My Collection: DS

May 7th, 2024

The Nintendo DS was a two-screen, touchscreen, foldable handheld game console released by Nintendo almost 20 years ago. It would go on to be phenomenally popular, and at 154 million units sold remains the best-selling Nintendo product ever.

I bought two DS units on release day (11/21/04): one for me and one for KLS. In time I would own seven in total, six of which I still have. The above photo shows four of them: an original model (silver), a DS Lite (white, 2006), a DSi (black, 2008) and a DSi XL (maroon, 2009). All are in immaculate condition and still work perfectly.

The system is a little quaint to use today, since most of it’s features are vastly surpassed by our phones, but at launch it was amazing to have a touchscreen game system and many of the launch games exploited this. Only the bottom of the two screens was the touch screen, and the common mode was for games to use it for touch control while displaying action at the top (like Dark Spire, shown above). Unfortunately developers were mostly not up to the task of incorporating touch elements into games twenty years ago, and during the first year of the DS it was home to many poor games that tried to sell themselves solely on gimmick. Then Nintendo released two very clever ‘games’ – Nintendogs and Brain Age – that both became phenomenons, sales of the DS exploded, and it never looked back.

In addition to a touchscreen and the dual screens of the system the DS was the first handheld with communication features. Consoles could talk to each other via WiFi which enabled wire-free multiplayer games, and about two years after release an internet browser was released. The comparitively low resolution of the screen limited functionality, but this was before I had a cellphone that could access the internet so it was novel for the time. Sadly it seems defunct now: I tried it yesterday and the Opera-based browser failed to load everything I tried except for Google, and even then search results wouldn’t load.

I bought and still own more games for the DS than for any other system: 271 in total as of writing this. My first game (Super Mario DS) was purchased on release day, and my most recent (Fairy Tail Gekitosu) was bought about a year ago. During it’s era this was by far my most favourite console ever, and looking through my games as I did yesterday was an experienced drenched in nostalgia.

These three photos (the two above and one below) show most of my collection, which currently fills two large storage boxes.

The majority of the collection was purchased from 2006 to 2009, and for three of those years I averaged more than one DS game per week! The DS was officially retired (in favour of the 3DS) in 2011, but the 3DS was reverse compatible so I still purchased games for the original DS for a few more years until 2013 or so, when releases had mostly ended.

Notably, the DS was not region locked, and I purchased many Japanese games for it (most are shown above) during our travels. Indeed, I even have a (pink) DSi that i bought in Japan a few months before it was released in the USA ๐Ÿ™‚

The above are most of my ‘collectors editions’ of DS games, which in those days almost always meant they came in a slightly larger box with a soundtrack CD or mini-artbook. Two of the above – Dark Spire and Super Robot Taisen – are amongst my favourite games for the system.

With such a large personal collection, it’s not surprising I have a few of the rarer games. The above is the rarest and most valuable I still own. Purchased in 2009 for a mere $20, this game (think of Animal Crossing meetsย Harry Potter) was released in small quantities sells for upwards of $200 these days. I don’t remember it being any good.

The above show a few other games in my collection that currently sell for $100+, and I have many more as well (most of the Pokemon games included). Generally speaking much of my collection is worth at least what I paid for it, and most of it is worth more, albeit not to the level some of my older collections sold for these past six years.

That said I did used to own the two rarest and most expensive DS games – Solatorobo and Shepherd’s Crossing – but I sold the pair together a few years ago for an impressive sum ๐Ÿ™‚

Moving away from pricey and collectible games into the most treasured of my collection, the above shows the three Oeundan games: the two Japanese originals and the US installment named Elite Beat Agents. These are incredibly fun and playable rhythm-based music games that I became absolutely obsessed with for a year or so. I remember being competitive with Florence about these games as well, and I’ll choose to remember that she never beat my highest scores ๐Ÿ™‚

The above are three DS Castlevania installments, and each are wonderfully playable exploration-based games that remain classics to this day. Ask me which is best and I’ll give you a different answer every time, and indeed I’m sure I’ll be replaying the trilogy again many times (as I recently did during the pandemic).

The Yggdrasil Labyrinth (aka. Etrian Odyssey) game series debuted on the DS as well, and I love them all. These Wizardry-like RPGs kickstarted a renaissance in dungeon crawlers that continues to this day, and a remake of these three came out for Switch earlier this year (which I own and have been playing).

The Puzzle Quest series also debuted on the DS. This is a clever match-3 RPG hybrid that spawned many sequels and clones (including a Magic The Gathering version on iOS) over the next decade or so. The first three remain the best, and are as much fun today as they were when they first came out.

If you look closely at the photos of my collection you’ll see many other great games, including the various Pokemon installments, Dragon Quest games, the Advance Wars series and some of the earlier Mario RPGs. During the heyday of the DS it felt like a great game was coming out every week, and as soon as I finished one I’d be immediately starting the next.

But apparently I didn’t play everything, since the above pic shows four sealed games I own! I would eventually buy and play Rune Factory 3 on Switch many years later, but the others I’ve never played. Will I ever? Perhaps ๐Ÿ™‚

Before I wrap this up, a mention of the camera. The DSi model released a few years after the original included a camera, and it was a little sad yesterday to find photos of beloved Yossie that I had long forgotten I had taken. Yossie was with us during the DS era, and many, many hours were spent playing with her in my lap. Indeed she had a special ‘interest’ in the DS, or more particularly the charging cables:

Remember I said we own six DS units? What we don’t own is six charging cables! In fact we’re down to a mere three – one of which has been repaired as you can see above. Why so few? The answer is Yossie, who loved chewing through them. She did it many times and ruined half of them. I loved her dearly, so never held it against her, but those days taught us the importance of always making sure cables were away from the sight of kitties ๐Ÿ™‚

As I mentioned above the DS was eventually replaced by the 3DS, which was an incredible handheld console. But that’s a story for another day…

Episode 1 Again

May 6th, 2024

I’ve written about Episode 1 before and I still unequivocally love the film. So last Fridays drive-in was very special:

This was the sixth time I saw the film in a ‘cinema’, and while I have watched it (from disc) more than once since the last time in 2012 I was overjoyed they brought it back again to the big screen to celebrate the 25 year anniversary:

Look at that beautiful new poster!

I discovered I still knew all the lines, all the characters names (yes even obscure ones like Sio Bibble and Oppo Rancisis) and all the shots and musical cues. It’s possible I know this film even more than any of the originals.

I was pleased to see how popular the screening was. This was at the bigger drive-in with four screens, and given the film was up against three new releases I was amazed that it was the second most popular. And it was clear that many of the other cars were full of super fans (like the guy above)! Particularly wonderful was the young kids – not even born when the recent trilogy was released! – dressed as Jedi and wielding their own tiny lightsabers.

We both loved watching the film again on the giant screen. Sitting in our car eating fries and candy made it even sweeter. I just read it was #2 at the box office this past weekend so the audience is clearly still there for there for big screen Star Wars rereleases. Let’s hope this isn’t the only one ๐Ÿ™‚

Letโ€™s Cook Omerice!

May 5th, 2024

Time for another Japanese candy food kit:

This is very much like the hamburger steak we made six months ago and preparation is very similar so I won’t show every step here.

Start with the (melon flavoured) beans:

And then prepare the (pudding flavoured) omelet section, which needed both microwaving and refrigeration:

And then the (chocolate flavoured) ‘rice’ portion:

Much like other similar kits we have made, the ‘rice’ is a strange breadlike material, very fluffy and to be honest not looking too much like rice!

By the way, ‘omerice’ is a Japanese dish where rice is topped with a runny – sometimes almost liquid – omelet. Usually the rice is plated first, then the omelet is made somewhat like a balloon of egg, placed on top, and then cut so it spills over and covers the rice. Here’s a typical photo:

It was time to complete our version. Even after 40 minutes of refrigeration the omelet was very runny and it was a challenge to get it atop the rice without losing its integrity:

Here’s the finished product:

Yes, it’s all candy. Melon, pudding, chocolate and strawberry flavoured candy! We of course tried it and…. it looked better than it tasted ๐Ÿ™‚

I’d say overall a success, although not as tasty or as much fun to make as the steak was.

Confucius Say

May 4th, 2024

A few years ago I bought a Japanese manga monthly and it came with a sheet of stickers of all 22 members of an idol group. They wereย  postage stamp size, and prime for adding to postcards. But they were also nearly identical, and it seemed a shame to separate them. A plan was hatched.

Rain Of Frogs had been a great success the previous year, but it had been a passive exercise on my brother’s behalf, and I think I needed to step things up a little. I’d had a few ideas in my mind, and the stickers made them all coalesce: I’d send him a puzzle across a series of postcards. Twenty-two, to be precise. And here is what he received:

There’s a message encoded in the cards, and my hope was he could decipher it. Two cards were sent at a time over about a month. There’s a staggering amount of potential combinations in which the cards have been arranged, so I encoded them with hints and icons. The hints themselves were of course received with each card, and the idea was as he got them he could use the hints to work out the correct order and therefore the message.

Some hint examples were:
– “Squirrels are next to cats.” (referring to the cat/squirrel stamps on some cards)
– “I’m in the first five positions.”
– “The colours of the letters are significant.
– “There is a typo: one O should be a U.” (this was unintentional).

It’s worth mentioning that the nature of the puzzle meant I had to devise a message of precisely 44 letters, which wasn’t at all easy. I didn’t want it to be grammatically strange, or use unfamiliar words, or be the sort of thing that wouldn’t jump out at him after he managed to decode portions of it. In the end I believe I chose something familiar – indeed expected – to make the task easier.

I started sending the cards in early September, and gave him until Thanksgiving to solve it for a prize (which was going to be a second wave of frog/toad cards). He didn’t solve it in time, so I extended the date and provided more hints. Eventually they became explicit to the point of almost giving things away: such as telling him that the colours of letters on adjacent cards matched (which massively reduces the potential combinations) or identifying certain two-card combinations. I issued an ultimate deadline of mid-January (2023). Alas, he failed to solve it.

Could you have solved it? Here’s the answer:

Confucios say Gary Oldman is younger than Gary Numan.

I thought it was easy ๐Ÿ™‚

Postcrossing Update

May 1st, 2024

It’s been over six months since I last posted about Postcrossing, so now seems like a good time for an update.

As you can see, I’ve now sent and received about 1150 card, and my monthly activity seems to be on the rise. I usually ‘do postcrossing’ every two weeks, writing about 10-20 cards every time. It’s time consuming and a bit expensive, but it’s always fun getting new cards in my post box.

Here’s the updates on the top sent and received countries where you can see just how much the service is dominated by Germany:

On the other end of the list, here are the countries to which I have only sent a single card: Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Cyprus, French Guiana, Guernsey, Jordan, Kosovo, Malta and Reunion. (I also sent a single card to South Africa but it never arrived.)

And here the countries from which I have only received a single card: Asland Islands, South Africa, Croatia, Denmark, Israel, Armenia, Bahamas, Guam, Morocco, Puerto Rico and Sri Lanka.

The above are the approximately 400 cards received since my last update. It’s always a surprise to see what sorts of cards people send – and what they write on the back – and they range across every possible type of design.

My profile says I like vintage cards and I get a lot of them (like the German one in the bottom left from the 60s) but I also get an increasing amount of cards with art or non location-specific themes, which is likely because tourist postcard printing is on the decline in most countries.

The one on the right above has an actual signature on it of a Czech actor/singer. The message on the back humorously describes her as ‘not famous’ but a quick Google search showed she was indeed in a few films. Apparently the sender got the card at a concert she was giving.

Here’s the most unusual card I received in the last six months:

Yes, that’s the front of the card! It was send from Canada. If you saw this, would you buy and mail it to someone? (I would!)

As for stamps, I recently changed my profile to say I like ‘unusual’ stamps and it seems to have had an effect on the amount of non-rectangular stamps I’ve been receiving:

Most are from Finland, and it seems their post office can’t not release unusually shaped stamps! The two at the top are particular notable: could the one on the left be the only instance of a Commodore 64 on a stamp? The bottom right image is of a lovely wax seal which survived the post completely intact. Maybe it’s time for me to dig out my wax seal kit again…

In other stamp news, I got one of the UK Bowie stamps, an unusual stamp of a singer (?) from Taiwan, and my first King Charles ‘machen’ stamp! The low denomination Canadian stamps are nice as well, especially since most stamps from that country are fairly mundane.

Russia and China also continued their silent war of who can release the largest stamps. Every one of the above is larger than any US stamp I have ever seen – in some cases two or three times larger. It may seem like China is winning from the above pic but take a look at this beauty:

Yes, that’s almost the entire back of the postcard with a single stamp on it! You can see they used the remaining 8 mm of space at left to write a short message and my address. This sender couldn’t have possibly known of my endless quest to fill the majority of the back of a card with stamps, and in one fell blow has surpassed my greatest effort. This is a card that will live in my memory forever!