My Collection: PlayStation Vita

March 17th, 2024

Sony released the Vita in Japan in 2011, and about a year later in the USA. It wasn’t an immediate success, with consumers mostly preferring the cheaper cost and larger game library of the 3DS. I didn’t get mine until 2014, by which time it had already stalled commercially.

It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the system, and to this day it remains my favourite of all the Sony consoles. The beautiful OLED screen was ahead of its time, and the ergonomics of the device made it a joy to play even for long periods.

Foremost for me were the games. By this time the Vita had been abandoned by most western developers, and in particular the big-name AAA games were nonexistent on the device. It had become an enthusiasts machine, with a notable abundance of Japanese RPGs, visual novels and quirky indie games. As a big fan of JRPGs I went all-in, and the Vita become my foremost handheld for many years.

The vita was a cartridge based system, and the carts are very similar in size to Switch cartridges. There was no region lock, so you could buy games from any country and they worked fine.

The Vita supported trophies as well – which I enjoyed at the time – and had a robust digital store with lots of available software. It was the first handheld with a seamless online experience which worked well, and certain games were even better with online features.

The screen looks much better than these photos suggest: very bright and high resolution with ink-dark blacks. It was leagues better than the 3DS and to this day remains the best screen on any handheld (excluding phones and the OLED Switch). Even now when I fired it up after five years for a quick play I was very impressed with the screen quality.

In total – including digital games – I have 90 games for the system. Many are shown above, but I also have several collectors editions:

And promos (thanks to AW for these):

Notable games include two Vanillaware games, not the least of which – Dragon’s Crown – is one of my favourite games of all time:

The Vita was also the home of the Toukiden series, which in my opinion is the closest a clone has come to actually beating Monster Hunter. My save files for these three games exceed 500 hours in total:

I’ve also got an abundance of strange ‘girl games’ like these:

I have virtually no memory of even playing some of the above, and the Vita had loads of similar titles. Most are action or RPG games featuring a cast of cute anime girls. Often the gameplay took a backseat to the graphics, and the games were fun enough but hardly memorable.

As mentioned the Vita was regionless, but the majority of good games got a US release, so I didn’t buy too many Japanese games. Notable among my small collection is the Berserk ‘musou’ game which is exceptional and has extremely impressive bullet-hell-like boss fights, which is strange indeed for a 3rd person action game!

I have one Vita game that I never opened. I had already bought and played the game digitally, so when I bought the box set I never bothered opening it.

I also bought the above memory stick when it became clear the systems life was nearing its end. This was late in 2018, and the last game I purchased was in January 2019 during a trip to Japan.

By then the Vita was essentially a retired system. In March 2019 Sony announced they had stopped making the system, and support of the online store was cut back in early 2021. No successor was announced, and with the end of the Vita Sony left the handheld market for good.

While a few of my games are worth more than I paid, on the whole it’s not a system with a great deal of value and I have no plans to sell my collection. I own many great games I’d love to replay, and one day I hope to do just that!

My Collections

March 17th, 2024

For over ten years now, I’ve been making periodic posts about my game collection. This update indexes all those posts. Some are yet to come, and will be updated with links when I get to them.

Note that as of this index, most of the collections I’ve posted about over the years have been sold. Those that I no longer own have been identified.

My Collection: NES (sold)
My Collection: SNES (sold)
My Collection: Gameboy (sold)
My Collection: GBA (sold)
My Collection: Virtual Boy
My Collection: Pokemon Mini
My Collection: N64 (sold)
My Collection: Gamecube (sold)
My Collection: DS (sold)
My Collection: 3DS
My Collection: Wii & WiiU (sold)
My Collection: Switch

My Collection: Genesis (sold)
My Collection: Game Gear (sold)
My Collection: Saturn (sold)
My Collection: Dreamcast (sold)

My Collection: PS1 (sold)
My Collection: PS2 (sold)
My Collection: PSP (sold)
My Collection: PS3 & PS4 (sold)
My Collection: PS Vita (sold)

My Collection: XBox (sold)

My Collection: Wonderswan

My Collection: Neo-Geo Pocket Color

Golden Stamp Books

March 14th, 2024

Some months ago I purchased this for only $3.50 at a local antique store:

This was quite a find, not only because it’s Australian, but because I owned this exact book in my youth!

It’s a picture book of reptiles that came with a sheet of gummed stamps. The lucky owner would separate the stamps and stick them into each entry like they were putting a postage stamp on a postcard. The stamps in my copy have been stuck, but the back cover shows what the unused sheets would have looked like:

And here’s the charming instructions for the reader:

The book is 48 pages long, almost all of which are dedicated to a single animal with a picture and several interesting paragraphs. As a child I would have loved this. All the famous and well-known reptiles are included, like crocodiles, goannas and this old favourite:

But the true wonder of this book is that it also includes many lesser known – and possibly even nigh-unknown – beasts such as the Tryon Gecko, Master’s Snake and the good old Scrub Mullet:

I can vividly remember in the schoolyard, when my lesser-educated peers were yapping on about crocodiles and frilled lizards and I started dropping facts about Curl Snakes, Dtella Geckos and Krefft’s Tortoises! Immediately they recognized a master herpetologist in their midst, and rightly admired me for my knowledge πŸ™‚

This book was first published in 1973, but I would have of course got it years later. I had other titles as well. I don’t remember exactly which ones, but I believe I had at least a sea life one and one about fossils or minerals. A quick search online reveals that many titles in the series were printed well into the 1980s. Here’s a selection:

The Golden Stamp Book series was popular not just in Oz but also in the USA and England, and no doubt other countries as well. Educational, fun, and lovely to look at: these were great books to have when we were kids πŸ™‚

Star Destroyer

March 10th, 2024

Yesterday I made this Star Destroyer:

It’s a cardboard model kit, and only cost $20. The reviews were good and I was looking forward to seeing what it looked like assembled.

First impressions are excellent. A 30 page manual, 16 ‘runners’ with over 200 pieces printed on thick card that punched out easily. It even comes with glue that the manual says is only required if the connections were loose.

The print detail was excellent, and the pieces are clearly marked making assembly – at least initially – fairly easy. I could have done without punching out the hundreds of tiny slots though!

It’s a massive model, and very sturdy. Assembly up until the point in the above pic wasn’t too difficult, but after this things changed a lot. Putting the main hull pieces onto the superstructure was an exercise in frustration, since it was extremely difficult getting the tabs lined up.

The hinged pieces I think could have been better designed as well. Far too often the print separated from the backing revealing the cardboard as seen above. I probably could have fixed these easily with a bit of glue, but I didn’t care enough.

The spherical parts were almost impossible to correctly assemble. The design of these overall was dubious, and they were very loose even when I attempted to glue them. In the end I just left them as you see above.

The whole kit took me about 4 hours, and here’s the finished model:

At first glance it looks great, and as I said with a bit of extra work it could have been near perfect. I think this is a kit that shouldn’t be rushed (which I did), and would look very nice if every part was assembled with great care. That said it’s almost too big: where would one display this?!

I found it fit very nicely – after some rigorous disassembly – in the recycling bin πŸ™‚

Overall I’ll give this a thumbs up despite the epilogue above, since I think the design is fundamentally strong and because I have another by the same company that I have high hopes for…

WcDonalds

March 9th, 2024

Watch enough anime or read enough manga and you’ll eventually come upon a scene where the characters eat at a fast food joint often called WcDonalds:

The almost-but-not-quite name of these restaurants is of course to avoid copyright, while telling viewers that they’re eating at McDonalds. It’s become somewhat of a trope these days, and apparently a version of WcDonalds appears in over 60 manga or anime series.

McDonald’s itself has embraced anime for several Japanese TV commercials, and of course these use the real name of the restaurant:

But now McDonalds has gone one step further, and actually embraced the WcDonalds name. Stores in America are right now participating in a month-long WcDonalds event where much of the food packaging and in-store branding (posters, ordering kiosks, even uniforms) now display a large yellow W in place of the familiar M:

Here’s all four sides of the bag you get when you order takeout during the event:

There’s a website (WcDonalds.com) where you can read manga and watch anime based around the characters on the bags. You need the QR code from the bag to unlock these, so here it is:

The manga and anime are cute enough for corporate advertising, but predictably tame. Here’s a panel from the latest one about two teenagers falling in love while sharing WcDonalds:

Disappointingly, the event is limited to branding and the manga/anime. There’s no burgers, toys, or anything to collect. Surely they could have made a ‘Big Wac’ or something? The only actual menu item that is limited to the event is this nugget sauce, which I’m told isn’t fantastic:

A true crime is the lack of any Ronald WcDonald character. I know they’ve turned their back on the world’s favourite clown but surely his bizarro-world brother could have made a triumphant return just for this?

This event is USA-only now but will apparently happen in 30 other countries as well. While they’ve obviously put a lot of effort into it (an actual WcDonalds store is opening for a limited time in LA!) I feel there’s potential for even more. Let’s hope it’s a success and we see Super Saiyan WcDonalds in the future!