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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 »

My Collection: Saturn

Friday, June 21st, 2019

In late 1994 Sega of Japan launched the Saturn console, their long-awaited followup to the Megadrive. Sega was starting to struggle in the market after the failure of the Sega-CD and 32X addons, and their hope was the Saturn would fight off the looming threat of Sony’s entrance into the home console market. As history now tells us, it didn’t.

I bought my Saturn on the day of US launch: May 11 1995. Famously Sega launched ‘early’ with only one day advance notice and while I was planning on buying a Saturn I never expected I’d have it in my house several months before the originally stated launch date. As we now know the early launched failed: there weren’t enough compelling games ready and consumers weren’t interested.

But I loved the Saturn. Mostly this was for the very reason it failed: the Saturn was a machine that was very poor at 3D graphics, but very good at 2D. This meant it got all the ports of Capcom arcade fighters, which I greatly enjoyed back then. For me therefore, the Saturn was an arcade in my home.

That’s a portion of my collection. I quickly got my Saturn modified to play Japanese games and it became my intro to ‘import gaming’. I played the hell out of the above, and loved them all.

That’s the remainder of my current collection, and back in the day I had more but traded some in during the late 90s. I bought more games for my Saturn than for any other non-Nintendo system.

And it wasn’t just 2D fighters. The above show Quake and an Egyptian turned FPS called Powerslave which is easily the better game. I also bought driving games, puzzle games, RPGs (alas not enough were released) and all sorts of other weird games (such as a horse racing simulator). During the failing days of the system I bought just about anything I saw for cheap, which was often as little as $5 brand new! I didn’t want to see this console die.

The Saturn was never a great success, and it laid the groundwork for Sega’s ultimate departure from the hardware market. But it’s treasured by retro gamers and as such some of its rarer games now fetch astonishing prices. Collectively the three shown above would probably fetch $1500 or more, which is more than I paid in total for my system and all the games. Collecting for the Saturn these days is a rich man’s hobby!

The above shows a save file I found when I was looking through my games earlier. Over 22 years ago, and 12:30 am no less. Younger me played well into the night! In the mid to late 90s I often played my Saturn much more than my PlayStation or N64 and my save files go all the way up to 2000.

But as with all consoles it would eventually be obsoleted – followed up by the Dreamcast in 1999 – and less than a year later I packed mine away and put it into ‘deep’ storage. Here’s where I usually say I had fun looking through my collection but it’s going back into storage for another XX years, never to be sold… but not this time…

Because this time things are different, since for the first time ever I’m very seriously considering selling a portion of my collection. Indeed I’ve started the process, and whether or not it actually happens depends on a few factors, not the least being the offer I receive.

Rest assured if it does happen you’ll be able to read about it here.

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

Happy Birthday Game Boy!

Sunday, April 21st, 2019

30 years ago today Nintendo released their first portable game system: the Game Boy.

That’s a very early Japanese advert touting the ‘handy game machine’ (being played by young boys obviously lost/abandoned in the Australian outback)! As you see the system was very much marketed at children, but as we know now went on to become beloved by players of all ages.

The Game Boy went on to sell almost 120 million units in the fourteen years it was sold, and directly led into the followup Game Boy Advance and then DS series. Many competing handheld consoles came and went, but none made much of a dent in a market absolutely dominated by Nintendo’s Game Boys.

I’ve loved this device since it was released, and to this day handhelds (especially Nintendo ones) are my favorite game systems. Between the Game Boy and it’s followups I own over twenty pieces of hardware and over six hundred games! Needless to say the release of the Game Boy 30 years back had a direct effect on my life 🙂

I’ve written about my (original model) Game Boy collection before. You can read that here (and yes I misspelled the console name throughout). In preparing this post I dug out my collection for another look-see. Here’s a shot of a portion of the game boxes I mentioned five years ago:

And here’s another shot of all five of my Game Boys (all of which still work):

I was looking for a particular game to feature, and found these four Japanese release Pokémon games I bought to play since I couldn’t wait for the USA releases:

(Yes I ended up buying all the USA versions as well, except for Pokémon Card 2 which was never localized!)

And since my original post I’ve added a few more games to my collection, including two more beautiful Wizardry games:

And this guy, bought for ¥100 in Japan last January:

I fired up the above just now on one of my Game Boy Pockets just for some nostalgia…

It was terrible 🙂

The Game Boy may be ‘obsolete’ now, but it will never be forgotten. It’s legacy includes not just numerous followup systems, but also a library of amazing games many of which are still great fun today. The systems themselves are notoriously robust so if you’ve got one in an attic somewhere why not get it out, pop in some batteries, and fire up Tetris again for some late 80’s gaming nostalgia?

Posted in Collecting, Games, History, Otaku, Retro, Tech | Comments Closed

My Collection: Game Gear

Saturday, March 23rd, 2019

Sega released their Game Gear handheld console in 1990 as their answer to Nintendo’s Gameboy. It was marketed heavily on the strength of its full colour backlit screen, but poor software support coupled with the market dominance of the Gameboy led to the Game Gear never becoming a true hit.

This is my Game Gear. I never bought the system myself – I wasn’t interested in any of its games – but JAF (ie. KLS’s mum) bought herself one. Specifically on June 27, 1993 for $129.99. I know this because I still have the receipt, which shows the rechargeable battery pack ($49.99) and ‘Super Wide Gear’ magnifier ($29.99) were bought at the same time.

Joyce would eventually bequeath the system to me along with the few games she had bought. I myself had bought one game (shown above) but when I inherited it in 1994 I put it into storage and essentially ignored it for 24 years.

Then last year in Scotland I found a large collection of Game Gear games being sold at a CEX used game store and bought them all! Eighteen games in total cost me £18, which was a steal even considering they were unboxed. I was eager to try them, and when I returned to the USA I powered the system up for the first time in decades and saw this:

Yes it had broken and the screen just displayed garbage. There were sound problems as well. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this because in the decades since release the Game Gear has become infamous for the lousy quality that Sega chose to cut costs. Many components are second-rate, and the capacitors in particular are known to be the worst ever placed in a game console.

In short, all the capacitors (about 30) needed to be replaced. I bought tools and a capacitor kit, then did nothing for four months! This was because I knew it wasn’t going to be easy at all (leaky surface mounted capacitors needed to be replaced with wired ones) and because the cost of paying someone to do it was cheaper than my time. Eventually that’s what I did, and $30 and one month of work later my Game Gear was fixed.

Now it works we can see the other flaw. The much-marketed full colour screen? It’s terrible! Very washed out, with a slow refresh rate and very limited viewing angle it makes playing anything a bit of a chore in the day of OLED invisible pixel displays!

In short: all games look bad on it, and don’t even have the retro appeal of (for instance) a Gameboy.

Things are slightly better using the magnifier, even if it does make the system less portable. It also reduces the viewing angle quite notably, so you’re better off putting it on a table if you want to use it.

Let’s not discuss the absurd battery pack (top left in the above photo), which gives only about an hours battery life at the expense of a heavy eggplant-sized unit that clips onto your belt. Less expensive I suppose than 6 AA batteries every three hours, but once again something that makes us question how portable this system actually was?

The above is most of my library. I forgot to take a game out of the system (Columns) and of course Shining Force isn’t included. Game Gear games aren’t particularly valuable compared to other handhelds, mostly because if you’re interested in playing them you’ll almost always be emulating. The most valuable game in my collection (Shining Force) is ‘worth’ only about what I paid for it 25 years ago.

This system is a curiosity these days. It had very few good games at the time, and almost none worth seriously playing today. The systems themselves are unreliable, and even when repaired are frustrating to use unless you spent too much to replace the screen with an LED upgrade. This is very much a system just for my collection, and I reckon it could be decades before I turn it on again…

Posted in Blog, Collecting, Games, History, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Tech | 1 Comment »

Dungeons & Dragons LCD

Sunday, February 10th, 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?

Posted in Collecting, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Tech, Toys | 1 Comment »

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