Category: Collecting

Dungeons & Dragons LCD

  • February 10, 2019

Before Christmas I visited a nifty local retro store and the shop owner, who recognizes me now, said he may have something I wanted. He reached under the counter and produced this:

Yes, the game was inside:

This is a handheld LCD Dungeons & Dragons LCD game from 1981. I’d been wanting this for many years but had never seen a copy for sale. I opened my wallet and handed over the $80 he was asking in light speed!

The game is complete in box with the instructions, which are well-written and remarkably long for a game like this:

It’s a maze game in which you must defeat a dragon or die trying. Gameplay takes place on a 10×10 grid of rooms and you can move around in any direction until you either kill the dragon or are slain.

As you can see your current location is shown, and via the ‘cursor’ and ‘move’ buttons you can head in either of the four directions. There are no walls or dead ends; each room has four exits and the maze wraps around. Some rooms contain pits (which end the game unless you have the grappling rope, as I do above), bats (which move you randomly) or the dragon (game over).

You’ll need the magic arrow (found randomly) to kill the dragon, and you get one shot only to try. The dragon icon above reveals that the dragon is in an adjacent room. I took a gamble and shot north and failed, and then I headed east and…

Game over!

It’s very difficult. 13% of the rooms are instant death, and with only one rope and one arrow the chance of success seems minor. I played about ten games and only found the arrow twice and only once did I encounter the dragon while I had it.

As a child I would have loved this game, carefully mapping it while playing to assist in victory. It’s only the second actual D&D electronic game (the other, a board game, we also own) and is probably the first actual ‘electronic RPG’ (of sorts). While it does have a score, that’s only if you win, and since it’s time-based I imagine luck plays too big a factor!

Note the text: Look for other exciting games in the Action Arcade Series! It turns out there was only one other – a Masters Of The Universe game that is identical in gameplay to this one with a different LCD. It’s apparently even rarer, especially in the original blister packaging.

I’m happy with my purchase, and this is now a gem in my collection. Now should I do a followup post about the electronic D&D board game from 1980?

2018 in Games

  • December 15, 2018

I know you love them, and I know you were waiting with baited breath, so it’s time once again for the year in review of my game buying!

Overall the year was down in spending, but up in aquisitions. Here’s the beloved plots, in a shiny new format to silence the haters…

First, by total games purchased:

And secondly, by total dollars spent:

Some interesting information here. For instance, who would have thought I would have bought more games for the (Sega) Game Gear than any other console in 2018?!? What about the Genesis, or NES or even PSP? And from barely being on the charts last year now the Switch is #1 in dollars spent? Let’s unpack these a bit…

Firstly there was a definite retro trend in my buying in 2018. Of the $936 I spent on games this year, over $200 was for dead systems. And since I’m not buying the pricey games (I own most of them already!) this translated to a lot of purchases – over 30 – for ‘dead’ systems. Much of this was boosted by a mega-haul of 12 Game Gear games picked up in a Scottish CSX for under US$20, but I also wandered out of the occasional retro game store over here with NES and Genesis games this year and even found (for only $3!) a sealed copy of a UK PSP game at – of all places – a NY City street vendor stall!

Secondly the handheld market collapsed. In 2017 I spent almost $750 on 3DS and Vita games alone. In 2018, I bought 80% fewer games for these systems and spent under $120. It’s entirely possible that in 2019 I buy nothing for either system. This is melancholic, since I have always been a big fan and booster of handhelds and don’t personally feel the Switch is the replacement. A good thing therefore that I have approximately 875 handheld games in my collection to keep playing for ever 🙂

Thirdly the Switch roared into first place, backed by an amazing lineup of games, a beautiful piece of hardward and a very promising future. There’s a lot to love about this system, not the least of which is that it is cartridge based, but for me the migration to the Switch of many iconic Japanese developers bodes very well for the future in terms of the sorts of games I like.

Deciding on my favourites in 2018 was very difficult because there were so many great games I played. I considered the copout route of doing one per system as well but even that was hard. So I’ll do the cop-copout route and talk about franchises, and in 2018 it boiled down to two for me:

Monster Hunter Series

Amazingly 2018 saw two MH series games released. The first and most important was Monster Hunter World for PS4 (first pic) which came out early in the year and took over my life for weeks. It’s a magnificent tour-de-force of a game, absolutely worthy of the many accolades it has earned and I eagerly await the expansion due next year.

In the middle of the year Nintendo finally got around to translating the Switch version of Monster Hunter XX (second pic) and once I had uploaded my save file (from the 3DS prequel) and set foot into the new G-Rank content I was giddy with joy. After the changes of MH World it was like visiting an old friend and coupled with some amazing new opponents – the final mantis boss in particular – this may have been the most fun I had ever had playing MH. Alas, I fear World had stolen the fanbase though, and online play was barren. Perhaps this was because I was at the very edge of progression (I broke the HR barrier I think the day after I got the game) and there were very few players at my level? Either way I beat all the content mostly solo and once Nintendo required payment for online play put the game aside to play everything else.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 Series

I played the third and fourth Xenoblade Chronicles games in 2018, both on Switch. The first (Xenoblade Chronicles 2) was a 150-hour massive open world RPG with incredible gameplay, amazing graphics and finely detailed ‘systems’ that would dazzle a statistician. Just my sort of game in other words. But did it surpass Xenoblade Chronicles 1 or X? Hard to say: it was at least as good and maybe better. The series is remarkable for it’s consistency though, and every game is well worth playing.

Later in the year a ‘DLC’ was released that was basically an entirely new game. Titled Torna The Golden Country this reused a modified version of the XC2 engine to tell a story set in the same world only many thousands of years before. And this game was astonishing, to the point of perhaps being the single best game experience I had in 2018. Highly recommended (although you’ll need XC2 to play it…)

So once again Xeno and MH games bubble to the top, but I have to add that these were simply the brighest sparks in a year full of excellent games. From the Vita (Danganronpa), 3DS (Etrian Odyssey 5), PS4 (Hollow Knight) to Switch (Super Mario Odyssey) there were countless other games that could have made the top list any other year.

So what does 2019 hold? I expect the trend of less spending will continue, especially as I am becoming increasingly likely to delve into my collection and replay games I already own. However the Switch is the big unknown. I’ve already purchased two retro collections for the system (Namco and SNK), two more are on the horizon (Capcom and Taito) and if the trend continues and the old Japanese arcade companies release more and more of their content for the Switch then who knows how much better the console will get? In another year you can find out… 🙂

  • Posted in Collecting
  • Robert

Deathtrap Dungeon

  • December 2, 2018

That’s Deathtrap Dungeon, the 6th Fighting Fantasy book that was published way back in 1984. It’s a classic title, one of the most famous books in the range, and has inspired countless other gamebooks and video games.

Here’s some more editions from my collection:

Clockwise from top left they are the 2017 Scholastic version, the 1984 Dell USA version, the 2009 Wizard version and the 2002 Wizard version.

And here’s another version:

The above has been one of my ‘Holy Grail’ gamebooks for years. It was published in 2009 by Hobby Japan, and as you can see it’s definitely not like the others.

It’s still Deathtrap Dungeon, although obviously translated into Japanese. This isn’t the first Japanese version either, since FF books were published there during their original run too. But in 2009 Hobby Japan gave the books a distinctive anime makeover with a short-lived reprint series.

Whereas in FF books you are the hero, and therefore the player character is rarely described and even less commonly named, in this edition the player character is this adventuress named ‘Philia’ (according to my translation software). She still challenges Baron Sukumvit’s evil Deathtrap Dungeon for fame and fortune, but her experience is distinctly different from the one I first had in 1984.

For instance here’s the ninja I encountered in the original version:

And here’s Philia’s ninja opponent:

What about the iconic Manticore? Whereas originally it was the focus of the art during its encounter, now it seems to be photobombing a Philia selfie:

The fighting hobgoblins:

What about the disturbing (to my 12-year old self in ’84) one-handed man:

There are other cases where opponents switch gender (a crazy old man becomes a young witch etc.) but most of the illustrated sections are actually new and don’t correspond to the old ones.

I can’t read Japanese, so I can’t determine if the text itself changes. But it must if only slightly to accommodate the gender switch of some of the encounters? I wonder if it’s still in the first person though, or if Philia is directly referenced in the text?

As for the makeover, it’s undoubtedly because Hobby Japan was trying to market these to otaku in the wake of the success of the Queens Blade series. The all-new art is possibly due to the original art becoming pricey to license since the artist (Iain McCaig) had become quite famous in the intervening years (he designed Darth Maul for instance).

As best I can tell, there were three books in this reprint series. Deathtrap Dungeon is #1, I also have #3:

And #2 was House of Hell, advertised here in my copy of Deathtrap:

As I suggested, these are both difficult to find now and pricey when you do. My Deathtrap cost me $40 and took three months to arrive from Japan. One day I hope to get House of Hell, but I’m not sure it’s worth $50+ to me. Further books in the same series exist, but don’t seem to be FF titles (for instance one is an AD&D gamebook (?) based in the ‘Eberron’ game world).

As a curiosity though it’s lovely, and I’m extremely pleased I finally own it 🙂

(I obtained a few other gamebook curiosities this year. Maybe I’ll do a future post on them…)