Games – Page 29 – Robot Claw

New Hampshire

September 5, 2017

We went to New Hampshire for a few days! Specifically we stayed at Weirs Beach in the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. It’s a very popular tourist destination with lots to see and do.

On the first day we started by taking a lakeshore ride on our tourist train.

Jim had bought us tickets in the caboose, which meant we could sit in the seats up at roof level for a spectacular view!

The trip was great and the views better. They even served food and I had a delicious sandwich! We were dazzled by the crazy lakeside homes we saw, including one little shack on sale for a cool $900k!

Right after the train we comboed straight into another trip, this time on a boat:

BUT NOT JUST ANY BOAT! You’re looking at the only floating post office in the USA, and we rode on the second mail route of the day to several islands on the lake.

That’s the crowd at Jolly Island, waiting not just for their mail but also the ice-creams sold on the boat. The lake has dozens of islands, many of which have summer homes on them. It’d be a fab place to spend a few weeks in the summer…. if you were rich enough to afford it!

Two minutes walk from our cabin was a boardwalk that had restaurants and gift stores and two arcades. You can bet I visited it nightly 🙂

On the second day we went to a place called Polar Caves. After being (not so) momentarily distracted by the feedable deer, we took the route through their nine glacial caves.

This place was incredible. Self-guided, the caves required a lot of agility and stamina to get through, and we were very often crouching down almost to our knees or contorting ourselves in ways we had forgotten to get past a tight obstacle.

The limited warnings in advance and near total lack of any meaningful safety notice meant we didn’t expect anything like this, and while (a lot of) fun, this was a very strenuous experience!

Easily the best cave system I’ve ever visited, this place is highly recommended to anyone that can still climb ladders, crawl along on your knees and doesn’t suffer from vertigo (since some caves were vertical) or claustrophobia. Beware if you’re a fat man though; you’ll be miserable 😉

And then after the caves came Funspot, the mega arcade we visited last year and the reason for the return trip. It was mobbed with people since the remnants of hurricane Harvey had blown into town and it was very wet, but we endured the crowds for a few hours and had a lot of fun.

There’s probably more I’m forgetting but I’m sure you can tell we had a fun long weekend and a good ‘last hurrah’ to summer. Even though it’s a long drive, I’m sure we’ll return again one day.

My Collection: XBox

August 29, 2017

I received my XBox as a Christmas gift back in 2003. This was more than two years after it had been released, and by then there were many games already available. I actually owned one, D&D Heroes, that I had bought several months earlier. I guess I knew what Santa was bringing me for Christmas that year 🙂

While I didn’t buy an excessive amount of games for the system, I played it fairly frequently for the next 2.5 years and remember enjoying it. Some games, such as Morrowind and the Otogi series were particularly good. But the last game I purchased was in early August of 2006. Since I never had an XBox 360 or an XBox One, that day ended my time as an XBox player.

That is the sum total of my XBox collection (except the console, of course); 38 games for which I spent (in total) only about $450. I very rarely spent full price for an XBox games, and many of them cost me under $10. One of them cost only $5 new and a certain trilogy cost even less:

Those are the three Burger King games released in 2006. They retailed for $4 apiece but I recall there was a deal when you bought all three at once (maybe $10 for the set). They’re simplistic – today they’d be called ‘mobile games’ – and little more than curiosities, but a memorable part of my collection.

These two games are the highlights of my collection:

The Otogi series is a magnificent set of two games set in mythical Japan. Complex and challenging, they are mission-based action games featuring absolutely beautiful graphics, destructible environments and lots of intricate combat. Developed by From Software, both games contain elements that would resurface in the Souls series, and in my opinion these two are important milestones in the history of the action-RPG. They are so good in fact, that these two games along justified the XBox for me. Neither were released for any other console, or have even been rereleased or remastered.

As for strangest game, that award would go to a demo I have of a Magic The Gathering action game from 2003:

Entitled Battlegrounds, this is a terrible RTS-style game where you frantically summon creatures and cast spells to defeat your opponent in real time. There’s no cards, or even decks, and it only has superficial resemblance to an actual game of MTG. While I’ve only got the demo, I obviously wasn’t (and aren’t) impressed enough to buy the actual game!

The final XBox game I ever bought was this one:

Since I had the system out and connected for a bit of nostalgia, and since JJ were visiting, it seemed like a good time for an old fashioned retro gaming tournament! So once again KLS, JBF and myself sat ourselves down and answered the question of who was the superior videogamer. The ‘standard rules’ applied (one game each, no practice, winner goes first on next game) and we – as always – only played games with a score.

Here’s the per-game result:

And here’s the cumulative score result:

It seems I haven’t lost my mojo!

Anyway the XBox has now been boxed back up and returned to ‘deep storage’ where it will remain for at least another decade or so. Unlike almost every other system I own there are no games for the XBox I’ve always been after, so if and when I get it out it will probably just be for another go at Otogi or maybe Solomon’s Key. Who knows if the system will even work then…

Speaking of old games tourneys, we’re off to NH for another visit to Funspot this weekend. Watch this space for photos…

Regret?

June 30, 2017

I own about 2000 video games, almost all of which still have their box and manual and are in ‘as-new’ condition. A couple of dozen are even ‘mint’ condition (still in the factory sealed wrapping). About 50 maybe were used. It’s a big collection, and contains some real gems worth many times what I paid for them.

Virtually all of these are recorded in a massive Excel file that I’ve been keeping for over two decades. This arose because I used to have to keep records for my contract reviewing I did years back, but I’ve kept it up ever since. This is what I use for my annual ‘year in review’ posts regarding my collection (as well as the system-specific posts).

I’m pretty pleased with my collection – more so in recent years as I’ve sunk myself more and more into retro gaming. I do believe that one day I’ll set them all up again and be able to play decades worth of games whenever I wish. Very few of these games are what I consider ‘bad’, and I would enjoy replaying almost all of them.

This is one of the reasons why I regret something that happened over an 18 month period from June 2000 until Devember 2001: I traded in for store credit exactly 92 games. I can’t say for sure I regret doing this, but I certainly wish I could go back and tell myself it was a terrible, terrible idea. Granted I got decent money for them (trading in wasn’t as much of a scam then as it is now) with which I purchased many (about 44 actually) new games, but I do still wish I owned every single game I traded in. The principle reason I did this wasn’t for the money, it was because of space (we were in the apartment then). Plus EB Games was trying to move into used game sales and were offering very generous prices in those days (about half new retail cost).

This post discusses these tradeins in detail, including prices, specific game titles, and the ones that I probably should have kept in my collection 🙂

Dreamcast

I traded in only six Dreamcast games, for which I was given approximately $100. Three of these were (bad) RPGs, one was an action game and two were Capcom fighting games. Today, the approximate value of these games would be about $154, which is less than I paid for them back when I bought them.

No regrets therefore from a price point of view, but I would like to play Armada again.

Gameboy Advance

Why did I trade in GBA games? It’s not like they take up much space at all!! The list – only four games – is arbitrary as well. A mystery then, but one not worth spending too much time on since the four games only cost me $63 in total and I got almost $50 in credit for them!

However…. one of those games – Klonoa – cost me only $19.99 new, gave me $12 credit, but can easily fetch $80 today! In fact the four games today are worth over $135, or more than double what I paid. Given the four of them in boxes could have fit anywhere, I probably should have kept them!

Gamecube

I only traded in two games (Pikmin and Super Monkey Ball) and could easily buy both of them today for much less than the trade-in credit I got in 2001 were I interested. Which I’m not 🙂

Nintendo 64

I gutted my Nintendo 64 collection, trading in a whopping 16 games (more than half what I had bought), which gave me about $430 in credit. While Nintendo 64 games haven’t started spiking in price like NES or SNES games, they are creeping up and today these 16 are worth about $550.

One of them is notable, Kirby 64. I bought it with credit, and traded it in only 14 days later for $40! Today it could fetch $80. I don’t particularly miss it, but I do miss games like Doom 64, Jet Force Gemini and a few iconic N64 games such as Starfox, Mario Kart and Paper Mario. Why on earth did I trade in Nintendo first party classics?!?

Sega Saturn

I only traded in three Saturn games, none of which were good. For Baku Baku, Golden Axe The Duel and Winning Post (a horseracing game I actually purchased new for $60!!) I got about $65 in credit. These three games today are worth over $250 combined!

Why so high? It turns out Winning Post was a rare game even when it came out. Coupled with the unusual genre, and the fact it’s apparently a pretty good game, means it commands a high price now – up to $200 in good condition. I probably should have kept that one 🙂

Playstation

Here’s where the regret gets closest to the surface. In those 18 months I traded in 44 Playstation games (from a collection of about 120). This was more than any other system, and I estimate I got about $530 in credit from all these games.

Some were bad, some were middling, many were good. And a few were great. Perhaps more than anything else on this list I can’t easily explain just why I traded some of these in. When I look at how much they have appreciated in the years since the decision to part with them becomes even more inexplicable.

Take the two Tomba games for instance, which were great platformers. Or the three Playstation installments from the Armored Core series – all of which I played to death. Or Koudelka, the first installment in the fantastic Shadow Hearts RPG series. Or Tales Of Destiny 2. Or Tron Bonne. Why oh why didn’t I keep these games?

All 33 today would retail in good condition (with box and manual) for about $1400. A couple are worth more than twice what they cost back in 199x. Tron Bonne alone is a $200+ game… that I traded in for about $9. If only I had known!

Playstation 2

And then we get to the PS2 era, which was a young console during this period. Even so I managed to dispense with 17 games for this system, many within months of buying them. For this I got about $380 in credit, which was good in the day, and on which most was spent getting more PS2 games!

Today… these games are worthless! In fact I could buy back all 17 in good condition complete for probably $150! Only one is ‘worth’ anything (Grandia Extreme, about $30) but I have no desire to own or play it any way!

In other words, I made the right call on the PS2 games I got rid of 🙂

Sega-CD

Here’s a bonus. I actually have seen about 20 additional games leave my collection in the last 24 years. Some of these were returned to the shops, some were given away to family but one special game was sent to Victor Ireland, boss/owner of the company Working Designs who I reviewed games for.

Vic had been very generous to me over the years, sending me lots of free games and even getting me a Japanese N64 before they were out in America (not to mention Pokemon for the gameboy before the USA release). I knew he was attempting to complete a collection of the entire USA Sega-CD library and I actually helped him with this, sending him a few games that I stumbled across that I knew he didn’t have. Some of these games (such as Space Adventure Cobra) I purchased two copies of and kept one. One game though was in my own collection, but had been quite rare, so I just gave it to him. That game was Keio Flying Squadron.

I had bought this game in very late 1994 for the Sega-CD and loved it. It was a shoot-em-up featuring a cute girl and lovely graphics and had a good amount of challenge. I played it a lot and thought it was a great game, especially at the very low price of $20 new.

I kept it for 8 years, and then in 2003 sent it to Vic since I knew his Sega-CD collection lacked only a very few games and this was one of them.

Here’s the reason he never found it: it’s super rare. As a result it’s now easily the most expensive Sega-CD game. In fact it’s worth $1200. Yep, twelve-hundred dollars. And I gave it away…

(But had I kept it would Keio even be my most ‘valuable’ game? Are you interested in the answer to that? Should I do a post on the gems in my collection? Let me know…)