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.
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!
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