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Ultraman [B Type]

Tuesday, August 27th, 2019

The new Ultraman series on Netflix is fantastic. It adapts the recent manga which has updated the series for the modern era whilst not rejecting the past, and in my opinion succeeds tremendously.

When I first learned of it I was wary of one of the major aspects: the combat suits. Ultraman was no longer a being, but a human in a suit. However – and without giving anything away – by the end of the first season I loved the suits, and happily and eagerly picked up the two model kits recently put out by Bandai.

That’s the first one. It was a little pricey compared to a Gundam, but it’s a very high quality kit with a very nifty feature.

This is not a beginners kit. The metallic gray is painted on, which means cutting from the runners leaves white (the colour of the underlying plastic) edges that need to be cleaned up. There’s also a lot of tricky-to-remove tabs on the red pieces that require a lot of patience. Cleverly Bandai has designed the kit to hide almost all of these after assembly but I needed a silver paint pen to fix a few spots.

Secondly the kit has a lot of stickers that in some cases were fiddly to attach. I’m not a great fan of stickers, but found them particularly unusual in this case since they were the same colours as the runners. We’re this a higher-priced kit I suppose the stickers would have just been extra pieces, and I don’t know why the cheaper Dragonball kits can do this level of detail sans stickers but this one couldn’t?

That said – and despite occasionally interference from a fuzzy thief – assembly wasn’t difficult and it looked great once finished:

As usual I was happy with just the figure, but there’s a lot of Ultraman’s various energy (‘specium’ to be precise) weapons that can be assembled and attached. But even without any accessories this kit is special for an extra feature; a first for one of my kits:

He has lights! His eyes and chest light up, and the chest can be set to blue or red. It looks incredibly good, and the simplistic but effective interior design (with light pipes and a sticker-mirror running from an LED unit) is charming.

An amazing kit therefore. He looks and can be posed like a high-end action figure, but he was assembled from scratch. I can’t wait to make the other one 🙂

Posted in Crafts, Models, Otaku | Comments Closed

Two Treasures

Thursday, August 22nd, 2019

I picked up a bunch of weird stuff during my California trip. Here I’ll show two of them.

This LCD Star Wars pinball game cost me $15 which wasn’t bad considering it was new. A glance on eBay tells me I wasn’t ripped off. The guy that sold it to me made mention of treating it carefully since the plastic packaging had become brittle but of course I was going to open it!

And here it is! Note the poor sticker affixed between the buttons, as if after they made it they realized they forgot to brand it! You’ll also see that the only Star Wars evidence in the actual game screen are the droids on the backplate…

The batteries had of course leaked (it’s 24 years old!) but not seriously and it was an easy clean. I popped two more in and:

It has flashing lights, a vibration function and very, very poor gameplay! Also the game itself has nothing to do etc Star Wars, and I imagine the others in this like (such as a Barbie game) play identically 🙂

A curiosity though, already in a box never to be played again!

Following on, I also bought this for $5 at an amazing antique store in Gilroy:

A European Panini sticker pack from 1983! Panini made gazillions of sticker sets for just about every sport and licensed brand you can imagine and sadly they barely distributed outside of Europe. So I never got any Dark Crystal or E.T. or Pope John Paul II stickers in my youth…

The ‘original’ art stickers in this set are strange and difficult to look at for long periods, but most of the stickers were from the cartoon;

I bought this in the hope of sending you all some He-Man nostalgia via future postcards but the adhesive is too weak after 35+ years and these will therefore remain as priceless additions to my collection 🙂

Oh and even though this post was just supposed to be two treasures… here’s some of the rest of my purchases:

Posted in Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Tech, Time, Toys, Trading Cards | 4 Comments »

In The Cards

Sunday, July 28th, 2019

As I mentioned in this post, I bought a bunch of packs of old trading cards at a recent convention. Today I opened them, and I’m here to share the joy…

These American Gladiators cards were released in 1991 and feature shots of the gladiators and the various events. The sticker isn’t great since it’s not die-cut, and after 28 years has adhered to the backing so isn’t usable anyway! Overall this seems to be a boring set. Rating 5/10

I bought a bunch of this set when The Phantom Menace came out in 1999 and probably have all these cards somewhere in a binder. The screengrabs on the cards are a little blurry and the stickers should have been die-cut but when it came out it was amazing due to the widescreen size. Rating 8/10

Series two of Space Shots was released in 1991, and is evidence that back in those days almost anything got a card set (series TWO?!?). The cards are well made but very boring, and it’s difficult to believe anyone ever bought more than one pack of these. Rating 3/10

Dinosaurs was a criminally awful sitcom featuring ‘dinosaur’ puppets. I hated every second I ever saw of it and surprise surprise I hate these cards as well. For starters they don’t even include any shots from the show (just puppet photos), the ‘jigsaw’ cards are garbage and why on earth are there trivia cards?!? Not worth the cardboard they’re printed on. Rating 0/10

Speaking of dinosaurs all I know about the 1994 The Flintstones film I learned from the cards in this pack. And boy does it look bad! The card set is the usual no-effort trash that so many films received (that’s the sticker card above) and as with many in this post I find it hard to believe people actually bought these packs. Rating 0/10

If you had told me the Barbie cards (from 1991) would be amongst the best I would have guffawed and called you a jackanape. Turns out though you’d have been correct! Lovely design and well written text make more a nicely done set. My pack had cards from 8 different years but the set is a massive 196 cards so I wonder what the other designs would be? Rating 8/10

That’s Zoffy helping me with this blog post. Her assistance was of course invaluable…

I’d never heard of Bingo, a dog film released in 1991. Critics hated it but based on amazon reviews it’s so-so for kids. That said I doubt even a sleuth as skilled as The Shaggy D.A. could explain why they made a card set. These cards are, of course, not good, not bad… just nothing. Rating 0/10

I bought all these card packs as a set, and of course took the bad with the good. The only comment I’ll make about these I Love Lucy cards from 2000 is that surely that must be a typo on that card name? Rating 0/10

The printing on the wax-pack of these Wizard of Oz cards from 2000 turned the cast into a nightmare freakshow! The cards are shockingly low quality for such a famous film, but will make good tinder when the fossil fuel runs out. Rating 0/10

At NYCC years back some guy offered to sell me a case of these Dick Tracy cards for a song. I declined, which was wise since even opening this single pack was excruciating. Bad cards from a worse film, and a travestic mockery of the Topps vintage design, these deserve to be encased in concrete and sunk in a harbour. Rating 0/10

And now we move into actual vintage Topps! This set – Back To The Future II from 1989 – follows the by then established formula: bold colours, dynamic movie shots, well-written backs. But the stickers were no longer die-cut and (controversy warning!) in this particular case the movie is boring. The gum had long since turned to hard plastic. Rating 5/10

These Saturday Night Fever cards from 1977 are tied for the oldest cards I got and it’s quaint to think of a time when a dancing film was so big they sold trading cards to kids! However I had to toss these in the trash since:

The gum was moldy! The mold had (visibly) spread to one other card and was inside the packaging. Maybe it was long-dead since it’d been 42 years, but I wasn’t taking the risk. Rating mold/10

E.T. was – and is – a creepy film. For each of the three times we rode the E.T. ride at Universal earlier this year we were slackjawed that it was the phenomenon it was. I can recall buying these cards back in 1982 as a child, and I wonder what I did with them? It’s a good set – every card in my pack features E.T. – but the real surprise to me was the sticker:

Sixteen tiny stickers on a single sheet!!!?! As a kid I must have loved these. Alas now after 37 years the adhesive has all but evaporated and they flaked off the backing. No E.T. stickers to look forward to on your California postcards then. Rating 7/10

I hardly have to say it: these Close Encounters of The Third Kind cards from 1977 are the best I got. Timeless classic Topps design, great picture selection and an amazing (die-cut!) sticker easily lifts these above the others. I’d love a whole box of these but alas they are pricey and very rare now and this is likely the only pack I’ll ever open. Also note the ‘Skywatchers Club’ had annual dues?!? I wonder how many years it lasted? Rating 10/10

There was one last pack that you may have seen in the photo in the original post, but I’m not opening that one now. Maybe I’ve got better plans for it…

Posted in Collecting, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Trading Cards | 1 Comment »

Selling The Collection (Update)

Sunday, July 14th, 2019

Yesterday I went and sold these two for a lot of money:

I immediately spent some of the cash on these:

They’re the old Dragonlance modules collected into book form. They’re all in top condition and the prices were good. Also he threw these in:

With a pocket full of cash I then headed straight to the store and purchased this:

It’s both the sixth model of the 3DS and coincidentally my sixth 3DS! However I have multiples of some rather than every iteration. This is the ultimate version (2D only!) since the announcement of the Switch Lite essentially means the 3DS is now obsolete.

But my day wasn’t over! Turns out there was a retro game convention on in Albany yesterday and – after a quick stop to buy Magic cards so I can make an unbeatable deck to beat both BS and AW with – I headed over to check it out!

It was decent. Lots and lots of games, but very little I needed or was even tempted by. Looking at the prices I’m glad I’ve sold what I had and feel good about the amount I received.

However I couldn’t resist these two:

I’ve been looking for the second NES Ultima game for a while and had never seen it boxed in this condition, so I was very happy to find that. The other game is Wizardry 1 & 2 for the PC-Engine, a Japanese CD based console I’ve never owned and never will. Yes, I paid $40 for a game I’ll never play! For those of you that was ‘worried’ I was getting out of game collecting: that should rest your souls 🙂

Oh and I couldn’t resist this lot either:

All sealed! Some of these packs are over 40 years old! I reckon you’ll see some of these on the blog again in the future…

This shopping bender was fun but only used up a portion of the cash I got for the two games. I think the rest needs to go toward airfare…

Posted in Blog, Books, Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Trading Cards | Comments Closed

Selling The Collection

Sunday, June 30th, 2019

Yesterday I sold 6 game consoles and 152 games. For this I was paid a considerable amount of money, but it was like parting with a piece of my personal history.

In recent years the market value of ‘retro’ games has been skyrocketing. In particular certain systems and game genres have seen prices rise to borderline unbelievable levels. I own(ed) many of these, and therefore the value of my collection had risen as well.

Over the last few years I’ve written quite a few ‘My Collection‘ blog posts, and more than once as I set up the systems and spent a day playing I wondered if I’d ever want to play those particular games again. I questioned the wisdom of storing them away for another decade or more.

I still love games and still buy loads of them. In the last year or so I started to recognize that in all likelihood I wouldn’t be playing certain old ones ever again. Furthermore the collection was just too large (>1600 console games) and it was time to focus.

So I decided to sell. For this first wave I settled on six older systems, and all the games I had for them: Genesis, Sega-CD, Saturn, Dreamcast, Turbografx and XBox. Last week I sent a list to a local store I know and trust, and they quickly responded with a generous offer, which I accepted.

In total what I sold filled the seven boxes you see above. It took a few nostalgic hours to sort and pack them up and it took the two owners of the store another two hours to unpack and assess everything. They were astonished by the condition. One guy said he rarely sees any Sega-CD or Saturn games (from 20-25 years ago) without disc scratches: I sold him almost eighty, all in pristine condition complete with all packaging. Virtually everything I sold was the highest quality. I think they were more excited by the sale than I was!

Several of the games I sold are amongst the rarest on their systems. The one above (yes that’s the original receipt) they may sell for $800 or more, and I sold two others even more valuable. I hope they make good money on this sale, and I hope my games – some of which are ‘holy grails’ end up making other collectors very happy.

The guys told me I should become a streamer or write a book. They were amazed by my history as a gamer, the depth of my collection and the gaming knowledge I had. Also the fact I could give details about virtually every game including when and where I bought it as well as mini-reviews. But I’ve never collected for it’s own sake: every game I buy is simply because I want to play it.

Although I sold a lot of games, it represented less than 10% of my total collection. I’m still buying games of course, but going forward will increasingly concentrate on Nintendo and/or handheld systems. While I will very likely sell more of my collection, I can’t see myself ever parting with the (sizable) Gameboy/DS portion.

Am I sad about this? Do I feel regret? No I’m not and I don’t. I got a good price, I sold to a store that understands and respects the hobby and will find all my games new homes. I personally bought every one of the games myself, played them all, and cared for them for over two decades. They were precious to me but it was now time to pass them on. I hope their new owners love them as much as I did.

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

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