Another year, more video game swag as Christmas presents for the video game fiend in every family. Typically my retired MIL, who under ordinary circumstances habitually haunts such venues of secondhand commerce as thrift shops, garage sales and flea markets, yields a massive haul of genuinely vintage and dubiously curated (heh, remember back in 2016 when I received seven Donkey Kong cartridges?) game goodies. This year the sweep was markedly subtler, as this entire field of inquiry was dramatically scaled back by nearly an entire year of lockdown and Coronavirus precaution. But she still managed to find some games for me in the first couple of months before the hammer fell, surely for a deal because... I sure hope she didn't pay the going rate for those old GameCube titles, they're really on the collectability upswing again!
Other lots there include a 3-D printed StarMan from a family friend (that my youngest daughter immediately claimed as her own), a charmingly irritating noisemaking 1-UP light, a mini 100-in-one arcade cabinet that manages to be a miracle of technology while eschewing licensing any old games anyone might actually want to play (despite which, my kids find it engrossing enough. It might warrant a post of its own, appears to be an NES-on-a-chip full of bespoke simple NES programs that just don't happen to be any fun... tragically, no apparent way to backdoor it and introduce worthwhile historic game ROMs), and a real curio: Pac-man ghost band-aids! I don't think a band-aid will help you at that point! Or maybe it just signifies feeling wary of the source of the injury. (Of course, Pac-Man ghosts being what they are, in a few moments you should be able to change direction and resume being the threat rather than the threatened. But in any case, I assume you "get it", let's move on.)
A cautionary tale: never forget to confirm that the contents of the box match the outside of the box! But I'm sure that this is just as fun as Mario Party 8, right?
Here was a thoughtful present from my wife, who I gave roughly her weight in chocolate and tea. But wtf is Silver Tree doing making new "retro" ornaments in the vague shapes of nostalgic '80s microcomputers? Don't Ready Player One me, I don't like the feeling of being a valuable targeted market segment! These things are far more charming when they're authentic period pieces, minting tchotchkes to appease me is creepy!
When I was a kid, after school we'd hit the corner store and have to make a decision whether we'd spend our quarters on penny candy or arcade machines. No longer do you have to choose, apparently, as video game brands and the iconic nostalgic design of their hardware peripherals are now a suitable vessel for the conveyance of sugar! See above and below.
And that's where the trail ran cold, a dozen games, a couple decorations and some candy. But hold on to your hats, kids, people start cleaning up and clearing things out to make room for unwrapped Christmas presents and one man's trash...
Sweet hatchi matchi, that's a box of pure gold there! The onetime game purveyor of the FuzzNet OldWarez CD is no stranger to distributing video games, but that was a long time ago! Sir, I salute you. (He also threw in a pile of great DVDs for my kids to enjoy down the road. It's like I got two Christmases! Except...)
That's right, three Christmases! I've been waiting A Long Time to try some of these titles -- the big problem with Nintendo games, especially the first-party ones, is waiting for the secondhand price to dip to reasonable levels. In many cases, they never enter that zone! Typically you only see lots like this -- juicy stacks of desirable games that haven't been pieced out to ebay or Craigslist collectors -- come available when youth leave the nest and go off to college, and their parents remodel the old rec room. In this case I imagine that my other Very Generous Friend upgraded to a Switch sometime this year (I'll be getting on that train no doubt in about a decade). Don't tell her, but somehow poetically, I actually bought my WiiU console used from her ex-husband, so there's something cosmic going on here that I'm not going to explore further. Ironically, her son is now getting interested in collecting the classic games of his youth -- hotly hyped PlayStation 2 era (!) discs. (I think I still have their PS2 and several of their PS2 games that I inherited about three generations ago. Curiously, none of the games that they actually had are titles on his hitlist. The nostalgia grass is always greener on the side of someone else's collection!)
So all in all, thanks to two friends trying to keep their living spaces from becoming the vintage computing museums mine is destined to wind up as, my somewhat relatively meagre stocking stuff (due to pandemic circumstances, I'm very understanding besides which, with over a thousand games on media... no shortage of games to play!) ended up a massive and gnarly Christmas-season haul, tempered only by a growing awareness that as we approach the streaming gaming horizon and the end of games on physical media, the hobby overall is in its dusk. My friend's son's son will almost certainly not collect PlayStation 7 discs in the year 2040. But then what primary documents will he have to vlog about, game trailers and press releases? Hm, maybe not a bad idea...
Anyway, until next year, game on!
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