Category: Time

My Collection: Genesis

September 17, 2017

Sega released the Sega Megadrive in Japan in late 1988. About a year later it was released in the US as the Sega Genesis. I can recall when the PAL version came out in Australia back in 1990, but was still so entrenched in arcade gaming that I didn’t think much of it.

When I came to America KLS owned one, and that system is still in our possession today. Usually when I do these posts I list all sorts of details about when it was purchased and how much I paid for games and that sort of stuff, but for mysterious reasons virtually all my Genesis games were omitted from my game collection database, so I can only say the bulk of my Genesis games were purchased ‘before 1996’.

The system itself is very large and very black! Ours is a first-generation, which means only RF outputs on the back and quaint additions such as a headphone jack and volume switch right on the console! I don’t have a CRT TV anymore, so I have to connect the RF signal to an LED flatscreen which isn’t ideal… but at least I get a picture! You can see me playing Wonder Boy above, which is a fantastic game. I only wish it were arcade perfect like the Master System version 🙂

The Genesis for me always felt like a strange bridge between Japanese and European gaming. Take Alisia Dragoon for instance, which is a Japanese action-platformer featuring a female protagonist that owes no small debt to Turrican. The box art for the US version is a classic in my opinion, and while (slavishly?) adherent to the game itself suggests a lot more than what’s in the box. The game itself, like all action games of that era, is brutally difficult. I thought I did pretty well in stage one but the game said I was only a ‘worm master’:

The vast majority of my collection are RPGs. KLS and I purchased some of these in 1993, but I suspect others made their way into my collection as I was reviewing for Working Designs. A few have stickers on them that show I bought them used, but many games are near mint condition, obviously bought new. I recall owning (and playing) many more games than what’s in my collection right now, which means some were traded in back during that regretful period in the late 1990s. I wonder how many and which ones?

Here’s my current collection in entirety:

There’s some giants in that box, including Phantasy Star II, III and IV, the first three Shining games, Landstalker, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Shadowrun and Beyond Oasis. All of these games have aged well and are extremely playable today.

Amongst the very few items related to the Genesis that were in my database are the date of the last game purchased (Shadowrun for $20 in 1996) and the purchase of this item in early 1996 for $149:

That’s a Nomad, or portable Genesis. It was a spectacular failure for many reasons including high cost and dreadful battery life (about 2 hours on 6 AAs). Mine is in great condition as you can see, and I could easily sell it for more than I paid for it 21 years ago 🙂

Here’s a closer look at the blue boxes on the bottom of the collection photo above:

That’s my Sega-CD game collection. The Sega-CD was an add-on for the Genesis that was released in 1992. We have the second version released in 1993 that changed the form factor to sit alongside the main console. You can see it on the right in the photo at top. It was an exciting addition way back then since games on CD were very new and promised a lot. Sadly they rarely delivered, and the CD add-on was never much of a success. Mine still works, and I played a few of the games last weekend. I was pleasantly surprised by the fast access speed and short load times, especially compared to what I remember.

Some of my Sega-CD games incidentally are quite valuable. I should get around to the post about my priciest games one of these days…

I was recently watching a Youtube video and they commented the release of the above game, Fatal Labyrinth, was ‘immoral’ since the game itself is so unplayably bad. This gave me an idea, and I am seriously debating visiting this single roguelike game in detail in a future post. Interested?

The Genesis is a classic and important system in the history of home consoles, and was home to a great many absolutely fantastic games. Sadly I own few of them and because of my stubbornness about emulation will forever be deprived from playing them because I’ll not pay $750+ in any hurry for Slap Fight on the Megadrive! But I’m glad I have what I do, and will continue to keep the old Genesis safely tucked away until next time I set it up for some retro fun.

My Collection: NES

May 17, 2017

I owned an NES way back in prehistory (ie. ‘The Australia Era’) and – at the time – played to death all the classics like Super Mario Brothers, Zelda 1 and 2 and Metroid. A couple of years after arriving here in the US, with the SNES in decline and the Playstation and Saturn already released I bought my second NES. It was September 24, 1995 to be exact, cost me $49.99, and I also spent an additional $90.50 buying up a library of 15 games.

I unpacked the NES from deep storage last weekend for a whirl and was pleasantly surprised to find that it still worked, that I actually had a TV that I could connect it to (a non-trivial exercise in this day of HDMI-only ports) and that – most incredibly – the batteries on every single game still worked!

The NES was released way back in 1983, and discontinued in the USA in 1995. I actually bought mine in a fire-sale after it had been discontinued, and therefore mine is the last version of the console ever manufactured. It’s amusing to me that I owned both the first and last versions, and wish I still had the one I bought back in 1987 (when it was first released in Australia).

After the initial flurry of purchased in September 1995, I bought the odd game here and there over the next six months and then stopped. I remember playing it avidly during this time, and the save files on my games support this, with most of the RPGs having maximum-level parties saved. But I suspect somewhere during 1996 I packed it into storage and moved on to the 16-bit CD-based machines.

With the unusual exception of Christmas 2002 (on which day someone gave me Ultima 2 NES for a gift!?) I hadn’t purchased any new games until a couple of weeks ago, when I got these guys for $5 apiece:

This was mostly because I watch lots of retro gaming online, and wanted to try out some shooters on the NES. These three are all ports of fondly-remembered arcade games and are brutally difficult on the NES. I was laughing out loud as I was in some cases getting game overs within a minute of starting, and remembering how such difficulty was the norm rather than the exception in those days 🙂

Then I dug out the RPGs…

That’s my actual party in Ultima 2, strangely named after the noble gasses! The game is a reasonably faithful port of the old PC classic but runs so slowly as to be almost unplayable by todays standards. I found this to be true for almost all of the ‘CRPG-type’ games (such as Bards Tale, Ultima, Wizardry etc.) and since the games can’t be accelerated when played on original hardware I doubt they hold much appeal today.

There are however certain exceptions, such as this still-playable and wonderfully-packaged Japanese installment in the Might and Magic series:

Or Solstice, a game that has become a bit of a cult-classic among certain aging ‘isometric‘ fans 😉

This latter one is ludicrously difficult, and yet I recall spending hours upon hours playing it way back when!

Here’s a photo of most of my NES library:

Almost everything in the above photo cost me $5, with a few (DW4, Startropics 2, FF1) costing $10-15. About half of the boxed games were new (you can still see the plastic wrap on many) and include all the manuals, maps etc. Needless to say these are in pristine condition. Even many of the used games came with most of the inclusions as well, and everything in the photo still works and (if applicable) has a working battery.

As with much of my game collection a lot of this material has gained value over the years. While I didn’t exhaustively check, Castlevania 3 as an example cost me $5 new (the price tag was still on the wrapper!) and now would fetch twenty times that. Amusingly my most ‘valuable’ game may be Godzilla 2 (which was also purchased new): boxed copies on ebay sell for over $200!

If you’re wondering about the major gaps in my collection – SMB, Metroid etc. – I have ports of them on other systems so never felt the need to get them for the NES. As you can see I prioritized RPGs, and as such ended up building a collection worth a nice amount these days. But I’ve got no plans on selling it, and back into storage it will all go.

By the way if you have any requests for the next one of these posts let me know. There’s a great many systems left to cover (basically I own everything since the NES excluding the 360 and XBox1) and I do plan on getting to them all eventually.

Bonus Game Included (on c-side)!

April 13, 2017

Back in 1983, Pete Shelley (ex-Buzzcocks) released his second solo LP called XL1. Despite having great success with his first album, mostly due to the hit single Homosapien, this followup wasn’t very successful. And yet it was a bit of a landmark album for a very unusual reason: the album came with a piece of ZX Spectrum computer software.

For those unaware, games were often distributed on tape in those days. Rather than using digital media, computers often input data via an audio signal, which therefore meant using cassettes or (much less commonly) vinyl records to distribute software. This was the heyday of the 8-bit games industry, and more cassettes containing software were being sold than containing music. It was a natural idea for a band to include software on a record… but Pete Shelley was the first to do it.

While the program was nothing more than a visualizer, it may have been the very first visualizer! The idea was you’d load it up on your spectrum and start it playing at the same time as the record, and then watch the pretty visuals play out on the screen while you sang along with the lyrics. Here’s the whole thing on Youtube (remember the software itself was silent):

Here is a fascinating account of the production of the software by the guy that made it. I particularly like how they put out a lock-groove on the vinyl version to save speakers (and ears!) since the raw audio of the code is just screeching white noise. Amusingly, in researching this post i found a forum post where someone described returning the cassette to swap it for the version without the game since he hated having to fast-forward through the screeching sound of the software every time he listened to the album 🙂

I can’t find any reports on whether this was a success, or even made a ripple in the games/music industry. I’m sure it was a novelty, but I wonder how many Pete Shelley fans made use of this even in those days? Either way it hardly set a precedent, and I know of no other examples of a band including visualizers on their albums…

In the early 1980s text adventures were a big deal, and successful enough that there was even a ‘do it yourself’ program called The Quill that allowed anyone to make their own game. One such person that did was Dave Greenfield, member of the band The Stranglers. He wrote a game called Aural Quest that was included at the end of side two of the (cassette only) versions of their 1984 album Aural Sculpture:

It’s a long-ish game (for a text adventure) in which you play the manager of the band as they tour around the world (starting in the UK, via Europe to Tokyo and eventually Brisbane) and get into misadventures. It was apparently quite challenging and since it was mostly ignored by the gaming press in those days players must have had a terrible time beating it without assistance. Here’s a video of a playthrough:

As best I can tell, this was the first and quite possibly only game actually included on an officially released album. Certainly it was the only game released on an album in audio format; if software was ever included these days it would be as a digital file on the CD. (Let’s ignore for the fact that even CDs are mostly dead…)

As a last curiosity, how about the Thompson Twins game? They were a synthpop band from the early 1980s, and in 1984 a ZX Spectrum game based on their single Doctor Doctor was released on flexi-disc only as a promo attached to a computer games magazine:

The game was a graphic-adventure, quite short and apparently quite bad. It lives on via emulation and you can see a full playthrough of the c64 version on Youtube:

This release is remarkable for many reasons:
– The fact that it was ever made in the first place
– The fact that it was only distributed as a free magazine promotional item
– The fact that it was distributed on vinyl disc rather than cassette

This last fact is notable: users would have had to record the disc onto cassette first before being able to load it into their computers. This wouldn’t have been difficult, but is just an unnecessary step and is probably what led to flexidisc software distribution never catching on! (Wikipedia has a good article on this game including the development, and additional research suggests the oft-delayed c64 disc version is extremely rare these days.)

I was a Thompson Twins fan in those days. I would have played this! I suspect the flexi was stripped from magazine covers in Oz though, and I can barely believe any Australian readers sent off for the c64 disc? Adam… did you?

And that’s that. I became curious about the idea of 8-bit band-related software-on-albums a while ago and this post has been percolating for some time. But despite my attempts this is all I can find. There were of course unofficial items (such as Jethro Tull and Beatles adventures written on The Quill) and actual games based on bands (Frankie Goes To Hollywood) but none of these were distributed by the band or on vinyl record.

However… there was another unusual method of software distribution in the 1980s, in some ways even stranger than including code on vinyl albums. Maybe that’ll become a future post…

Robot Claw