Category: Retro

In The Cards

  • May 6, 2018

I found this at Walmart last week:

‘New low price!’ meant $10, and of course I bought it. Twenty packs for that price was a steal, or seemed that way before I knew what it contained…

Here’s the contents:

Interesting mix. 11 different sets, including 4 packs of collectible card game cards. Nothing newer than 10 years, one of set (Anastasia) 24 years old! I’m guessing these have been in a warehouse a long time…

So let’s examine these in detail:

The Power Rangers cards are based on the film and are pretty boring. The plus is that each pack has a foil card, but the minus is that those foils are awful. Each card also has a strange Amerocentric trivia question on the back like this:

Can you get it without decoding the answer?

The X-Men cards have awful art, from the early days of computer-aided colouring. The less said about these the better. But what’s this on the wrapper…?

Each pack has an entry form for a contest to win a baseball card (then) worth $451k! Wikipedia informs me this card was indeed won, sold shortly afterwards for $641k and is now valued at $2.8 million!

The Anastasia cards are pretty normal for an animated film. I got one chase card (cut into an unusual shape as you can see). I’m pretty sure I’ve got packs of these in other boxes like these in the past so I’m guessing they were overprinted and undersold!

The Panda cards are unremarkable, but I got this flashy monkey card that will make a great Xmas gift for Bernard. And I also got this badass tattoo:

Fear the Fur indeed!!

The game cards are mostly garbage – useless cards from unwanted expansions for forgotten games no one played. But I got a rare token (?) from The Simpsons and some crazy gold Power Rangers card so that was good?

I’ve not seen Igor or Despereaux and judging by the cards I don’t want to! They’re uniformly brown for starters, and both seem to have uninteresting and somewhat ugly design. At least I got another chase in my Igor pack – and a Despereaux sticker that will no doubt end up on a postcard 🙂

Which brings me finally to the Space Jam cards. Again I’ve never seen the film, and frankly have always thought it’s probably awful, but take a close look at that card, specifically the bottom right corner…

Yes that’s a scratch-off panel!

My card may be a Grand Prize winner! I may have won a trip to Hollywood! It’s a shame it expired 21.5 years ago… but I’m still interested if I won? Should I scratch it off?

So that’s that! Worth $10 do you think? Or were these better left in the warehouse?

Videogaming Illustrated (Issue 4, Feb 1983)

  • April 8, 2018

At a convention a few weeks ago for the princely sum of $5 I bought this:

It’s one of the very earliest video game magazines, dating to before the ‘crash of 1983’. It’s from the same publisher of the old sci-fi magazine Omni, and the format is very similar (silver pages, yellow pages with fiction, somewhat pretentious tone).

This was very much a magazine without an audience. The inclusion of fiction, the monthly news round up heavy on business content and the (repulsive) interview with Don Imus suggests they were going for the Playboy approach. So much so I’m surprised there’s no cheesecake photos!

That said it’s also an interesting curio from the earliest days of my favourite hobby! For instance I was surprised by the lavish adverts for Atari 2600 games:

(By the way I’m ripping off Ashens here and taking photos of the magazine on a couch rather than scanning it. Hey I’m lazy!)

And the lengthy strategy sections – which take up a decent amount of the magazine and cover arcade and 2600 games – are charmingly low-tech:

The middle one is a four page guide to the arcade game Kangaroo which was probably mostly forgotten even when this issue shipped!

There’s also a guide to third-party 2600 joysticks, a lengthy but superficial article about pinball machines, too much fiction and a lot of uninteresting (even then I suspect) ‘monthly news’.

What isn’t well-represented though are advertisements. I’ve shown some above, but there are very few in total and many of them are clearly there as part of some paid-content promotion:

That’s just one of two ads for Cosmic Creeps, an Atari 2600 game profiled and given a strategy guide in this very issue…

The other element common to today’s magazines that is almost entirely absent are screenshots! In fact, in the entire issue, there is a grand total on one real shot (as opposed to drawings of the screen) and this is it:

Can you name the game? (And yes, I suspect it may also be fake…)

Anyway this mag was sold at the con by a guy who flogs old magazines of many kinds, and at the same time I got some very old Dr Who magazines as well as a bunch of cheesecake horror mags. Why was he selling this one issue of a 35 year old gaming magazine? The cover!! It features a preview of sorts of Revenge Of The Jedi (tied to an article about the 2600 Jedi Arena) which includes this gem:

It was all mostly true, if a bit off with the date estimates!

Anyway a curio from the dawn of gaming time. This magazine would run another year and change names twice before becoming another victim of the crash that almost sunk the US industry, but from what I see here I struggle to wonder who bought it even then?

Buried Treasure

  • March 22, 2018

Last year I went on an expedition into a tomb that had been sealed for decades: a crawlspace upstairs in J & J’s house. I found some startling things in there, mostly in great condition, and one of the most remarkable was this:

The Game Of Time And Space eh? This beauty was published way back in 1980, and is a board game made for and by ‘anoraks’. Back then I would have loved it!

Here’s what it says on the back:

Note that the complexity claims to tend low…

The game includes a big board, some boring plastic pieces (instead of cardboard versions of The Doctors?) and loads of cardboard tokens.

Here’s the board:

And a closeup of a very fanciful depiction of Gallifrey:

And here’s a selection of tokens:

Gameplay is a little like Dungeon and consists of the player moving around the board trying to find several treasures which are initially face-down and often protected by monsters. A selection of items can assist with movement, combat etc. and once the player has the pieces he is after he returns to Gallifrey to win.

A read of the rules seems to contradict the summary on the back: this game seems overly complex and tedious to play. I couldn’t convince KLS to have a go, but I imagine the item wrangling and large variety of rules does not a quick-and-easy game make.

Look at this quick reference rulebook for instance, which every player gets a copy of for reference:

As I said, by nerds for nerds 🙂

It’s also got very little to do with Doctor Who, in the sense you could easily change some names and art and the game would be the same. Shouldn’t time travel or regeneration been themes?

One day I’ll play this, and possible I’ll update when I do. But for me it’s an ancient and treasured part ‘of the collection’!