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.
