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Gamebook Update

Friday, June 14th, 2019

Late last year, motivated by the blog post I had made referencing it, I bought this:

It wasn’t too expensive (~$30) but took about 3 months to arrive from Japan. It’s the third of three Fighting Fantasy reprints from a decade ago, and since I had the other two I naturally had to own this one as well. This is now my fifth different imprint of House Of Hell!

As with the others the player character is now a young girl and the art (and text?) showcases this. House of Hell is a notably grim gamebook – inspired by the darker elements of 1970s gothic horror – and our poor protagonist gets herself into some tight spots in this book. I bet in the Japanese it’s a good read.

The adverts in the back suggest that Hobby Japan also printed Dungeons & Dragons manuals with an ‘anime girl’ makeover. I’ll keep my eyes open for one of them in the future…

The above is an ‘Esper Gamebook’ published by the same publishers of FF books in Japan. It’s very similar in design and style, but seems to be more of a choose-your-own-adventure than a system-based RPG book.

I can find very little about this online (it’s not on Demians for instance) and there’s no adverts or listings of any other titles at the back so maybe it was a one-off? Based strictly on the art I’m guessing the story is Akira inspired, although it contains androids and aliens as well. I bet it’s crazy!

The above is a real treasure, and I paid about $40 for it. It’s called The Four Kings and is the fourth of four ‘original gamebooks’ published by the Japanese licensor. It uses the standard Fighting Fantasy system and character sheet, and probably plays the same as well. Aside from the fact it’s not one of the original series titles, it’s essentially an FF book.

Much like the other Japanese releases from that time (this book was published in 1990, just after Sky Lord came out in Japan) it uses the Japanese numbering and writing (vertical text) system throughout and even google translate has trouble with it. I doubt therefore I’ll ever be reading it. But as a curio it’s as good as they get, and I’d love one day to find the earlier three.

It’s also loaded with advertisements for other books at the end, including all preceding 32 FF titles, all the Advanced FF books, various related titles (such as Maelstrom) and something quite unusual:

Look at the ad on the left. Google translate tells me the book is called ‘Cube of Tantalon‘ and is a JP-exclusive Advanced FF module! Here’s the translated synopsis:

“Shimomura House Keiko & Group SNE’s first fantasy RPG scenario! The Kingdom of Galantria has been repeatedly attacked by militant neighbors, and now the flag color of the front line has become worse and depressed. According to the court magistrate, if you get the “cube of equilibrium”, a mysterious item that is described in the book left by the former King Tantalon, you might save the kingdom of Galantria.”

King Tantalon, famous for his tasks perhaps?!? Sounds fascinating! This book is probably impossible to find these days, especially since it’s also seemingly nonexistent online, but it’ll go on my ‘list’ just in case I stumble upon it on a future trip to Japan 🙂

Posted in Books, Collecting, Gamebooks, Miscellaneous, Otaku | Comments Closed

My Collection: Virtual Boy

Friday, May 24th, 2019

In 1995 Nintendo released their Virtual Boy console. It utilized monochrome red stereoscopic 3D graphics and became a legendary failure, being pulled from the market in under a year. The launch price was $180; eight months after launch I bought mine – an ex-rental – for $30.

When assembled for use it looks like this:

And is played like this:

While playing you view two screens – one each eye – which form a 3D image via parallax. It’s very effective – ‘true’ 3D – and almost impossible to photograph. But I tried:

While the 3D effect is convincing, there are three significant problems with the device:
1) The games are poor.
2) The posture required to actually play it is painful.
3) Playing hurts the eyes and for most people (myself included) causes headaches in only minutes.

It’s incredible this was ever released since these serious issues are obvious after even casual use. I remember after it launched I knew it would fail, and was never seriously interested in buying one even after the first price cut (this is an advert I kept from a late 1995 comic):

Only 14 games were released in the USA (22 worldwide) and I own four:

All of these were purchased brand new for $10 apiece (games were $30 at launch). I got Red Alarm the day I got the system, and the others about six months later. I recall playing the Wario game to completion but barely played the others.

The cartridges are large but very thin, and quite collectible today. The game shown above may be my priciest single game, with boxed copies on eBay right now for $900 (yes, nine hundred). It’s notable for being the last and rarest game for the system and for being linked to the Persona series.

I only paid $70 for my system and games. I could probably sell it all for $1000+ today. Not bad for one of the biggest failures in video game history.

Posted in Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Tech | Comments Closed

Happy Birthday Game Boy!

Sunday, April 21st, 2019

30 years ago today Nintendo released their first portable game system: the Game Boy.

That’s a very early Japanese advert touting the ‘handy game machine’ (being played by young boys obviously lost/abandoned in the Australian outback)! As you see the system was very much marketed at children, but as we know now went on to become beloved by players of all ages.

The Game Boy went on to sell almost 120 million units in the fourteen years it was sold, and directly led into the followup Game Boy Advance and then DS series. Many competing handheld consoles came and went, but none made much of a dent in a market absolutely dominated by Nintendo’s Game Boys.

I’ve loved this device since it was released, and to this day handhelds (especially Nintendo ones) are my favorite game systems. Between the Game Boy and it’s followups I own over twenty pieces of hardware and over six hundred games! Needless to say the release of the Game Boy 30 years back had a direct effect on my life 🙂

I’ve written about my (original model) Game Boy collection before. You can read that here (and yes I misspelled the console name throughout). In preparing this post I dug out my collection for another look-see. Here’s a shot of a portion of the game boxes I mentioned five years ago:

And here’s another shot of all five of my Game Boys (all of which still work):

I was looking for a particular game to feature, and found these four Japanese release Pokémon games I bought to play since I couldn’t wait for the USA releases:

(Yes I ended up buying all the USA versions as well, except for Pokémon Card 2 which was never localized!)

And since my original post I’ve added a few more games to my collection, including two more beautiful Wizardry games:

And this guy, bought for ¥100 in Japan last January:

I fired up the above just now on one of my Game Boy Pockets just for some nostalgia…

It was terrible 🙂

The Game Boy may be ‘obsolete’ now, but it will never be forgotten. It’s legacy includes not just numerous followup systems, but also a library of amazing games many of which are still great fun today. The systems themselves are notoriously robust so if you’ve got one in an attic somewhere why not get it out, pop in some batteries, and fire up Tetris again for some late 80’s gaming nostalgia?

Posted in Collecting, Games, History, Otaku, Retro, Tech | Comments Closed

Trash or Treasure?

Wednesday, March 27th, 2019

Recently I saw this in the shop:

Collectible items?!? $50 in value for only $15?!? I’d have had to have been a fool to ignore this. So of course I bought two immediately. One for me, and one for Bernard who also appreciates a bargain.

In this post I’m going to reveal almost all of the contents. Now I’ll be upfront and say it wasn’t all great, so I’ll separate it into three categories from worst to best. You can ask yourself: is this product the bargain it claims to be?

Let’s start with the Utter Trash…

With two exceptions every item inside was a ‘blind packed’ product, which meant a bag containing one or more of a series of randomly packed goodies. The above photo shows the items that were essentially worthless. Beyond garbage. Refuse.

The mini NFL caps were sub-cereal-toy quality and it’s difficult to imagine anyone wanting them. As you can see the box contained two packs of them and they were so awful I only opened one and saved the other to use as a future gift for the only NFL fan I know who would appreciate them (Adam).

The minions armbands almost literally made me weep with how much I hated them. The Spongebob dog tag was just a waste of metal and paint and the (five year old!) Skylanders ‘puzzle eraser’ didn’t go together, didn’t stand up and didn’t even function as an eraser. Also it was hideous. And trash.

Naturally this irredeemable trash was thrown in the garbage at light speed. Surely the rest of the contents would be better?

Let’s now move onto the Probable Trash…

An eclectic mix we had here. You’d be tempted to look at most of this and say “Surely this is utter trash as well?” And you’d probably be correct. However there was a chance that the contents of these packages – randomly packed as they are – could be acceptable. Even worth keeping?

Spoiler alert: most weren’t.

I hate Garbage Pail stuff so much I wish I could delete them from reality. I only included these stickers in this category since I predicted a tiny chance some could be useful for postcard hilarity. I was very, very wrong and gleefully binned them all.

The ‘hubsnap’ is a weird and utterly useless piece of trash that sort of functions as a ‘clicker’ noisemaker. They were very badly printed with Marvel character graphics and – let’s be real here – are utter trash. Once again I took joy in discarding one and stashing the Punisher one away for a future gift for Florence, who mentioned she was a fan.

As you can see the Yokai Watch pin is trash, the Guardians and TMNT dogtags utter trash, and the Yokai Watch dogtag a few atoms shy of trash since it was sparkly gold.

The last item though… the Walking Dead dogtag and sticker. That was – ahem – borderline not trash. I’m intentionally not showing it since it may also become a future gift.

So of thirteen items so far the tally is twelve are trash and one is borderline ok. It’s a good thing I saved the best for last!

And so we arrive at the Hopefully Not Trash…

Harry Potter, Star Wars and The Hobbit! Some high-quality licenses here, so the hopes were high. Did I hit the jackpot?

No, no I didn’t:

The Star Wars erasers are – what’s the word? – oh yes, they are trash. Hideous, not-puzzling and not functional erasers, I questioned the need for their existence as I stashed them away in my ‘random Star Wars trash’ box never to be seen again.

I was hoping for the cute spherical little owl toy in the Harry Potter bag but got that silly ginger instead. He was dense and heavy and somewhat spherical himself and made for an easy projectile as I hurled him into the garbage across the room.

And finally the Heroclix figure. Well, it’s total garbage. A common fodder figure from a tabletop RPG that no one plays anymore (and I never did)? There’s a word for stuff like this, and that word is ‘trash‘.

Sixteen items therefore, and almost all of them are total or even utter trash. One may conclude that had they any actual value they may have sold for their original price and not at the savage discount I bought them at. But that would ignore the joy of opening them all, none of which I actually experienced.

So in conclusion this product contained literal garbage and was a total waste of money. However since the contents are random, then perhaps the second one I bought – the one I sent Bernard – was very different. Perhaps he hit the jackpot, and opened a cornucopia of delights? Hopefully he’ll share in the comments…

Posted in Collecting, Toys | 3 Comments »

My Collection: Game Gear

Saturday, March 23rd, 2019

Sega released their Game Gear handheld console in 1990 as their answer to Nintendo’s Gameboy. It was marketed heavily on the strength of its full colour backlit screen, but poor software support coupled with the market dominance of the Gameboy led to the Game Gear never becoming a true hit.

This is my Game Gear. I never bought the system myself – I wasn’t interested in any of its games – but JAF (ie. KLS’s mum) bought herself one. Specifically on June 27, 1993 for $129.99. I know this because I still have the receipt, which shows the rechargeable battery pack ($49.99) and ‘Super Wide Gear’ magnifier ($29.99) were bought at the same time.

Joyce would eventually bequeath the system to me along with the few games she had bought. I myself had bought one game (shown above) but when I inherited it in 1994 I put it into storage and essentially ignored it for 24 years.

Then last year in Scotland I found a large collection of Game Gear games being sold at a CEX used game store and bought them all! Eighteen games in total cost me £18, which was a steal even considering they were unboxed. I was eager to try them, and when I returned to the USA I powered the system up for the first time in decades and saw this:

Yes it had broken and the screen just displayed garbage. There were sound problems as well. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this because in the decades since release the Game Gear has become infamous for the lousy quality that Sega chose to cut costs. Many components are second-rate, and the capacitors in particular are known to be the worst ever placed in a game console.

In short, all the capacitors (about 30) needed to be replaced. I bought tools and a capacitor kit, then did nothing for four months! This was because I knew it wasn’t going to be easy at all (leaky surface mounted capacitors needed to be replaced with wired ones) and because the cost of paying someone to do it was cheaper than my time. Eventually that’s what I did, and $30 and one month of work later my Game Gear was fixed.

Now it works we can see the other flaw. The much-marketed full colour screen? It’s terrible! Very washed out, with a slow refresh rate and very limited viewing angle it makes playing anything a bit of a chore in the day of OLED invisible pixel displays!

In short: all games look bad on it, and don’t even have the retro appeal of (for instance) a Gameboy.

Things are slightly better using the magnifier, even if it does make the system less portable. It also reduces the viewing angle quite notably, so you’re better off putting it on a table if you want to use it.

Let’s not discuss the absurd battery pack (top left in the above photo), which gives only about an hours battery life at the expense of a heavy eggplant-sized unit that clips onto your belt. Less expensive I suppose than 6 AA batteries every three hours, but once again something that makes us question how portable this system actually was?

The above is most of my library. I forgot to take a game out of the system (Columns) and of course Shining Force isn’t included. Game Gear games aren’t particularly valuable compared to other handhelds, mostly because if you’re interested in playing them you’ll almost always be emulating. The most valuable game in my collection (Shining Force) is ‘worth’ only about what I paid for it 25 years ago.

This system is a curiosity these days. It had very few good games at the time, and almost none worth seriously playing today. The systems themselves are unreliable, and even when repaired are frustrating to use unless you spent too much to replace the screen with an LED upgrade. This is very much a system just for my collection, and I reckon it could be decades before I turn it on again…

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Games, History, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Tech | 1 Comment »

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