Archive for the ‘Retro’ Category

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Birthday Aquisitions #1: Books

Monday, March 13th, 2017

I used to semi-regularly post about stuff I’d recently bought (or received as gifts) but haven’t for a very long time.

But I watch a lot of streaming on YouTube (and that’s a blog post right there…) and I enjoy when the streamers show off new loot they’ve obtained and how proud and happy they are to have it.

So, for one week only (?), a return to those types of posts! It was my birthday recently and I pulled in quite a haul! I’ll go over much of it this week in five posts starting today with the books.

And even though I bought much of this stuff for myself, I’m still calling them birthday gifts 🙂

There’s the ‘normal’ books. An eclectic selection perhaps. Sin-A-Rama is the updated and reprinted version of a book I bought two years ago and haven’t read yet (it’s an art book of pulp covers essentially). The book on the bottom is an anthology of lurid men’s adventure magazines from post-WW2. 

The manga. Obviously I’m a big fan of Fairy Tail (yes I own 57 volumes…) but of this pile the Junjo Ito books would be my favourites. He’s a master of horror manga and almost everything he has done is a classic.

Two art books and an RPG monster manual. The Fire Emblem book was surprisingly inexpensive (<$20) and will be worth owning for Tharja alone! Thanks to AJW for informing me of Tome Of Beasts (which now has entered my siseable ‘monster manual’ collection).

An unusual gift (from KLS) you may think? It’s an art book of women from Hammer Horror films. I’ll get back to this on Wednesday…

Loads of pulp! Almost all of the above cost only $0.01 (plus $3.99 P&H) from Amazon and after buying a few like this in Oz I’m now on a ‘1970s Conan ripoff’ binge! Keen-eyed observers may note the Kothar and Brak series are both incomplete in this photo… but I already had the other volumes 🙂

Speaking of Conan, and possibly stretching the ‘book’ definition, I got this old AD&D module as well. If anyone is interested, I’ll review this on the blog. 

And last but not least some Guy N Smith books. I’ve wanted to read The Sucking Pit for years and now I am I can reveal it most certainly wasn’t worth the wait. From the same author of the ‘crab series’ books, this is about as pulpy a horror novel as you can imagine and was probably written faster than most would read it! The Walking Dead is the sequel from ten years later (1985) and will likely be equally trashy. But you don’t read Smith expecting high literature, so I’m satisfied.

The above are all now put into my sorted-by-category ‘to read’ pile, which has now grown to fill five shelves of a bookcase. When will I read them all? Who knows!

But read them I will, one day. And I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy them all 🙂

Posted in Blog, Books & Comics, Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro | Comments Closed

My Collection: Dreamcast

Thursday, February 16th, 2017

Sega released the Dreamcast console on September 9, 1999. I bought mine that day, with the launch game Soul Calibur and a Visual Memory Unit (ie. save game cartridge). Total cost: $275, or about $400 today.

The Dreamcast (DC) had a rough life, burdened by piracy, strong competition from the PS2 and disinterest from the public. It failed quite spectacularly (especially outside of Japan) and when Sega discontinued it in 2001 it marked their departure from the hardware industry. Even so some publishers continued to release software for a while after, but by 2002 the system had become a memory.

While I remember the Dreamcast quite fondly I purchased fewer than 30 games during its lifetime. I own less today due to an ill-advised trade-in event I may one day dedicate a blog post to. Here (excluding an additional controller) is the entirety of my Dreamcast collection today:

Here are the games I still own:

I set it up this past week and gave most of these games a whirl. To be honest, few hold up now. While we thought the Dreamcast a beefy system back in it’s day, the 3D (polygon-based) games are a bit muddy and suffer from slowdown, and the load times on most other games leave a lot to be desired. Also – bizarrely! – many of the games don’t even use the analogue stick on the controller.

There’s also the issue of the terrible VMU, which is essentially a USB drive with a tiny LCD screen on it. It had a pathetically tiny amount of storage on it, and it’s telling that I bought a second one the day I bought my second DC game. I recall the horror of continually moving or deleting save files just because storage space was limited and I didn’t want to buy another overpriced VMU.

That said, there are some real gems on the system, including most of these:

Cannon Spike is a curiosity – a top down almost-twin-stick 3D shooter/Smash TV hybrid. It’s not great – arguably not even good – but it came out three months after Sega killed the system and is among the pricier games on the system these days.

It’s companions on the photo: Mars Matrix, Giga Wing and (the mighty!) Giga Wing 2 are the triumvirate of superb and these days very expensive DC shooters. Giga Wing 2 in particular is a monster bullet-hell tour-de-force that holds up oh-so-well even now 17 years later. If you want to play it though you’re looking at more than the cost of a Dreamcast today. In fact those four games in the above shot are probably worth collectively well over $500 today, which isn’t bad since I paid a total of $70 to buy all four of them!

Other notable games include Record Of Lodoss War (a still-unique RPG I could sit down and play for hours right now) and Sword Of The Berserk (the first game based on the manga Berserk featuring a story by Miura and the famous anime soundtrack by Hirasawa). While the latter is an important part of my collection, to be honest the gameplay is utter crap and wasn’t much better back then 🙂

And then we have this guy:

Typing Of The Dead, the utterly bonkers “is that real?” arcade machine was converted to the Dreamcast and I bought it used (complete with keyboard) for a laughable $4.95 four years after the DC was dead. The game design is classic House Of The Dead but instead of using a light gun to shoot the zombies you attack via quickly typing words that appear above the attacking hordes. It’s as insane as it sounds, but is a lot of fun and the DC port plays beautifully.

Seriously, this may be the most fun game I own for the system.

The rest of my collection includes racing games, a few fighters, some puzzle games and some RPGs that are almost unplayable these days due to clunky systems or excessive loads. Most of these games have become footnotes, or curiosities at best, and in fact rarely are any Dreamcast games included in lists of landmark games through history.

Which is why, going through my collection as I did I was surprised how much some of these games are ‘worth’. In fact the average cost per game may be higher for my DC collection than for any other system I own. I’ll never (say never…) sell them, but it’s good to know their not worth less than the space they take up.

Which reminds me, is there any interest in a blog post about the ‘stars of my collection’? I started one once but didn’t post it since it seemed indulgent. But I think there’s some good stories to be heard there about games I paid retail for that have now skyrocketed in value if you want to hear them…

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Retro, Tech, Time | 4 Comments »

My Collection: Wonderswan

Thursday, November 17th, 2016

In 1999, Bandai – no doubt tempted by the oodles of cash Nintendo were raking in via their Gameboy – released their own handheld system called the Wonderswan. It was notably designed by legendary hardware engineer Gunpei Yokoi (who created the Gameboy and many other Nintendo products) and was less expensive, more powerful and had longer battery life than the Gameboy. Bandai leveraged their contacts within the anime industry to deliver a wealth of licensed games unique to the system. It was quite a success in Japan in the first couple of years, obtaining almost 10% of the portable market. Then along came the Gameboy Advance, which killed the Wonderswan almost immediately, and despite two updates in as many years, the Wonderswan was discontinued in 2003. It was never released outside of Japan.

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I bought mine in Japan in 2004 for Y3600, or about $31. This was the final iteration of the system, called the SwanCrystal. It boasted better battery life and a colour screen compared to the original version, but is reverse compatible with all Wonderswan games. Mine came with two games and I bought 7 more at a total cost of an additional $45 (approximately). Here are the games I bought that day:

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I bought it in Akihabara, on the first or second day of the trip at a branch of ‘Super Potato’ if memory serves me correctly. Of the games shown above, only Final Fantasy IV (Y1900) and Front Mission (Y1800) cost much at all – Densha de Go! was an incredible Y80 (about $0.70)!

I still have fond memories of playing the system in the inn at night during that very trip to Japan. In those days, this was extremely advanced handheld technology.

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The system uses a single AA battery and has a (non backlit) 224×144 resolution colour LCD screen. It’s very reflective, which made taking photographs difficult. As you can see the cartridge-to-system ratio is enormous, and the cartridges for the WS are not just big compared to itself, but amongst the biggest handheld system cartridges I’ve ever seen. The pool game (Sidepocket) was made before the colour version came out and is B&W only. Here’s a shot of the graphics:

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The Wonderswan feels more like a toy than it’s competitors, but delivers in the gameplay department. The screen refresh is much better than it was on the gameboy, and the graphics and sound are still impressive today. I forget the battery life but it was surprisingly long for a single AA, and I very much enjoyed playing the FF games on this system long before ports came out for the Gameboy Advance. As you can see, it took me over 28 hours to reach the end of Final Fantasy IV:

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The game is of course all in Japanese (as would be virtually every game for the system) but I had played it multiple times before so that didn’t bother me. Here’s a photo of the fight against Bahamut:

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Note the unusual controls of the system, specifically the two d-pads on the left. This was so the games could be played either vertically or horizontally, or even by two people at once. No game I have supports vertical (or 2P) mode so I don’t know what it’s like, but the small size of the system would make holding it vertically uncomfortable for an adult.

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As with most retro game systems, and despite being at best a footnote and at worst unknown, the WS seems to be appreciating in value these days. A boxed SwanCrystal can be picked up for about $80+ on ebay, although apparently mine is one of the less common colours (‘blue violet’) and may cost twice that. Games range in price from a few dollars up to over $1000. And yes, that’s no mistype: go and search ebay for ‘Judgement Silversword’ to see what I mean. I just checked ebay for the ‘value’ of my games and found most of the WS Colour ones to be going for about $20-30 each (boxed).

However to me my most prized game is actually this one:

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It’s an adventure-type game based on the Uzumaki manga by Junjo Ito. It’s B&W since it was for the basic WS, and virtually unplayable for me due to the language barrier, but I’m a big fan of the manga so I couldn’t resist buying the game ‘for the collection’ when I saw it a few years after I’d bought the WS during a later Japanese trip. Here’s a screenshot:

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This game was also the reason for the one-and-only Wikipedia edit I ever made. But that’s another blog entry…

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

Frozen Novelties (Part 2)

Friday, October 14th, 2016

The post on ice creams was unexpectedly popular! It led to some digging around on the interwebs during which I found these licensed Aussie ice blocks.

I’ll post them in more or less chronological order:

I can remember these! Apparently the license was so massive that more than one company made SW ice blocks over the years. This was of course in 1978.

 

Licensing was in full bloom by the late 1970s, although obviously the Bionic Man license was cheaper than the Star Trek one based on the cost of the ice block 🙂

The KISS ‘water ice confection’ came out in 1980 and I can remember the cola-flavoured back ice staining your tongue when you ate it. They sold these at school believe it or not!

Look at those flavours on this 1980 ice block! Lemonade, pineapple and bubblegum?!? I bet I loved them!

This delicious Flash Gordon ice cream was also 1980. I’d ruin one of these right now.

Collating these photos gave me distinct flashbacks of perusing the freezer cases in the days all this stuff was available. Happy times!

 

We’re into the early 1980s now. Orange and pineapple is my dream combination; here’s hoping they still market Donkey Kong when I visit 😛

 

The first one is a bit special since they came with glow-in-the-dark stickers. You can read about them here, and I strongly recall having a Spider Man sticker of my own! There other licensed shaped popsicles as well (such as Disney), but I don’t recall ever buying any.

Here things have just got a bit out of control don’t you agree? While this is a box from a New Zealand company, I read (although don’t recall) that Fame iceblocks were marketed in Australia as well.

All these are over 30 years ago, and there were virtually no licensed iceblocks before 1978. This is just another example of how Star Wars changed marketing entirely. Growing up in that era – where even The Bionic Man was a good license for the freezer case – was a privilege indeed.

Posted in Food, Miscellaneous, Retro, Time | Comments Closed

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