Greetings! My "Christmas haul" posts were never a very popular category of post I made here up at this blog, but as they gradually approach 50% of its semiannual entries, they are really dominating the second place on the podium. In any event, howdy! It's been a while! I'm now basically too occupied in my spare time, consumed with the business of sharing curated computer art over social media, to blog about it here. (It's a really unfair split, since my involvement with a great deal of the work I wind up sharing began as unfinished blog posts here. I could just advise you to hitch your wagon to the new caravan, but I know it's not the same to you or your RSS reader.) Anyhow, mea culpa, I digress -- I'm derailing this post before it even gets started, an unhelpful trick. Hey, look at this! The mug is in the shape of a beige desktop computer, possibly one whose main word processor is WordPerfect, and its irregular form makes the interior very difficult to effectively clean! (This selfie is posed, but I couldn't bring myself to drink -- no matter how many times I run it through the dishwasher, I keep winding up with floaties! Eugh!!!)
There was actually a good long moment during our extended family Christmas Day gathering where I quietly concluded to myself, after a frenzy of gift revelation, that my decade-long window of video game indulgence seemed to have closed, represented only by the book seen here (a distinctly mixed bag -- invite Los Angeles lowbrow artists circa 2005 to submit artworks on video game themes and stand back! Steve Purcell's Sinistar stood out however 8)... the rest of my spoils seemed to have landed in the welcomed but practical category of snacks, socks and the like. But I had forgotten the way my mother-in-law categorizes different kinds of presents for different stages of the unwrapping pageant, and happily it turns out I still had plenty of games ahead of me! Here's a broad overview of the goodies I had awaiting me. Only games this time, no consoles -- which is fine, I have all the consoles I need that are likely to be encountered in working condition secondhand -- and in manageable lots. No "five identical Donkey Kong cartridges" this year, which is funny... once!
No reasonably sane person categorizes Choose Your Own Adventures with video games except for me -- in my case, gamebooks are probably what I used as a home video gaming substitute back in the '80s. Plenty of duplicates with games I already own, but it's the thought that counts. Will Clue the video game be any more fun than Clue the boardgame? I hope so!
Sure, you may have a Sonic the Hedgehog cartridge and might not see the benefit in having another... but do you have a Sonic the Hedgehog cartridge in a generic replacement Genesis cart box complete with Sonic the Hedgehog 2 manual?
The Xbox One games are interesting, as for about nine months, since relieving a friend of his WiiU, I'd finally been caught up with ownership of a suitable console for just about every game I own (not quite true, I have a few unplayable N-Gage and PSP games, but as a rule of thumb I do not collect that which I am not suitably equipped to play.) Now I once again have games for a machine I may not own for years yet to come! My estimate is that I wind up owning every machine about a dozen years after its release, so that means I may wind up with the means of playing these discs in about five years. We'll see! Pictionary for the NES is renowned for having a soundtrack that punches above its weight class, but I imagine things have evened out since then.
And the "So, I hear you briefly had, then divested yourself of, a Nintendo DS" starter pack: a Mario game, a Brain Age game, a High School Musical game (the sports game weed choking thrift store bins of the 21st century) and a licensed game from a movie you've never heard of! Ah well, you can't complain. Did I somehow leave out the NES carts completely? Well, Super Mario / Duck Hunt is a known quantity, and as for Bart Vs. the Space Mutants... Simpsons video games always felt like they'd be a better fit than they actually were. The Konami arcade version hit the sweet spot, but that spot wasn't what Acclaim was targeting in its licensed NES carts.
Bonus gaminalia: everyone in the house knows how much I love Katamari Damacy (A: A Lot) and so here's a little Sisyphean sculpture of the prince toiling away at his cosmic task... also a little Super Mario Bros 3. cross-stitch piece, because... hey, why not? I only take out the vintage gaming decor for my vintage gaming parties twice a year, but it stays up for a few days while the odds of a given game getting any airtime, with a collection of over a thousand pieces, is very slim... so we likely actually get more mileage out of the set dressing! The last Big Pixels party is two months behind us, meaning we have another four or five before all the dusty 8-bit machines of yore are exhumed from their rubbermaid tombs and we actually get a chance to try out some of these "new" (to me) specimens on their corresponding vintage hardware. But will I be posting here again before then? Unclear... well, odds are I will at least be doing another Star Wars textmode art roundup, then who knows 8) See you later!
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