Month in Review: December 2010
My final monthly blog of 2010 is a short one in terms of acquisitions. I'm afraid the winter months just aren't conducive to a collector like me - no carboots this time of year and I have little desire to wander the freezing streets in search of charity shops, pawn stores and other musty-smelling providers of vintage game content. However, the internet is alive and well and big name stores are throwing sales left, right and centre... so it's not all doom and gloom.
New Acquisitions
Three wildly different games from three different sources. Splinter Cell: Double Agent was a £3 bargain from CeX, adding to my recent acquisitions of Tom Clancy games. I picked up Crue Ball from The Entertainment Trader. Aside from some stubborn sticker residue on the case it's in near mint condition and satisfies two of my guitly pleasures: pinball video games and Motley Crue. Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 was from a charity shop. It's the Gold version with the waterworld add-on and, since I haven't played a theme park management sim since the first RT, it should be fun and challenging.
These were all picked up brand new and cheap from various internet outlets in the pre-Christmas rush. My 360 backlog increases every time I look, so it may be a while before I give some of these a spin. The Borderlands add-on pack cost less than £3 from Shopto and while I wish it included the General Knoxx content instead of the Underdome, I shan't complain. Borderlands was one of the most fun games I've played in years so I'll be installing that again soon.
Christmas Day itself provided no new gaming content, so of course I hit the sales as soon as possible! These were all picked up in high street stores in the days after Christmas at considerable discount. No More Heroes was just £2.97! The Arcade Hits Pack looks fun too: a brace of arcade rail shooters that, while obscure, are perfect Wii fodder.
I also picked up a pile of Steam games this month, thanks to their seasonal sale thing: Hammerfight, Uplink: Hacker Elite, Hacker Evolution, Twin Sector, System Protocol One, Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death, The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom, Machinarium, Puzzle Kingdoms and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Good times shall be had by all.
Year in Review: Acquisitions
2010 was a great year for my collection. In total I added a massive 444 games to the fold across 23 different platforms. That might seem like an excessive amount, but only 44 were brand new retail copies (9.91%), and they were mostly bought at discount. 30 were digital downloads (6.76%) and the rest were pre-owned games (83.3%), nearly all retro releases. The system I acquired the most games for was actually my PC with 110 new acquisitions. I actually made a handy graph to show it all, but Glitchspot keeps deleting it when I post... so I'll just write a list of all my systems by games acquired in 2010:
PC (inc. Steam) 110
ZX Spectrum 46
Mega Drive 43
PlayStation 2 41
PlayStation 32
Atari 2600 26
Xbox 360 (inc. XBLA) 25
NES 17
Channel F 15
Commodore 16/Plus4 12
DS 12
Famicom 12
Gamecube 12
Game Boy Advance 9
Mega CD 9
Wii 8
Master System 5
Nintendo 64 3
SNES 3
Game Boy 1
Game Boy Color 1
Game Gear 1
Game.com 1
It wasn't all software either. On the hardware front, I managed to snag myself seven new systems. Over the year I have acquired a Game Gear, Atari VCS (woody six-switcher), Mega Drive (Mark I), Mega CD (Mark I), Master System (Mark II), Dreamcast and an original model ZX Spectrum (with the rubber keyboard). I also picked up two 70's TV games.
So, out of it all, what were my favourite new acquisitions this year? It's a tough one to call, but I'm going to plump for my Mega Drive/Mega CD combo. Finally acquiring my own Mega Drive opened up a new realm for me in terms of retro playing and collecting as up until then I had been a bit of a Nintendo stalwart.
The 'Games Played' portion of my December blog will continue in another post, complete with year-end game-playing stats to satisfy the remotely curious.