Winning the lottery

Garage sale season is upon us and I'm haunted by memories of happy hunting in yesteryear where today I come up totally empty.  In a story I've doubtlessly recounted here many times, growing up garage sales were never a thing for me and my family... but when I met my wife I was sucked into their world of endless entertainment by touring outlets of secondhand goods, from garage sales to thrift stores to swap meets and flea markets.  Coming along for the ride, I had to spontaneously come up with a category of consumer goods to keep an eye open for just in case we stumbled across some, and naturally I gravitated to old video games.

Now it is not only garage sale season but the season of coordinated neighbourhood sales, where you can drive to a part of town and be assured of dozens of nearby sales offering their goods.  Neighbourhood sales we've visited year on year and have beloved memories of!  There are some eternal constants: always lots of women's clothing and children's clothing, none of it of interest to me... but the games are good, right?  It's been a couple months of garage sale season and I've gotta say by and large it seems that people are no longer selling video games at garage sales!  I might visit two dozen sales on a sunny Saturday and return home with just a handful of brain-stimulating Nintendo DS carts for seniors or a couple of PS4 sports titles, thin soup!  It stings when I have memories of visiting the same neighbourhood sales a decade ago and coming home with a complete Sega Dreamcast or a boxed VIC-20 for $10.

It's a weird thing returning to the same places across the years and ... well, some things change and some things don't.  (I remember seeing an NES on a thrift shop shelf for $100, outshining an entire cohort of unwanted $10 GameCubes... I used to visit Value Village basements to assemble NES and Sega Genesis units one component at a time!  It doesn't matter how many times I return to those stores, their shelves will never again boast those particular dispositions of goods.)  Back In The Day I think there was a greater likelihood of parents emptying the attic and liquidating their college-bound children's video game collections for pennies just to get the space back, whereas possibly with inflation games are now so expensive to buy and bizarrely retain their value so much better (especially Nintendo games, see below) that the buyers are more sensitive to recouping as much of their initial cost outlay as possible, ideally on Facebook Marketplace, priced according to recent eBay listings.  (Sometimes you do see these kinds of games cluelessly being sold at garage sales also, but ... you only achieve eBay sale prices by selling to the global pool of potential buyers, not the few dozen randos who stop by your garage sale.  Even on eBay, the buyers are only pocketing a portion of the revenues, the house takes a large cut and you're paying for shipping.  But don't get me started!)

Back to that Nintendo piece -- back when the Wii came out, my wife was briefly interested in exploring the exercise possibilities of Wii Fit and its Balance Board, but blanched with sticker shock.  As the PlayStation 3 had also recently hit the market, I was able to convince her that we could also enjoy substantial calorie-burning enjoyment along with profound pocketbook savings by instead buying a soon-to-be-discontinued PlayStation 2, a couple of dance mats and a DDR disc.  (We picked up two other games at steep fire-sale discounts, the all-time classic Shadow of the Colossus and the delightfully bizarre underdog Chulip.)  There were genuinely great savings to be had as one popular platform was eclipsed by its successor and was shown out the door with a celebration of sorts, inviting folks who had missed its entire commercial lifespan to take part at last for a hugely reduced ticket price.  (That PS2, which of course also played PS1 games, was an incredible investment, and over the years my collection of abundant and affordable (basically $5 or less) secondhand games for it has burgeoned to over 600.  They're not all winners, but how good does a game have to be to be worth at least $5?)

Compare and contrast: we came to the Nintendo Switch party years late, and its replacement the Switch 2 just having dropped, we thought we might fill in some gaps in my kids' Switch game collection for their birthdays.  My kids have enjoyed TOTK and Mario Kart 8 and Kirby & the Forgotten Land, Fae Farm, the untitled Goose game and Little Kitty, Big City... and logged many, many hours sucking the marrow out of Animal Crossing: New Horizons... but the killer app for any Nintendo console is its first-party Mario game, and we never yet got around to acquiring a copy of Super Mario Odyssey.  The game is now what, seven-odd years old, and we've reached the end of the line for its native platform, so surely we can pick it up for a song now as we eventually did with Super Mario Galaxy, right?  Buying it from a store today basically costs as much as it did eight years ago when it was brand new.  Maybe we can get a deal buying it digitally from the Nintendo e-storefront?  No, this old game long since paid off is still being sold at full price even though we give them a break on the costs of printing, packaging and shipping the media!  Surely we can get it on the cheap secondhand on Facebook Marketplace?  Stop me if you've heard this one before... It seems that my frugal collector's mantra of "don't collect for a system until the games become cheap" over the past couple of generations is now somehow translating to "don't collect games for Nintendo systems, they never become cheap."  We haven't quite yet arrived at the future where you don't buy games, only nontransferable licenses to play them -- but I am expecting its arrival every day, which will really bring this hobby of video game collecting to an ignominious end...

... which, somehow, brings us to the jaw-dropping photograph this blog post opens with.  Because I never actively began collecting console games until I very belatedly entered the "gainful employment and regular income" part of my life, basically by the time I had started the window had already closed on the likelihood of stumbling across any that I might have had childhood nostalgia for.  (Granted, as I never owned a console as a child, even this nostalgia is kind of false valour -- but I am able to resonate with kinship for generations of technology contemporary to my youth whether I got to experience them in their temporal context or otherwise.  After all, I saw them at friends' houses, I heard classmates exchanging tips on beating them in the schoolyard, and I saw the ads on TV.)  As I was travelling to the neighbourhood garage sale, an old friend was announcing it online, specifically noting to me that he had stumbled across some long-forgotten treasures in a dusty crawlspace while scouring his home for surplus housewares to sell.  Hilariously, my rounds brought me to his yard sale before the message ever had a chance to reach me.  Presented with his offerings, I gulped and concluded that basically I was going to have to pay him whatever he was asking, since some of these games are basically unobtainable without taking out a loan.

That guy!  He just wanted to be assured that these games would be appreciated and cherished, not crassly flipped for profit or more vulgarly tossed in the trash and consigned to the Atari E.T. graveyard.  Well, I can't make any promises about the Super Scope cart whose peripheral I am not in possession of, but between me, my kids and my annual vintage gaming parties, those top-tier JRPGs will absolutely be put through their paces and, basically, we will be making up for lost time with them.  (The Star Control 2 box is empty, but I can fill it with all my memories of playing the best computer game ever made!)  

In conclusion, it looks like I don't have to go to any more garage sales this summer, because I'm definitely not going to stumble across any further lots anywhere near remotely as amazing as this one!  (Heck, I'm only ever going to be seeing lots like this again by visiting estate sales of deceased collectors!)

Christmas 2024 - the evolution of vintage

I hope you all had a jolly holiday season and a happy new year, and once again we're back with me scratching my head and pondering some of my delightful and perplexing new/old technological goods received from my friends and loved ones (and, OK, let's be fair, sometimes I just buy them for myself when I see them for a good price.)

That's a fun haul from my family for Christmas!  Big items, little items, some to play, some to wear, some to hang as decor... let's dig into it a little more:

One thing for sure, this was the Christmas of Zelda.  At my latest Vintage Video Games Party in November, a recurring get-together over the past decade that has gradually morphed from a gathering of my own nostalgic peers and colleagues to one of my children's social circle, experiencing gaming history for the first time (... and their fathers, who somehow won the playdate chaperone lottery), we had a lot of diverse offerings available, but despite all the Pokemon and Katamari and Sonic and Mario and Pac-Man we demonstrated on all the different systems, all of the Nintendo machines (of which there are many) kept somehow gravitating back to Legend of Zelda titles from different generations.  It was the first time so many machines had experienced such a clean sweep from a single series.  And now it came home to me -- it is very, very extraordinary for us to be have games for a current-generation system (granted, only at a couple points in my life have I been in possession of a current-generation system, whose games you could just go to a regular shop and buy) (and granted, the Switch is kind of at the end of its lifespan, but it still has a lot of life left in it!) and in addition to the amazing Goose game I've been waiting years for a chance to get acquainted with and the post-apocalyptic Kirby game (a phrase that perhaps no one imagined would ever be written) here we're looking at two new Zelda titles, a Zelda Amiibo (a phenomenon that has hitherto only existed for me as a kind of abstract hypothetical) and, not pictured, another Zelda game delivered digitally.  My daughters absolutely had to have "the Zelda game where you finally get to play as Zelda" (well, it's about time), and Tears of the Kingdom, the digital purchase, is by all accounts a must-play.  I've only had the opportunity to put about a half-hour into the Goose game and haven't had a chance to even touch the other games, but it's very nice to have the option of playing them!  You will grow old and die waiting for used Nintendo games to lose enough value to become inexpensive secondhand pickups.  But wait, there's more!

Did somebody say "floppies"?  (No, nobody said "floppies".  Why would somebody say "floppies"?)  I remember when Risky Woods came out and had a demo circulating local BBSes from our friendly neighbourhood software corporation Electronic Arts whose campus I now drive past taking my daughter to school.  Megapede I know nothing about, but I guess I have what I need to get up to speed!  I love this flexible packaging style that would accommodate both of the major formats of floppy diskettes at that time, these 3.5 inch ones or the 5.25 ones you see below.  (And if I'm not happy with how well the packaging protects the media, now it seems I have several little diskette tupperware containers to shield them with!)

Well, isn't this a potentially fun stash!  I am not in possession of a any equipment that would have any chance of being able to successfully read them, but it certainly makes my nostalgia Spidey sense tingle!  Some of the earliest programs I have memories of running on our early PC were on this format of floppy -- Maniac Mansion, Hack, Deathtrack, the copy of Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game that my Grade 6 teacher pirated for me... and of course we were saving our course work in the Kerrisdale C64 lab on these kinds of disks.  I see here three disks of system software for an Atari 8-bit computer, plus course work for a 1984 Grade 11 computer science class saved to the Apple II format... I love the Wizard Computers branding for a local computer shop, and of course that disk and the ones above it clearly contain games games games!  So I will definitely need to do some kind of research needed to enable myself to experience the gaming glory of (checks notes) States & Capitols. 

My youngest daughter has taken a fancy to dancing games in the wake of her dad's DDR period 25 years ago, so I make an effort to pick those up whenever I see them secondhand even though it's not always clear what the common mechanism is for registering successful dance moves across so many different platforms!  These PS3 games are kind of filler but you know, all of the Traveller's Tale Lego games are solid, especially for family co-op play.  All I know about Boss Monster is that a) they nailed the NES Black Box art aesthetic and b) I have seen a suspicious number of sets for sale second-hand, leading me to believe... if the game is all that fun, why aren't its owners hanging on to it?  (But then that logic doesn't apply to Lego Batman, so maybe I am just being too picky.) 

It's a ... pillowcase?  This kind of stuff... well, I wrote one of the most popular posts on the past incarnation of this blog on that topic, they're called "realia" -- materials about games and gaming that aren't themselves games.  They're wonderful and terrible all at once, clearly I need more so I can wreck my life!

This has somehow fallen through a time hole from my Grade 4 school C64 computer lab into my home.  I should get it posted up immediately, how is it even possible my kids haven't already destroyed my machines without these ground rules clearly laying down the law?  

Here's the ordering information if you want to try to find a copy for yourself, but I can report that its website redirects to another business that, I imagine, ate the old one.  A pity, no home computer lab is complete without both this and a companion piece I just learned about!

I've been so immersed in old-computer-world headspace for the past 30 years I didn't think there was anything new under the sun, but here's something I'd never even imagined before -- a festive Christmas wreath fashioned from curly bundles of the little tractor-feed edges of dot matrix computer paper!  A pity it's so seasonal or I'd be tempted to hang it year-round!

Now that's it for the gifts but as around the holiday season I'm often passing through places where secondhand goods of interest to me are being sold while looking for secondhand goods of interest to others, I found some pickups I could use to wish myself a merry Christmas with:

To imagine all this time that my unboxed SNES cartridges have just been floating around loose... surely they (well, two of them) will be safer in these plastic sheathes, vouched for by the official Nintendo seal of quality!

When you think you've gotten to the end of your system's capabilities, why not expand them with some accessories and peripherals?  Yes, I want to sing into my Wii.  Yes, I absolutely want to play Dance Dance Revolution on my Wii... my fancy was caught by the series in the arcades when they were new, and since then I have acquired DDR games for all kinds of platforms but only ever been in possession of dance mats for the PlayStation 2 (which we bought, new, with the console in like its last week as an officially supported product, as a fitness aid, after my wife looked at the cost of a Wii Fit system with balance board ... speaking of which, I should put this fitness regimen to work at last!) which is good for the PS1/PS2 era DDR games, but leaves the rest of them only playable with joysticks, which really is a very different kind of experience.  Ah, and a PS2 remote control!  I always knew it could play DVDs, but I didn't realise it had a streamlined controller to emphasize that use.  (Now, what is it like playing regular PS2 games on the remote?)  I'm really not sure what the USB to HDMI adaptor is for but I look forward to finding out.

Yeah, it's a random assortment but it'll do: Conan is always a good time, Table Tennis gave us one of the greatest mouthfuls in video game history, Rogue Warrior is kind of "The Room" of video games, and I've already enjoyed a couple of hours with Portal 2... even luring my wife in with the voice casting of Stephen Merchant!  All that plus the Street Fighter spin-off movie about Chun-Li, in support of my aspirations to someday host a video game film festival, surely among the world's worst.

 

Can you believe that some people have a net zero video game philosophy, and clear out the old ones as new ones come in?  An old friend posted these up for grabs (and others, but they were grabbed) and, as I remarked, I would be honoured to play their old games on the old systems I inherited from them years ago.  Katamari is ageless!  Kirby?  That's gold!  And the rest of them?  Well... always glad to have.  Thank you very much!

Finally, one more random garage sale find.  How can you say no to him?  The Chessmaster is played by actor Will Hare, who died in 1997.  Chilling!  But he can still kick your ass at chess from beyond the grave.

Thanks for joining for another anachronistic blog post, likely see you again this time next year!

Christmas 2023: the last gasp?

This blog is basically sunsetted, but once a year I shake off the dust and leave it idle in a different position.  Every year since 2015, more or less, I like to take a look at video game and computing related materials that I was given for Christmas.  Over the years, there has been a natural rise and fall to this pattern -- initially, I received nothing in said categories, then as my preferences became known to generous persons, I started recieving more and more of it, as my benefactors would nab relevant specimens throughout the year while on expeditions to thrift stores, garage sales and flea markets.  (I was never the semi-pro thrifter that my gift-givers are, but even I have memories of gradually piecing together Nintendo NES and Sega Genesis units -- twice, after I donated the first units to Video In / VIVO's "Video Games Orgy" all-night vintage games parties! -- from pieces encountered by chance on the cheap in a Value Village basement, fingers crossed that they a) worked and b) wouldn't fail in such a way as to kill the rest of my setup!  But it has been many a long year since I have acquired any NES or Genesis parts from a baggie on a thrift shop wall -- you just don't see them anymore, those goods left their initial homes, went into thrift shops once already, and have long since disappeared down the black holes of collectors' vaults while the prices were good! ... and even if you do somehow stumble upon a missing period system component, now it is priced according to what those scarcity-surfing collectors are trying to sell it for on eBay.)  (I have related positions to share about people who sell used video games for eBay prices at garage sales , but this digression is already too long.)

I mentioned a rise and fall: first I was given some, then I was given a lot of it! -- my gift-givers found lots of it to give, and they were generous with it.  But in recent years, they have been giving less of it simply because they have been finding less of it to give.  No more years of "six copies of Donkey Kong", to be sure.  Up until recent generations there's been a naturally replenishing ecosystem of games and game materials in the secondhand market -- with every passing year, you would see fewer and fewer artifacts of the very earliest gaming systems (eg. I never saw anything Odyssey-generation at all, only items from the Atari 2600 / Intellivision / Colecovision years) but in their place you would see more and more artifacts from recent systems.  In short, PlayStation 2 came out and everyone couldn't be in a big enough hurry to throw out all their old PlayStation 1 junk at rock-bottom prices.  PlayStation 3 came out and ditto for PS2 goods.  But this slowed down a bit when we reached the PS4 and I think here at PS5 the wild flight has stalled, and maybe will crash.  Is this because people are hanging on to their games and systems for longer?  (Definitely "this looks like a game from ten years ago" is no longer the obstacle that it was when I was ten in 1989.)  Is it because collectors have driven up the resale value of old games?  (Partly, but that's just a wart on the back of -- ) Digital game distribution, I think, is the main driver of this imposed scarcity.

* (Also, due to pandemic years, less secondhand shopping has been going on overall.  But regardless:)

Growing up in the era of games that you went to the store and bought off the shelf, carefully brought home and whose fragile media you fed into your machine... if that was ever your standard experience, it necessarily feels timeless and, basically, instinctively correct.  Of course, in the era of games shipping on multiple discs and requiring gigs of patches before they're able to run at all, it's a silly and very time-consuming way of going about doing things.  Save yourself the trip to the store -- just buy the game online and have it install itself (and update itself) overnight without needing to worry about smudging the discs with your fingerprints.  If your machine breaks in a flood or house fire, you can buy a new console, log back in and download all of your games again without buying them a second time!  And as a funny side benefit, downloaded games are tied to one user's account and cannot be transfered to a new owner.  Magically, the secondhand market evaporates before your eyes!  I can't say that this phenomenon has inspired me to pay full price for new games (really, now that I have achieved peak game ownership, I have the least amount of game-playing time in my life, and with it, the lowest possible motivation ever to buy a new game at full price) but I'm sure that some corporate accountant is very satisfied with this closure of an imaginary loophole depriving their overlords of imaginary income.

In conclusion, as anticipated, these Christmas gift hauls are getting more and more meagre (no shade on the people giving to me!  I own over 1500 physical games, and probably that number again digitally -- if I die without ever being given another game, I will only have made a tiny dent in a minuscule portion of my collection!) and probably I will eventually need to stop making these posts annually because there won't be adequate grist for the mill.  That said, I've managed to get a few paragraphs of preamble rolling here and I haven't yet shared even a single photograph, so perhaps I'm mourning this tradition prematurely.

It's not a ton of games, I think maybe a dozen.  A game can also feel more underwhelming when you just have it on tiny SD card media rather than a big impressive box.  The NES carts were actually slated for my wife's resale concern when I noticed them and asked if I could cut out the middleman and acquire them without having to go through eBay.  (Grousing over receiving a dozen games seems a bit of sour grapes, but my being perhaps underwhelmed is more understandable when you understand that I have copies of most of the gifted games in my collection already.  I had to start keeping excellent records about what I'd already hoovered up to avoid spending more than I could afford on duplicate copies of games I already had.)

One mug has a pixelart-style snowman on it, and the stainless steel one is of a local company that boasted that it "built the Internet".  (As much as any contractor can be said to have done so, I looked them up and their claim appears to be reasonably valid.)  The microcomputer mug is period authentic (a spin on the AT&T advertising slogan "Reach Out And Touch Someone", in use from 1971-79) and part of a line of low-effort products their manufacturer cynically threw at the wall during the microcomputer boom to see if anything stuck, then moved on from.

"But wait," my wife said, "I forgot, I got a box of Skylanders in the garage for you!"  I have a love/hate relationship with these little buggers -- I love the developers Toys for Bob, and the "use your toy to unlock content in the game" conceit is a kind of genius, but there's just not that much fun to be had there in the games themself, and these toys were never cheap -- acquiring them by the pound makes me feel for the families who originally shelled out hundreds of dollars for these grim plastic gremlins.  It feels predatory, even if the intended prey are whales who can afford to buy a complete collection of dolls so as to experience the complete game content.  Maybe they just hit home a little too hard for the collector.

Oh, hey, an NES Classic Edition!  Er, NES Mini.  Uhh, some clone or knockoff of the officially licensed miniature NES emulator for nostalgic nerds, without the ability to sideload your own roms into it.  But that's fine, let's see what it comes with on-board...

620 in one, you say!  There only were ever 677 games released to the North American market, so if legit and not filled with garbage romhacks, this would constitute a pretty complete collection!  But that's a big "if".  Hey, Super Mario Bros. 6, that's my favorite one in the series!  Let's go check it out!

Oh yeah, there's that classic start screen I'll never forget!  I recall this one took some liberties with the classic platformer gameplay... spoiler warning, it's a reskinned Tiny Toons game with Mario sprites.  That's rather the opposite of what I was hoping for.

Then again... when will I ever get another opportunity to play Angry Birds on the NES? Apparently this port exists exclusively in this marginal ecosystem, possibly further research is warranted.  But since it's recent nonsense rather than classic, it doesn't have the warm fuzzy glow about it that Action 52 and the Cheetahmen do.  (It may look like it does, but that's just my combination of a bad display and a lousy camera.)

My kids are big fans of the dance genre of video games, getting you moving your body in sync to the action on the screen -- sometimes to a soundtrack recent enough that its selections have actually been experienced as songs out in the world independent of video games!  So in a sense there are gifts from me to them rather than gifts for me... but they are new to our household.  (Unfortunately, our rumpus room layout is just a little too shallow to make the most of Kinect sensor technology, but they still get a lot of fun out of putting it through its paces!  I was really excited to see where this tech was going to go with the next generation once I got my hands on an Xbox One and its respective camera, only to be very disappointed in the future we ended up with once I got caught up with the rest of the world.  Consequently of all the generations of Xbox we have on tap, the Xbox 360 retains its position of primacy on the main television's HDMI splitter.)

Yeah, he's just going to pretend that he didn't just photograph that giant Skylanders strategy guide twice.  I guess if you're going to have all those toys stinking up the room, you may as well have some of the literature needed to sort out which sets they belong to.  But really Compute's unauthorized 1990 guide to defeating the first two NES Legend of Zelda cartridges is quite a bit more exciting.  Speaking of exciting, I didn't even know that the PlayStation 2 had a remote control!  But what could actually be more exciting than a mystery floppy diskette?  That's right, nothing is more exciting than that.  And someday, when I find my USB disc drive, I'll have a report to make!

Happy holidays 2023, here's hoping that 2024 has some fun in store!

Video games for Christmas and represented at the local drugstore

Many years (2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 ... 2022) I make an annual blog post about all the nutty and wild antique and near-contemporary video games and vintage computing kit I'm given for Christmas, but three Christmases into a pandemic (this one the most lethal of the three thus far!) my extended family of secondhand shoppers strangely still don't feel safe venturing out into their beloved flea markets, garage sales, thrift stores etc. as they did up through 2019.  So while the "here you go, 18 pairs of tube socks" portion of my Christmas haul remains constant, this fun, bloggable segment has been wildly diminishing.  (That's fine, I have more than enough games to last me through the rest of my natural lifespan (indeed, I made $400 over the holidays selling unwanted duplicates cluttering up my games shelf!), it's just a curious transition to observe, a thriving ecosystem dwindling to a blasted heath.)

As I  move through the world, when I see games I don't yet have at the right price point (mine is $5), I hoover them up, so I did well enough for myself even if I'm just filling gaps in the collection rather than scoring hotly-sought titles I've been wating years to try out.  So all of these pictured games (and the Singstar microphone, my youngest kid is into singing -- they actually received a dedicated karaoke station for Xmas, but this is more along those lines) I bought for myself.  So in the opening photo here all I was given over the holidays was the Pac-Man lamp and the 10-in-1 Atari TV game (these are all a little underwhelming, this one especially in light of the recent release of the Atari 50 collection, but it's a convenient way to play a little 2600 Adventure or Missile Command when you're in the mood!  I gather these kinds of Plug N Play TV Games are themselves becoming more collectable, so ... OK no, I'm not going to be actively seeking them out anytime soon.  But I won't snobbishly spurn them!)

You don't get a good look at the games in the opening photo and that's just fine, there's nothing there that would excite anybody.  But if you have kids in the house, having an unpretentious cooking simulator or horseback riding game at your disposal can be just the thing to give you a quiet afternoon!  (I'm pretty sure however that whoever paid $30 for that Miniclip game got a bad deal.  I think these were a quarter each if I bought ten of them, the hard part was finding a tenth game on the shelf that wasn't just an empty case, a plague of thrifters.  NHL 09 is I guess the middle ground between a wanted game and an empty case, it turns out.)

(I don't even want a quiet afternoon if we can ideally find a way to make games a family activity, something difficult to achieve when the games are played at the Teletubbies level.  I was hoping to get my kids through Monkey Island 2 over the holidays, freeing me up to go out and buy the recent sequel, knowing that we'd all be up to speed, but ... it's a long game!)

OK, I've had my N64 long enough, time for me to start winning its games!  I can't pass up these thrift store finds at thrift store prices.  There's a whole other blog post I could make about the literary niche carved out by Jeff Rovin in the '80s, writing encyclopedias about movie monsters and the first major manuals about how to defeat NES games.  Could he have had the best career in history?  (But then there was that weird episode where he appeared on TV character assassinating Hillary during the closing days of the Trump campaign, so maybe not.  BUT I digress...)

A friend stopped by over the holidays and bequeathed a small wrapped package to me.  I said "hm, about the size of an Atari 2600 cart, but I hear things moving around inside, it must be chocolates.  Thanks, here are some chocolates for you, too!"  Only later did I open it and find these NES cart-themed coasters -- for people who are still kids at heart, but old enough to not want water stains on their hardwood tables.  (Emphasis is on the distinctive NES "Black Box" art, intended to show buyers what they'd be seeing on the screen, as opposed to Atari 2600 box art which had to lean heavily on misleading "here's what you should be seeing in your imagination while you're playing, which will look like three squares on the screen" imagery.)  I think this was peak game gift this year, hats off!  Sorry for the cruddy photography -- the camera on my phone smashed its glass and basically I have smartphone astigmatism now.  But wait, he's already done tabulating his gift haul and yet there's still quite a bit more to the post yet to go, what's up here?

While I was attempting to source some unrelated goods at London Drugs, I like to amuse myself by sliding down the toy aisle and peep in on just how many of the toy lines of my youth are still staggering along on fumes today.  I also like to investigate just how completely video games are infiltrating even the lowest echelons of the toy biz, and the answer this year seems to be impressively a lot!

This specimen above seems like a misstep on a few levels.  You can tell yourself that everything of a certain vintage is necessarily classic and in demand and children of all ages will thrill to it, but with the exception of Nintendo and a couple of other companies with deep histories and long memories (maybe Capcom and Konami?) I think most video game properties of the early '80s vintage are just old and played-out, unlikely to delight any child receiving its mascot in stuffed form in their stocking  Yes, Namco, Pac-Man has "got it".  But if you genuinely think that Galaga's Gyaraga has it too, you've drunk the Kool-Aid.  (I prodded in vain trying to determine what kinds of noises the "Talking Plush"es made, presumably some classic sound fx.)

Sonic the Hedgehog is of course evergreen, and probably would be appreciated by people young enough to know him primarily as a movie star, who might never have been alive when a Sonic game worth playing was on store shelves!  (Just kidding, that's an old Sega curse that I understand dissipated at last with the release of Sonic Mania six years ago.  OK, I suppose many of those youths actually have spent their entire lives in a world without that curse remaining in effect.  Time marches on!)

Pokemon also is one of those concerns that just gets more and more valuable over the years, making even some rather dry stationary supplies worth stocking in the toy aisle.  (no, Einstein, that must be a binder specifically for storing your Pokemon trading cards in for the IRL card game based on the video game series!)

Feels like Minecraft merch will be with us always, returning on Microsoft's investment of billions, but let this be a cautionary tale to you to not succumb to hubris: it doesn't feel like that long ago that Angry Birds was in that boat too, but today despite their, uh, slingshotting to the big screen, their assorted angry avian mascots go entirely unrepresented in today's toy aisle.  

Now this is where the action's at!  I don't know if Fortnite is the happening-est, most in-demand brand for Christmas presents this year, but definitely it's the one the store was keenest to shove the widest variety of merchandise down your throat about.  (That's a very special sentence structure there, Rowan!)

The Wall Of Fortnite, the single game most represented here, reminds me of a very special One Minute Play in one of my early visits to the ArtsWells Festival, where different members of the Victoria Poetry Slam community conducted a brief but enthusiastic conversation consisting entirely of the word "Facebook" in different inflections.  Truly these shelves are prepared to vend a Fortnite tie-in for every season.  It's a wild culmination of the company I still mentally file as the ZZT / Jill of the Jungle / Jazz Jackrabbit concern.  First impressions are tenacious!

I don't even know what these are -- handholds you attach to your phone to make it feel more like a game controller? -- but I briefly saw the word "Fortnite" on the packaging and lumped it in here.

I must confess I was not expecting to see Five Nights At Freddy's served up to kids for Christmas but then perhaps the little ones today are made of sterner stuff than I was.

And of course, the unavoidable GOAT OG triumphant video game mascots, now and forever, who proceed to do a victory lap of sorts.

Fortnite may be hot stuff today, but you don't see them effortlessly achieving synergy with the world's biggest toy brand.  Me, I'm not sold on the Super Mario Lego, but I can report that it excites a lot of people!

Here's a closer look at the pouches.  Does this one bag really contain everything needed to make all of those characters?  29 pieces, 10 characters, averaging ... 2.9 pieces per character?  Some of the little guys are variations on a theme, perhaps the sum of the pieces provided allows you to reproduce all configurations depicted here, but not all of them simultaneously?  My cynical first impression was that this was a gatcha pouch that would include only one of the enemies (or, er, penguins) pictured, but I can't see anything here that would require the 29 included pieces indicated on the packaging.

Look out, Sonic, Mario is coming for your crown in the "blue action figures sold at London Drugs" category.

Are these just playsets or does the "Link System" denote greater gameplay possibilities?  (If so, I suspect the possibility is on the "this set clicks together with other sets" end of the spectrum rather than the Amiibo end.  (Ok, I did the heavy lifting and Googled it.  Seems that the extent of the Link System is that the pieces are compatible with the different sets?)

More of the same, but it does raise the question of what effect Mario's position has on Boo's ability to approach when pointed at 90 degrees away from him, still able to surveil the ghost out of one eye.  (This question has almost certainly been addressed since sometime back in the N64 days, but darned if my tired noggin retains anything anymore.)

More of these Link System playsets, these ones on the grander side.  The breathless descriptors hint at some actual gameplay with these ones!  But this wraps up our extended trip to the Mushroom Kingdom in the toy aisle.  Thank you, Mario, but our princess is in another castle!

One more callback to one of the most classic titles of electronic gaming -- I wasn't able to confirm for certain, but the sense my brain is making of what my eyes are telling it is that this is a new, unlicensed form factor for Ralph Baer's 1978 memory game Simon!

Here's an overtime bonus: goods found in the toy section that are not licensed or cloned from classic video games, but whose brands could not exist in their specific forms without ... Internet culture, broadly speaking.  Measuring the sprawl of Internet culture into the mainstream culture, if you will.  Imagine a child raised in a home without a computer, trying to make sense of the invisible realm of cyberspace from these brief and contextless glimpses through the veil.  In this case I have learned that "LOL" does not stand here for "Laughing Out Loud" (or even "Lots of Love") but rather "Lil Outrageous Littles", a line of gatcha dolls.  What do they have to do with headphones?  (Probably about as much as Dr. Dre does.)

OK, what's an Oh! my GIF?  (I'm of a very narrow demographic segement whose mind always goes to the Unisys patent fiasco where GIFs are concerned, but surely they were not involved here.)  So, if I have this right, an Oh! my GIF is a little ... toy... that includes a code that you can scan with your phone, allowing you to use a digital version of the toy in your personal correspondence.  Would you pay $15 for three of them when there are plenty of emoji you aren't using for free?  Unclear.

FGTeeV?  WTF?  It seems the toy aisle here is being infected by the world of influencers, judging from the logo ones involved in the games sphere: it turns out the abbreviation is short for The Family Gaming Team, a popular YouTube games review channel.  How you get dozens of characters and three "season"s out of game review videos is a question I would have to do a lot of watching to achieve a better understanding of, but you know what... I'm good with what I have already learned, thanks.

Hey, I'm a Digi-Dood!  But on first glance I'm sure I already know this guy, surely it's just an unlicensed Tamagotchi clone, a throwback to that toy's 1996 launch, now styled as a "virtual reality pet".

Pinkfong is selling Baby Shark toys?  Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Tragically, this song remains the number one YouTube video by a wide margin (even if it were toppled, #2 is "Despacito", so out of the frying pan, into the fire), so we are likely to be stuck with it for years yet to come.

University games: "WTF" does not stand for "What The Fish".  WTF!  Such a weird footing to make the basis for your game.

Ok, that's it for this year's holiday roundup post!  And, who knows, that may the only post this blog sees all year, we'll see how it goes.  (I know you were all curious to see how the Pac-Man lamp held up in the dark.  Not too shabby, but I instinctively bristle at devices that only run off of batteries -- though with LEDs, probably it lasts for a good long while.  If they'd really been committed to the bit, this lamp would reverse the situation when flipped around, turning into a power pill'd Pac-Man chasing three frightened blue ghosts, but then it probably would have cost a couple dollars more.)