswan version of Wizardry 1. This was expensive: in fact it was the 4th most expensive game I’ve ever bought, at about thrice the cost of a new game. This is because it’s very rare, and because it was complete including an unused sticker sheet:

I have a Wonderswan, and plan on playing through this one day. Yes it’s in Japanese, but google translate these days is a wizard (no pun intended) and will more than suffice.

And the bonanza didn’t stop there! I found the above trio at Mandarake Nakano, and spent at least one minute deliberating before handing over my credit card and buying the three most expensive games I’ve ever bought. These are the (Japan-only) Gameboy Color versions of the first three games in the series, and are in fantastic condition. One of the biggest deciders in me splurging on these is the fact I can play them all on one of my many GBC’s, and will.

With 12 new (old!) games and 10 books my Wizardry collection expanded a lot this past trip (here’s an old post about it)! And yet I didn’t buy everything I saw, since even for a no-budget Wizardry collector some items were a bit too pricey, such as a factory sealed Empire II (the same one I bought for ~$40) for $300+, a 3DS Elminage game for $130 (which I couldn’t play since the 3DS is region locked) or a ‘greatest hits’ version of Busin for $100+ (I own the USA version).

And then there was the above soundtrack CD for about $220, which suggests that it is spectacularly rare.

Or these metal miniatures for tabletop RPG play. Give they are sealed, and probably insanely rare, I was a fool for passing on them at ~$70. If they’re there when I next visit (they won’t be) I’ll get them for sure.

Despite this bounteous haul, the two items I was really after – both of Jun Suemi’s Wizardry art books – eluded me. Both are very expensive now, so if I ever do find one I’ll be paying out the nose.

And when I do, you can read about it here 🙂

Posted in Blog, Books, Collecting, Games, History, Otaku, Retro | Comments Closed

2022 In Games

Tuesday, December 13th, 2022

Another year, another look back at my game purchases…

2022 was an interesting year, and unique amongst all the years I’ve been buying games (since arriving in the US), in that I only bought games for a single system. Yes, this means no charts this year since there would only be one entry: the Switch! In total I spent $1286 bought 43 games for the system for an average price of $30. This is my third lowest ever total amount spent and number of games bought. The reason for only one system is we have not yet replaced our PS4, mostly since we have never seen a PS5 (or replacement PS4) for sale. However since the Switch has more than enough great games and the PS5 is – in my opinion – lacking compelling software, I’m in no hurry to buy one.

This is not to say my game playing saw a decline in 2022 – quite the opposite! There were some important releases this past year, and coupled with the fact we consume more and more media on our iPads, this meant lots of evenings playing the Switch and watching shows at the same time 🙂

Before to my usual ‘best of’ list, I’ll add that I made a third game sale this past year, a bit smaller than the previous, parting with my NES/SNES/N64 and Gamecube collections. I’m now down to about 1100 physical games and as with the previous chunks of my collection I sold, I don’t regret it one bit and am sure that one day I will sell more.

So, what did I enjoy most this year? No prizes for guessing the top spot:

Monster Hunter Rise Sunbreak (Switch)

This was a massive update to the base game that introduced several new monsters, loads of new weapons and armour and an entirely new difficulty level (what we used to call ‘G Rank’), and it was amazing. As with every MH game I devoured this, playing 16-hour days during Spring Break and reaching the endgame very quickly. The new fights were so much fun, and the added complexity of gear (especially creating sets around the vast amount of skills) was very satisfying. Looking back on Rise/Sunbreak as a complete game, this is without a doubt my favourite Monster Hunter ever, and I can only imagine where the series will go from here.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 (Switch)

The third (or fourth…) game in this beloved series also came out in 2022, and once again it hooked me quickly and didn’t let go until about 150 hours later. With well-written characters, an engrossing story and a massive world to play around in this was another triumph of an RPG. This series is known for leaving some questions unanswered, but I’ll say the finale of this third and final game left me with a warm feeling. Now can we see a port of (or sequel to) Xenoblade Chronicles X?

Dungeon Encounters (Switch)

This was a surprise! I bought this one from Playasia since I wanted it on cartridge (it’s digital only in America), and didn’t open it for a few months. When I did I found a super old-school dungeon crawl in the Wizardry vein, only the dungeon is viewed from above and looks like a simple drawing on grid paper! Combat is turn-based and employs a simple gimmick involving two types of attack (physical and magic) and defense and at first everything seems a bit sparse. But very quickly the depth of the game becomes apparent, and 75 hours later when I beat it I knew it had become one of my favourite RPGs of all time. It’s very hardcore and certainly not for everyone, but I hope it does well enough for a sequel since it was absolutely my sort of game 🙂

Last year I wondered if 2022 would have brought a PS5 into our house and the answer was no. But I’ll make a prediction: 2023 will. I’m sure I’ll keep buying Switch games as well, but I think this time next year we’ll see both more games and more systems played in the annual round-up. Come back and see!

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Games, History | Comments Closed

Postcrossing 750!

Saturday, December 3rd, 2022

I’ve been a Postcrossing member for a little under four years now, and recently received my 750th postcard! I still love using the service, and every card received is a little treasure in my PO Box. It’s been about a year since I passed 500, so here’s an update about the recent arrivals.

That’s my top 10 countries, sorted by received cards. As usual Germany dominates the service, and collectively German users have now sent over 10 million cards! Russia on the other hand will probably eventually lose the second spot, since cards from there have all but ceased this year due to the war.

These are the countries from which I’ve only received a single card. Can you point to all of them on a map? There’s a longer list of countries from which I have not received any cards, and it’s always a nice surprise when I get the first one from a ‘new’ country.

Card images are anything you can imagine but I’ve been getting a larger percentage of animal cards recently. I suspect the reason may be that ‘tourist’ cards are becoming rarer so people are buying generic cards online. The above are three of the better animal cards received, but by far the weirdest (even perhaps disturbingly so) animal card I’ve got this past year is this one:

Is that a real life Mr Snuffleupagus?

The above are some ‘Postcrossing meetup’ cards I’ve received this year. These are cards printed by Postcrossing users and shared at gatherings. These seem popular in Asia, and the above are from China, Taiwan and Singapore. Very often multiple people sign the back of each, and you can see the back of one of them below.

This is a card featuring the art of ‘Tom of Finland’, a famous Finnish artist known for his gay art. As you can see the sender also used a stamp of the artist that was issued several years ago. Cards where the stamps match the front are very rare and always appreciated.

The stamps continue to impress, and the above is only a small selection of the hundreds I’ve received this past year. Russian stamps seem to be getting bigger every day, and Chinese and Japanese ones more colorful. Some stamps were particularly notable…

The Finnish stamp at top left is not just circular but also die-cut so that the country is removed! The top right stamp is the new German Postcrossing stamp released only a few weeks ago. The bottom left shows a lenticular Olympic stamp from The Netherlands and the bottom right is a selection of several vintage stamps a Japanese user sent me. I was so impressed with her doing this I sent a response card – my first one ever – blanketed with vintage American stamps. She was suitably pleased 🙂

This was probably the most unusual stamp: a braille stamp from Hong Kong! The dots (which read ‘good morning’) seem to be plastic adhered onto the stamp.

The above shows the backs of two cards. People write all sorts of things, from interesting to mundane, but occasionally go to impressive levels decorating or making the back unique. The one on the right is one of the meetup cards, and I’m impressed by the rubber stamps some users have!

From the 250 new cards since the last update, what were my favorites? It was a hard decision, but these three bubbled to the top:

The left one was from Japan and the sender said she bought it in a ‘big bookstore in Tokyo’. If I find this same card for sale, I’d buy it too! The middle card is a vintage card from France that is embossed and has glitter on it. And the right card is just a lovely photo of a man and a baby. There’s nothing on the back explaining the photo (not even artist credit) so we can only imagine who they are.

These days I can send/receive 25 cards at a time, and am averaging about that amount per month. So it may take a little under a year to get to the big 1000 cards received. When I do, I’ll post another update 🙂

Posted in Blog, Postcards | Comments Closed

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