Archive for the ‘Gamebooks’ Category

Crowns of The Collection

Thursday, August 27th, 2015

I was sent these two postcards recently:

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OMG, those are gamebook covers?! Let’s see what’s on the back:

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HOLY MOSES! Those are nothing less than the actual signatures of the creators of FF gamebooks, Ian Livingston and Steve Jackson! These are holy grails to a gamebook collector such as myself πŸ™‚

So where did they come from? Well some months ago on twitter the company Tin Man Games (who makes app versions of gamebooks) started posting pictures of their collection. I jokingly suggested it needed organization, and this led to a conversation between me and them which led to them learning about my collection, being amazed by my collection, and saying they wanted to ‘send me something small for my collection’. Little did I know the magnitude of this ‘small’ thing they wanted to send me!

Here the autographs are with the books from pictures on the cards:

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I think I have a fourth imprint of House Of Hell as well. But I didn’t want to show off πŸ˜‰

The Gamebook History Post

Sunday, February 1st, 2015

I’ve read a few blog posts about gamebook collecting in recent months, and thought it was time to make my own.

What’s a gamebook? It’s a solo RPG adventure in book form. Tradaitionally gamebooks are distinct from ‘choose your own adventures’ in that they have some sort of system associated with them (usually keeping track of statistics and items, or rolling dice), but strict classification isn’t easy to do and the lines blur here and then with particular books.

While not the very first gamebook, the genre can be traced back to this particular book, which came out way back in 1982:

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I was 10 at the time, and bought my first book – the exact version picture above – via the scholastic book club at school. It changed my life!

All of a sudden I didn’t just have to read about fantasy adventures involving orcs and elves and demons and dragons, I could play them as well! I was too young at the time to know that the authors were entrenched in interests I would eventually adopt myself (not the least being Dungeons & Dragons), and merely got swept away by the magic of the book with it’s vivid descriptions of peril, chaos and heroism and the astonishing (to this day) artwork contained within. I must have read through the book dozens and dozens of times, and the joy I experienced was only surpassed by the discovery that there would be more books like it published soon afterward.

I eagerly bought every Fighting Fantasy (as the series was dubbed) book as they were released, initially via the school book club and soon thereafter (once gamebooks had become a phenomenon) in the bookstores. Other series began (Lone Wolf, Way Of The Tiger, Falcon etc.) and I bought them too. I quickly built up a sizeable collection and it became perhaps my biggest hobby. I even wrote two books of my own (sequels to Scorpion Swamp and Forest Of Doom), compiled a bestiary (prior to the publication of Out Of The Pit) and even copied the art to hang it on my wall:

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The above was taken in 1987, when I was fifteen and still clearly still enjoying my gamebooks. I was quite proud of my collection and it was displayed prominently in my room. I even saved related miscellany, including the adverts in magazines, reviews in newspapers, related magazines (Warlock and Proteus) and even an iron-on patch I was given at a bookstore when I purchased a book once.

Then I ‘grew up’, life moved on (ie. girls were invented) and my gamebook hobby – as it did for many of my generation – took a back seat. By my first college years I still had my gamebooks but rarely purchased any new ones, and when I left Australia in ’93 I left them to my brother. Even then I didn’t consider selling them, because they were still an important (and very happy!) memory of my young adolescent years. I’m not 100% sure what happened to the collection. I know most of the Fighting Fantasy titles would move into AW’s care (where the collection remains to this day), but I don’t know what Bernard ever did with all the others.

Fast forward a few years. I moved to America, got married and a job and became immersed in video games (& video game collecting). But I never forgot about the gamebooks, and the memories were always good ones. When I first returned to Oz in 2000 I brought back two books with me (ironically Scorpion Swamp and Forest of Doom) that I purchased for a song at a used bookstore, and reading them – maybe 10 years since I last had – was just as much fun as it ever was. In those days the gamebook fad had died; no new books were being published (killed as they had been by video games and the passage of time) and even on the internet it was difficult to find much enthusiasm. It seemed they would live on in my memories only.

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When next I returned to Australia (in 2006), things had changed quite a bit. A British publisher (Wizard books) had purchased the rights to Fighting Fantasy books and had started republishing a few years prior. I was quite excited by this, and purchased many on that trip. In addition, when in Newcastle on that trip I bought every single gamebook (from any series) I found in used bookstores, including doubles of some. Upon returning to Sydney, I gave AW almost all of them as a gift, keeping only the doubles for myself (and of course the new imprints of FF books). I may not have realized it at that moment, but this was the start of my modern collection.

Within a few months of arriving back in America I had started buying books online, mostly (in those days) via ebay. I started with Fighting Fantasy books, and my goal was initially just the titles I had never read/owned but quickly became to build a full set of all books. This was still several years prior to the gamebook renaissance, and I was able to get books at astonishing prices (such as Night Dragon for only $3!). I remember watching auctions of lots of books – in which I only needed one or two – go buy with only my bid and winning for much less than I was prepared to pay. Those were fun days, and within only a few months I had close to a full collection of the Fighting Fantasy series. Some books remained elusive though, and it would take almost 8 years to complete the collection, by which point I had numerous imprints of many of the books including (almost) the entire US series.

I’d been well-and-truly bitten by the gamebook bug though, and long before finishing my FF collection I started on the other series. I dove in headfirst, and agressively hunted down the books from other major series such as Lone Wolf, Falcon, Skyfall, Grailquest and Golden Dragon. I discovered Demian’s webpage and it became sort of a shopping list for me. I was buying books on ebay and amazon mostly from overseas (Canada, England and Australia), and still trawling the used shops in Australia on my annual visits (I returned with 36 books in January 2011).

My collection continued to grow. By this time many of you knew about it, and I was helped significantly by Adam (who gave me many books, including returning the ones I’d given him in ’06), Bernard (who dug deep and bought me a few missing and expensive titles) and Florence (who astonished me with this graduation gift). It was getting harder and harder to find books I didn’t have, and my ‘recent aquisition’ piles tended to include more and more obscure series:

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So we come to today. You can view my entire collection here. I don’t know how many there are – over 300 at last count – and the website I created (to assist me when I am traveling) isn’t even complete (since it doesn’t list duplicates or all FF imprints I own). I’m still actively buying books to fill in the blanks in my collection, and have even started buying the reprints of old series being published by Morris and Thompson. The collection is physically quite large now, long having outgrown the full-sized bookshelf once dedicated to it. I really need to sort it at all and work out how to store it better…

To pre-empt questions from those that may read this:

Q: Do you read them all?

A: Yes – and no. I have played through every FF book and most of the books from other landmark series, but I haven’t yet played all Lone Wolf books, or every book from every series. However there isn’t a series I haven’t played at least one (if not more) books from, including the standalone gamebooks.

Q: What are your favourites?

A: You can’t go wrong with Fighting Fantasy titles, especially the fantasy ones from earlier in the series (pre #30). If someone was only ever going to read one gamebook, I’d always recommend the grand-daddy of them all Warlock Of Firetop Mountain. That said the other series I would recommend are the Blood Sword books (which have a deservedly high reputation), the Virtual Reality (now called Critical IF) books, the (Lovecraftian) Forbidden GatewayΒ series and the recent Destiny Quest series. But to be honest, I love all gamebooks, even the ‘bad’ ones πŸ™‚

Q: What about Choose Your Own Adventures?

A: You can’t spend a decade buying gamebooks online or in used bookstores without eventually picking up some titles that blur the line between gamebook and choose-your-own-adventure. You’ll see on my website I have a few, and there are others I didn’t bother listing. Typically I find the traditional choose-your-own-adventure titles to be too childish for my interests, but some books that use the mechanic (notable Life’s Lottery by Kim Newman) are every bit as entertaining as a ‘real book’.

Q: What’s the most you’ve paid for a book?

A: Not much, maybe $20 at the very most, probably less. As I said above, I bought most of the books that are now very pricey long before people started collecting again in earnest, and got them for a song. I feel sorry for those that want to obtain something like an original Knights Of Doom or Deathmoor today). I know some of the gaps in my collection could easily be filled with a single click on amazon or ebay, but I’m not going to pay big $$$ for a book just to own it (yet).

Q: What are your most-wanted gamebooks that you don’t yet have?

A: In no particular order, these are the five that have eluded me but I haven’t yet given up on:

Trial Of Champions (original US imprint)
Sorcery box set with spellbook (I consider myself owning it ‘in spirit’ since AW has the one I bought years ago)
Blood Sword #5 (prohibitively expensive; may be reissued soon)
– high number Lone Wolf books (again, prohibitively expensive)
Citadel Of Chaos (US Wizard reissue, early 2000s. Jonathan Green mentions it’s existence in You Are The Hero, but does it actually exist?)

But the true Holy Grail would be a foreign imprint book. There’s hundreds of thousands of them out there – Warlock was published in dozens of languages – but I’ve never found one. I’ve particularly like a Japanese version, and have invested some time checking used shops and hobby stores during my many trips to that country (all to no avail). One day this may be mine:

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(Incidentally I do own the English language – and some JP imprints – of the Queen’s Blade books, as well as a number of Lost World gamebooks. I should probably add them to the website…)

Well that’s enough for a history. The collection is old and quite complete, but I consider it active and ever-growing. If you’ve got any questions add them in the comments, or via twitter if that’s what got you here.

And may your stamina never fail πŸ˜‰

 

At Last! The Annual List Of What My Brother Will Buy Me For Christmas!

Thursday, October 30th, 2014

The other week I got this text from a certain brother-of-mine:

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I was astounded. In previous years I had produced such lists, but little did I know that they had worked their way into the tapestry of my brothers christmas-shopping life (so to speak).

He went on to say “money is no object and “the more obscure and difficult to find, the better“. Sadly I forgot to screenshot those bits.

So Bernard, as requested…

Books Category

The ZX Spectrum Book (Andrew Rollins)

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A few years back Bernard got me ‘The Commodore 64 Book‘ which was just fab. I quickly snapped up the followup (‘The 8-bit Book‘) but have been tragically unable to acquire the first book from this small publisher. This is perhaps not surprising, since it was published over five years ago in small quantities and is long out of print. I don’t know exactly where he’s going to find it, but when I open this beauty on Christmas day I’ll be a happy reader indeed!

The World Of The Dark Crystal (Brian Froud)

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Given there is now a sequel to the film coming, I believe Christmas 2014 would be the perfect time for my brother to put on his sleuth’s hat and solve an outstanding mystery. You see I don’t just want any copy of this book, I want my copy. Truth is, as a youngling sprout, I purchased myself a copy of this lovely tome from Angus & Robertson Charlestown Square. This would have been back in ’82, when the film came out. It was a mildly expensive book, and I had to utilize lay-by to get it! And oh how I loved it! It was one of my most treasured possessions, ‘my precious’ if you will. And then some soulless inhuman thief nicked it :<

As I hinted, the mystery of who stole my book is as yet unsolved. The only lead I’ve had these 32 long years is this photo taken by a security camera:

With cousin Anna in 1984

I’m hoping, in the spirit of Christmas, Bernard may finally discover the identity of the thief and return to me my beloved tome…

Trial Of Champions (Ian Livingstone)

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Of course I own this book. Multiple copies in fact. But I don’t own the version shown, which is the US imprint. It was the last FF book released in the US during the initial series, and I have all the others. But not this one. And I have looked, oh how have I looked! The problem is sellers very, very rarely (ie. never) bother to specify the imprint when they sell this book online. And given there was probably 80 quadrillion copies of the UK version printed to every US copy, taking a chance is a fool’s errand. I consider myself one of the world’s foremost ‘online searchers for and buyers of’ gamebooks, and boast a bookshelf of more than four hundred. And yet I’ve never seen this one. I look forward to that changing this Christmas day.

DVD Section

It Couldn’t Happen Here (1988)

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Otherwise known as ‘The Pet Shop Boys film’. I saw this a few years after it came out, probably at the Enmore theatre, probably with a lass named Caraid who I forget everything about except her unusual name. I think she looked like Karen Gillan though, and her mum gave me a beer once within 30 seconds of visiting her house. Weird. Anyway I want to see this film again, which means I want it on DVD. This is a tall order, since it’s never been released on DVD. Which limits my options to two: VHS or Laserdisc. The first option is of course absurd, but the second is a possibility since I own a working LD player. Maybe. So that’s the hard part out of the way, now all I need is the disc, in NTSC format of course. I’ve made your work easy Bernard πŸ™‚

Adam Adamant Lives! (1966)

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I’ve never seen this show since it never screen outside of England and I’m not an Englishman. Firstly, the BBC trashed a bunch of episodes so it doesn’t even exist in it’s entirety. Secondly, it’s never been released on anything outside of England. And lastly the DVD set (containing the 17 existing episodes) is long out of print. All these considerations aside, given that this show inspired Doctor Who and The Avengers (and some of Kim Newman’s characters) I obviously need to see it. And I shall, when Bernard gives me the Region 2 box set loaded with extras for Christmas.

Toy Section

Dark Horn ‘Harry Special’ (HM Zoid Kit)

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There’s a lot of beautiful things in this world, and then there’s the limited ‘Harry Special’ variant HM Zoid Dark Horn kit. I mean look at that! Could there even exist a better looking model kit? Of course not, and I therefore must own it. Bernard will undoubtedly agree, and I’m just going to be ebullient when he gives it to me for Christm–

Oh to hell with it! This guy’s so pretty I just can’t goddamn wait until Christmas! Hang on a second, while I go buy it…

<insert sounds of online shopping>

<insert sounds of UPS delivery>

Ok, taken care of. It’s now mine, all mine. And in case you don’t believe me, let Emi prove it to you:

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OMG the box is bigger than Emi! Sorry Bernard. Guess I ruined that as a potential gift πŸ˜‰

L.E.D. Mirage V3: Inferno Napalm (FSS 1:100 kit)

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If I ever met anyone that claimed that any other kit was better looking than this, I’d start by punching them, and I’d end by never being their friend. We all know that Five Star Stories mech’s are stupidly pretty and the jewel-in-the-crown of FSS model kits is unquestionably this one. Sure it costs more than almost every piece of furniture in my house,Β  is supposedly extremely difficult to assemble and when you do takes hundreds of hours, but gosh it’s pretty. Even prettier, I suspect, than Caraid, the girl I saw a movie with 25 years ago and have forgotten about. Oh and Bernard, when you budget for this guy, be sure to add on another $50 or so for the sizeable cost of shipping the collossal box all the way across the USA πŸ˜‰

Game Section

The Sacred Armor of Antiriad (C64, 1986)

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I’m a canny beast. Much like Steven Moffat (aka. the favourite scribe of my illustrious friend Adam ‘The Bold’ W), I like winding secrets into the story of my life. I bet none of you knew back when I penned this that I was in fact laying the groundwork for this very post? That blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to this game was none other than a deliberate mention to plant the thought into my brother’s mind that “Hey, that’d be a good gift to get him for Christmas!” This game was never that great, but it has a lot of nostalgia factor, and I’d like to give it a whirl again one day. Now before you say it, I’ll quote my prestigious friend Florence ‘The Bear’ L: “Emulation, shmemulation!” She knows, as I do, that emulation is for fakers, and I must play the original C64 version. This introduces a… wrinkle into the equation though, for even if my bellowing brother Bernard ‘The Brave’ S gets me this game he’s going to have to get me something to play it on. It’s good thing therefore that this list also contains…

Commodore SX-64 (1984)

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Let’s for a moment consider that there even exists a world in which my brother find a US version of one of these portable C64’s in working order and for sale. That alone would be surprising, given the fact they are 30 years old and contain circuitry that has almost certainly worn out after so long (not to mention the screens are infamous for burn-in). But if that happens, we must also consider the chance he would somehow manage to acquire it and not keep it for himself. I would imagine that chance to be miniscule, especially since in good working order this would cost more than that LED Mirage kit mentioned above. These reasons are why this would (no doubt) be a truly heartfelt and appreciated gift. Doubly so when he sends me hundreds of games with it πŸ™‚

Gold Cliff (1988)

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Last year I asked for the Zelda Game & Watch, but Santa ignored me. This year I’ll scale down my desire slightly to the even rarer penultimate dual-screen release: Gold Cliff. I saw one of these boxed, in Japan, for almost a thousand dollars. Naturally I’d want a boxed version, so it’s a good thing my brother made that quip about money not being a problem isn’t it? πŸ˜‰

Miscellaneous Section

Now I’m no fool. I fully realize some of the above are hard to find. And therefore I’ll finish with a brief list of other items that would be wonderful to find under the tree. This list may not contain as much detail as the above, but I can’t do all the work for you now can I?

– t-shirts (large size, preferably with Ultraman on them)
– 4711 soap
– Any other FSS model kit
– A Stonehenge papercraft model kit
– “How to Master The Video Games” (sadly stolen in the same heist that nabbed the Dark Crystal book…)
– Any game & watch that isn’t ‘Turtle Bridge’, ‘Donkey Kong Jr’ or ‘Ball’
– trading cards, preferably sealed packs (of anything non-sport)
– Anything on old lists I don’t have yet (esp. the John Pertwee album of bawdy songs!)

And there we go! Happy hunting πŸ™‚

How Did My Resolution Go?

Tuesday, January 21st, 2014

Last year I made a post detailing what I felt was an enormous amount of books, games and DVDs on my ‘list’ that I felt I really needed to get through. It became a resolution or sorts, to shrink all lists in 2013. How did I go?

Books

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I made great progress in this category, reading the majority of the approximately 50 volumes that were sitting on my shelf this time last year. The only one I haven’t yet found time for is In The Wake Of The Sea Serpents, the 800+ page magnus-opus by Heuvelmans. In addition to those I had this time last year, I purchased and read many new books during the year, mostly manga and fantasy novels. I try and read every single night before sleep at the least.

However – and to my delight since I love books – I have to admit my ‘to read’ list is hardly smaller than it was last year, replenished as it was by a large variety of other books. Heuvelmans tome is now accompanied by 3 other cryptozoology books, and they share a shelf with about 20 novels (mostly fantasy), a handful of manga (not much I am interested in is released nowadays), and a half-dozen or so RPG manuals such as the one pictured above. Add to this a couple of Doctor Who books, an art book or two and four books on video-game and pinball history and I should have enough to keep me busy well into 2014!

Movies & TV

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As with my books, I made great progress on the DVD ‘watch list’ of February 2013. Ultraseven, Lexx, Claymore – all the box sets have been watched. In fact almost every single item we owned last year has been watched months ago, and many more have now filled their place.

In fact, the ‘watch list’ as of today is actually longer than it was last year. Two items alone: the Inspector Morse DVD box set and the Monkey DVD set sum to over 100 hours! Add to these several other anime DVD sets (Spice & Wolf, Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai!), another Japanese sci-fi set (Ultra-Q) and about a dozen assorted DVD movies (almost all sci-fi/fantasy) and we’ve got our watching cut out for us.

Games

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As with the other two categories, I made bold strides into my piles of unplayed games. As of today I have:

– 8 unplayed PSP games, only one of which was actually purchased in 2013
– 8 unopened 3DS games, most of which are less than 6 months old
– only 1 unopened Wii U game (Pikmin 3, which I may start playing today!)
– 2 unopened PS3 games (both of which I owned last February as well…)

As you may recall from the blog post a month ago, I purchased much less games in 2013 than I usually do, which allowed me to play a lot more games I already owned. I expect during this next year to ‘finish’ the PSP games as well as possible the PS3. Since I currently have no plans to obtain a PS4, I imagine this section of the list will be much reduced this time next year.

Last time I looked at the piles of unopened/unread/unwatched media and thought “Why do I even buy more stuff?!”. Now I look at the smaller piles and think “I’m looking forward to opening that!”.

In other words, I think my resolution was a success πŸ™‚

New Year’s Resolution?

Saturday, February 2nd, 2013

When I returned from Australia, for some reason I started becoming very aware of the piles of stuff that filled my house. Books to be read. Games to be played. Media to be consumed.

When I was young there was so much I wanted but couldn’t have. Now I can have it all, but – especially in the last year – have been accumulating it faster than I can enjoy it. The reasons are varied (work, World of Warcraft, age), but I’ve never purchased anything I didn’t really want to read, watch or play and, by Jove, it was time to do just that!

So, my first ever (?) New Years resolution: Consume more media!

How much am I talking about here? I will preface by saying we all have little ‘to read’, ‘to watch’ and (some of us) ‘to play’ piles. For instance, I know for a fact quite a few of you – SFL, AW, BS – certainly do. But mine had gotten quite large. As in very large. And it’s time to climb them.

I’ll revisit this resolution at the end of this year, but here’s the scope of what I’m tackling. All of this just describes what is in the house right now, not anything I expect to obtain in the next few weeks or months…

Books

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That’s the English version of Monster Hunter Illustrations, which came out over a year ago and is jam-packed with all sorts of fascinating MH art. It’s on my pile with two additional japanese MH books including the sequel (!) and a different art book on TCG art. These share a shelf with no less than four additional art books (including Genzoman, Queen’s Blade and the recently released Hyrule Historia Zelda art book). I could probably look through all these in a long afternoon.

But that’s hardly all. There are some 30+ volumes of manga (Bleach, Bakuman amongst others), 16 novels (including some purchased five years ago when a local bookstore went out of business), 2 academic texts (one, on cryptozoology, is almost 800 pages long), about 50 comics and 20 odd magazines. This list doesn’t even include the approximately 100+ gamebooks from a collection of over 200 that I haven’t played through.

How much of this can I read in one year?

Movies and TV

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I got the above for Christmas. It’s the long-awaited (by me, for one) second full Ultraman series finally translated into English. And it’s 19 hours long. It sits on a shelf right now next to DVD collections of all 4 series of Lexx (over 40 hours in total) and the first three seasons of the Keroro Gunso TV anime (20+ hours). Add to this list 22 more anime DVDs or Blu-Rays adding to more than 35 hours (including the full series of Claymore) and about another 28 hours of UK TV series collections and 30 more hours of (sometimes untranslated) Japanese or Korean series and I start to wonder realistically how we could watch all this in a single year? I haven’t even considered the movies…

Games

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I currently have, unplayed and in most cases still shrinkwrapped:
– 8 PS3 games (including Hyperdimension Neptunia 2 and Resonance Of Fate)
– 6 Nintendo DS games (including Pokemon Conquest and Shepherd’s Crossing 2)
– 17 (!) PSP games, almost all RPGs, many of which look great (including God Eater Burst and Ragnarok Tactics)
– 11 3DS games, many of which were Christmas gifts (including Theatrythym Final Fantasy and Paper Mario Sticker Star)

That’s 42 games on my ‘to play’ list. With some embarrassment I’ll reveal I have already preordered about 6 more online, and yet right now much of my gaming time is spent playing Warcraft. I think I’ll have to be more disciplined πŸ™‚

Will I succeed? Can I possibly consume all this media before getting overrun? Also, will I stop buying more until what I have has been enjoyed? I’ll revisit this post at the end of the year, and it will be interesting to see how effective my resolution has been!