Specifically, 41 different boosters from 38 expansions, plus 2 premades.
To make the long story short – I like having cards from all the expansions, and there were gaps in my collection 🙂
The oldest cards bought were from Fallen Empires and the most recent were from 2010. Some of the packs were from expansions that I don’t remember ever seeing (Scourge, Prophecy), and some were expansions I already had cards from but couldn’t resist the $2.50 per pack price. In only one case did I pay more than $4 for a pack – and that was the $6 I paid for the single Chronicles pack I bought.
I only opened 4 packs yesterday, including one of the two Fallen Empires. I was hoping for a ‘Hymn To Tourach’ (they are common after all), instead I pulled these two cards from the 8 card pack:
Ah, you have to love the multiple-art approach in that expansion. I expect BS and AW are having fond flashbacks to opening boxes worth of FE boosters right now 🙂
Many of the older cards I bought will likely be unplayable. But a lot of the fun of the game is working out which are and which are not. Looking at a strange card and thinking “Can I use that…?”, and devising some deck that can utilize it. This is in some ways as much fun as actually playing the game!
I’m going to break down the decks I made for Australia and remake a bunch of decks more suited to solo play. I’ve already done that with the black deck, replacing it with a (a bit too) powerful Vampire deck. Next will come green and then I have an idea for a black/blue discard deck as well. Here’s hoping many of the cards in these as-yet-unopened packs will find a place in these as-yet-unmade decks.
Five years ago yesterday the Playstation Portable was released in America.
Above is pictured the limited edition, Japan only Monster Hunter lithographed PSP-3000. Although I don’t own this unit (and likely never will due to the price) I do own two different PSP handhelds.
I bought my first the day it was released: March 24 2005, the for (in retrospect) staggering price of $249.99. I also purchased 3 games for the system: Lumines, Metal Gear AC!D and Darkstalkers. From the start I was a fan of the system, and although the games were fun, it didn’t seem very long before I thought more about what games could be on the system than what actually was.
It would be about 18 months (during which I purchased 13 games) before the first truly astounding (for me) game was released on the PSP. Capcom took their hard-as-nails Monster Hunter series from the PS2, and relaunched it as a portable game series with Monster Hunter Freedom:
I was all over this game. It was so perfectly suited to the PSP that finally the system appeared to have the game it was designed for. This would become – for many PSP users – the defining series for the system, so important to the brand that it would single-handedly allow the PSP to compete with the DS in Japan. In future years two more iterations of the series would be released:
Of course I purchased both and played them like a man possessed. I am not exaggerating when I say that of the 61 total PSP games I own (I bought one per month on average??), I have probably spent more time playing these three titles than the other 58 combined. They are ruthless, complex and impenetrable to casual gamers, but pure bliss for enthusiasts such as myself.
A day or two before Monster Hunter Freedom 2 was released I purchased the newly released PSP-2000 model (also known as the PSP ‘slim’), which was lighter, sexier, had longer battery life and at $170 was quite a bit less expensive. This is the model I still play today, although two newer versions have been released since (the incrementally updated PSP-3000 and the ill-fated and download-only PSP-Go).
As mentioned I have 61 games for the system, about 75% of which are RPGs. The most I have paid for a game is Y6300 (about US$60) for a very rare copy of the limited edition Wizardry Empire III (currently unplayed). The least I have paid I was $4.98 (Dragonball Evolutions, also currently unplayed).
The future of the system doesn’t seem rosy. Sales have been dropping sharply in the last year, and in recent months Sony has been releasing games in digital download-only format. This is probably to drive PSP-Go sales and probably to fight back against rampant piracy. As a game collector I’m not a big fan of digital downloads and refuse to buy any such games. This is problematic, since three such games are of interest to me (including Eye Of Judgement, however each were released on UMD in England so I hope to buy the disc during my trip.
Very few games have been announced that I am interested in (digital or non-digital) and it is difficult to imagine where the system will be a year from now. Many suspect a new PSP to be announced in the next few months (PSP2?), and were it not for the next Monster Hunter game as well as a few other quirky titles (which I doubt will even come stateside) I’d start thinking it’s almost time to pack up the system for good.
< Quirky enough?
At five years old and 60-odd million sold the PSP can hardly be called a failure. And yet it is a system that has only a small handful of truly superb games on it. Given that amongst this handful are some of the best (albeit unforgivingly difficult and hardcore) games I have ever played (in ~30 years of gaming) it’s easy to see why I’m fond of the system. But objectively, I’d have to say that for most players the PSP has never quite lived up to its potential.
Show me an Australian who claims to hate Kangaroos and I’ll show you a liar.
I was asked one of the perennial dumb questions about Kangaroos the other day “Do people really ride them?” I’m sure it was a joke question (I answered “Yes”), but the life of an Aussie ex-pat in America can be described as an endless amount of people asking questions about Kangaroos.
Q: “Are they everywhere?”
A: “Yes; you have to push them out of the way when you go outside to check the mailbox.”
Q: “Do people have them as pets?”
A: “Well, one person I knew did” (<- true story, see below)
Q: “Do people really eat them?
A: “Yep, and their jerky taste like fish!” (<- personal experience)
Etcetera, etcetera.
It is quite possible that my first ever encounter with a kangaroo was captured on film, and is show at the top of this post and here:
I’m not exactly sure where this image was taken (Gosford Reptile Park? Somewhere in Barrington Tops?) but as you can see the kangaroo itself is freakishly large – almost as tall as I am. Man-sized (see top pic) roos are rare indeed, and it is perhaps lucky I escaped with my life.
During my childhood years we often visited small family run nature parks and zoos, almost all of which would have a clutch of friendly kangaroos eager to eat whatever breakfast cereal (usually honey smacks) were offered up in the vending machines for $0.10 or $0.05 a go. I always liked the roos, and liked to think they liked me.
At some point, as these things tend to do, it became crass to house the roos. Domesticizing them and offering them up as feeding toys became uncommon. At some point during my teenage years Taronga Zoo switched from a roo enclosure in which you could walk right up and pat the roos (or wallabies) to one in which – while still free roaming – they urge visitors to not touch the beasts. And no machines offer up cereal for handy feeding opportunities.
Blackbutt Reserve had adopted this vision of roo-displaying years prior, and it’s roos were always behind bars in a rather large enclosure (frustratingly so from the point of view of a short child who couldn’t see them when they were behind a tree or in the opposite corner). I recall one of the other wallaby enclosures – built into the side of an incline so the beasts could bask on the rock – was great for viewing.
During these years of my young-boy-as-a-roo-viewer period, one of the better opportunities to see the beasts was of course on the television.
I refer to none other than Skippy The Bush Kangaroo
Skippy started in 1968 and ran, well it still runs today in some countries. It was basically Flipper in the Australian outback, but the producers really lucked out when they found Skippy for the lead role because he was the god of kangaroos. There’s basically nothing Skippy couldn’t do. He played drums! He scuba dived! He fought dogs and snakes! He was a horse rustler, a piano player, a thief-catcher and even a radio operator:
Truly, I wanted to grow up to be at least half the man Skippy was.
My first experience with wild kangaroos (seeing them from car windows during bush/country drives doesn’t count) was at some point in 198X, during a walk in the bush near where we used to live. I think I was with my brother and we were walking ‘out the back of Kahiba’ somewhere where we were amazed to see a roo in a bit of a clearing behind someone’s house.
Now I had almost been exposed to a ‘real wild roo’ since a friend of mine in primary school (JF, ‘hola’ if you’re reading!) somehow had a pet kangaroo in her field. The facts of this memory are blurred indeed, but I recall the beast (it was smallish, maybe a wallaby) being only slightly domesticated and both myself and JF being afraid to approach it. I think her mum was taking care of it for someone… (amusingly enough I had another friend with a magpie pet once… another entry…)
Anyway some years after the first spot of a wild roo I was walking ‘out the back of Kotara’ with GW and possibly MT when we saw another roo in the distance through the trees. I’ll never admit we were actually lost at the time. We approached the roo, but he fled. Sue once told me that some of the roos actually kept at blackbutt occasionally got out, so maybe that’s what we saw? At any rate it was a strange place to see one, since that bushland is surrounded by homes.
Years later (or maybe around the same time) during a class trip to ‘a mountain somewhere up north’ (Sue remembers where; I always forget) we all saw a bunch of red kangaroos when we climbed this tall hill. I recall them being enormous (as reds are) and slightly unsettling. They perused us and hopped away, as wild roos always do.
At some point, probably around the age of 15 or 16, with a few friends we saw two roos on the sand at Dudley Beach as well. That was a weird sight. They were in the far distance, and we ignored them.
Seeing roos in the wild very often means seeing wild roos hopping away from you. They are inquisitive but shy beasts, and although I never tried I doubt they’d let you get very close. They are not very common in the suburbs, although they do turn up from time to time. I liken their frequency to deer in America. (Although here in Delmar we see far more deer than I ever saw kangaroos in Australia).
When I was there this past January I mentioned at a family gathering that I had seen a very large collection of kangaroos just beyond Kotara out the window of a train. There was some skepticism directed my way, but I was adamant. This sighting did happen (I verified with KLS) but I may have been a bit off as far as the location was concerned – instead it may have happened somewhere closer to Lake Macquarie.
At any rate there was the biggest collection of roos I have ever seen (in or out of a zoo) – 40 or 50 of them. Most were lazing themselves, a couple were hopping around. I recall many passengers were as surprised as I was, so I surmise such a sighting was quite rare.
A dream of mine (one of many) would be to have a house in the Australian outback. Something like this.
Where I could wake up and hear nothing but the birds, and peep out the window and see kangaroos in that field in the early morning.
Do I love kangaroos? Yes I do. They are one of a handful of Australiana that if I think about too much is always sure to rekindle homesickness in me.
So I’m not ready to formally announce it yet, but we certainly may have a trip coming in the near future. Such as, say, early June.
It’s been too long since I traveled, and the bug has bit me once again. Given that tickets are not yet purchased, and hotels not yet booked, it would be premature to say where. But not, perhaps, to give a hint:
It would be remiss of me to mention such things as visiting ancient and legendary destinations such as Blackpool and Exmoor to spot the legendary Exmoor Beast , or all-you-can eating fish-and-chips the fabled foods of this land during the trip. Or even a day trip to frogland.
And banish any thoughts of lurking in used bookstores looking for gamebooks.
Or even watching new episodes of Doctor Who live as they are broadcast.
