Category: Retro

Castle Grayskull

September 27, 2020

Today I finished building this:

It’s a 3500 piece model of Castle Grayskull from Masters Of The Universe. It looks like LEGO but it’s actually ‘Mega Construx’, which is a LEGO ~~ripoff~~ competitor. The kit came out for $250 but I got it for quite a bit less on Amazon, both because I love the design and because the reviews were overwhelmingly positive.

The packaging is beautiful and opening the massive (and heavy!) box revealed lovely art and a fantastic manual. The 50+ bags of pieces are separated into four smaller boxes each with their own art, and the entire thing screamed quality.

The kit was built in five parts, each of which took 2-3 hours. It wasn’t a trivial build, but not as challenging as the more complex LEGO technic kits. However the mega construx pieces are slightly lower quality than LEGO and occasionally were difficult to actually push together! As a result it was physically more difficult to make this set than your average LEGO kit 🙂

There’s also the occasional bit of molding flash visible (as you can see above) and the manufacturing of the pieces isn’t as perfect as LEGO, but overall I was extremely impressed with how well the set was designed and went together. I had routinely dismissed LEGO competitors before making this kit, but now I’ll have to keep my eyes open in case anything else of this quality is released.

That’s the front of the finished castle…

And that is the back. Note the curved walls and roof, and the 100+ individual little brown pieces used for roof tiles. It’s a tall kit, very sturdy and heavy. I feel if I dropped it it would hardly break!

Of course it opens and has massive amounts of ‘play features’ including several doors, a jail cell (with creepy inhabitant), a moving throne, a cannon, ladder, moving lift etc. It came with six minifigs (and I bought a few extras myself) which are a good LEGO-scale equivalent of the original guys from the 1980s.

I’ve always loved LEGO castles and for many years have wished for a highly detailed and large kit (perhaps of Neuschwanstein) so when I saw this I bought it as much for it being a castle as the (cool!) MOTU origin.

It was great fun to build and looks wonderful up on my bookshelf. But there’s still a spot free if LEGO is inspired and finally releases a detailed castle of their own…

Mint In Box

September 18, 2020

I bought some clear plastic boxes:

“What the hell are these?” you ask? These, my friends, are polyethylene terephthalate protective cases for retro game boxes! I bought 150 of them: 25 each for NES and SNES/N64 and 100 for GB/GBC/GBA/VB. Since my collection has value, I reckoned it was time to add a little extra protection to the more expensive titles I own.

The protectors ship flat and fold into boxes very slightly large than the game cases. Insert a game, close the tabs, and you’ve got yourself a game protected from the grubby hands of the typical gamer!

Every game above I purchased myself new. I’ve kept them in astonishingly good condition over the years as they have appreciated. I paid $20 for Dragon Warrior IV 25+ years ago; it’s $200 now. Final Fantasy cost me $14; it’s $150 now. You can see why I put them in cases!

But it gets better with the SNES stuff:

Those three combined would easily fetch $750 today! Possibly more since they’re in immaculate condition (Chrono Trigger alone could probably fetch $500). Keeping them in cases should preserve them for many years longer.

The Nintendo 64 boxes are the same size as SNES boxes so they share protectors. This ‘chrome’ collectors edition of Zelda fetches a pretty penny today and is just one of a few N64 games I own that sell for much more than I paid when I bought them.

If you’re astonished by these prices be mindful it’s all about the boxes. The cardboard boxes Nintendo used for their first few consoles tore easily and many people just tossed them out. At least 50% – sometimes 75%+ – of the value of a lot of these games lies in owning the box and manual, hence the utility of these box protectors.

Box protectors are a bit of a rabbit hole to delve into though. Frustratingly Nintendo used different boxes in different regions so I can’t protect my Japanese copy of Sin and Punishment or any of my Famicom games. There’s also a few (silly valuable) N64 games with custom boxes that don’t fit in the protectors. But I’ve kept them in good condition for 20 years already and should be able to for another 20 at least.

I’ve still got the 100 Gameboy cases to put on. I’ve got about 260 boxes games that they can fit so it’ll be fun working out which ones are worth protecting. Maybe I’ll post an update when I’m done 🙂

Postcard Sorting

August 16, 2020

About a year ago I started thinking seriously of sorting my postcards. I’d been storing them completely unsorted in a plastic tub, and while I wanted a better solution I had a feeling the job would be a difficult one.

Then in January while in Oz/Japan I bought some postcard storage albums. Interestingly none of these were intended for my own use (they were gifts) but when I used one to sort some of mums postcards I became impressed by how great it was to have them all viewable at a glance, and knew them I’d certainly get around to it sooner or later.

Fast forward through the pandemic, and a couple of weeks ago I helped JAF sort her postcards into a binder using postcard sleeves. They looked wonderful and at that moment I knew I’d found my solution. Within a week I’d bought binders and ordered sleeves enough for over 1000 cards, and these past few days I sorted and sleeved them all.

I’ve kept every single card ever received, with the earliest being from SMC back in mid 1994. They’re now all sorted chronologically (as best I can) by sender and for the ones sent by me I’ve sorted by country as well.

This process has allowed me to catalogue the collection. In total I’ve got over 850 postcards, about 530 of which I’d sent myself (or KLS did), and about 330 of which was sent to us by someone else – probably one of you!

Unsurprisingly the most cards are from Oz: over 300 in total (220 of which I sent myself). These past few years I’ve sent KLS at least one per day during my trips and I’m sure I’ll continue to do this whenever I can visit again. With so much from one country you may expect repetition but there’s surprisingly few cards represented more than once.

From within the USA there’s cards from many states with the most represented (outside of NY) being CA, FL and HA. There’s lots of cards from Japan, the UK and Ireland and a handful from countries including France, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Korea, China and other exotic locales. (Incidentally I’m not including Postcrossing cards in any of this; I’ve got over 220 but they’re still loose in a box!)

These cards are overloaded with memories. When I first started sending postcards to myself (over a decade ago) I didn’t write much – the goal was the card, not the message. But these days I write a lot and over time the cards have become ‘trip diaries’. Reading them brings back all the memories from the various vacations we’ve taken over the years.

That’s an example card from 2017, written in a Kyoto hotel room after a day trip to Nara to see the deer. I was well into using stickers on cards and the simple description of our day contains details that would have certainly been lost had I not written them down.

There’s an example of a card I sent from Scotland. The card itself is amazing – metallic and shiny – but the message on the back is sublime in its mundanity, and when we read it today we had a good chuckle remembering the (true) event. I daresay there’s no chance we would have remembered this had I not written it on the card in that Inverness B&B! (Incidentally I bought two packs of candy and got a second sticker that I put on another card. Who did I send that to?)

When I travel alone the messages (sent to KLS) are more introspective and I have noticed I have a tendency to dedicate entire cards to moments, as you can see in the example above (and yes, that’s a Ganesh watercolour I painted). I never run out of stuff to write, and in fact last Oz trip I sent an average of two cards a day. Sometimes when unusual or notable things happen I make a note on my phone so I remember to write it on a postcard 🙂

Here’s a similar example from my last stay in Japan:

Each of these cards is a little time capsule and having them all easily readable like they are now is something I should have done years ago. If you’ve got your own collection (and I know many of you do) then I suggest getting them out of a shoebox and sleeving them yourself. Yes it’s a little bit of an investment up front (the supplies cost me under $100) but it’s absolutely worth it!

Oh and send me some postcards! I’ve received almost none in 2020 due to you-know-what but just because you’re at home doesn’t mean you can’t send me a funny/interesting message on a card. I’ve still got empty sleeves: give me some cards to fill them!

Robot Claw