Month in Review: July 2010
July turned out to be quite a varied month in terms of game acquisitions. Some old, a few new, covering thirteen (yes, thirteen) different gaming platforms. Oh, and I hit a pretty big collection milestone too.
New Acquisitions
A small haul from the first and only carboot I attended this month, as every other weekend since the beginning of July has been a complete washout. Oh well, at least it's saving me some cash. I upgraded my PC copy of Resident Evil 3 to a mint big box version, which is good, and I also grabbed a real bargain with the complete C&C collection. I might fire up the original Red Alert soon; it was always a favourite back when I used to play a lot of RTS games. The GBC game is Dropzone, in case you can't make it out.
A decent bundle of Mega Drive games from eBay. I caught this in the closing minutes of the auction and ended up paying just over £11 for the lot. Not bad, except that they are all missing the manuals. It wasn't specified in the auction listing, but as there wasn't time to contact the seller for clarification, I took a gamble. A shame, but I'm still pleased with the games as apart from a small bit of damage to the case of Virtua Racing, the boxes and carts are in very good condition.
Just a couple of imports for my collection. I said a while ago that I wanted to track down the Famicom Mini GBA games to go with my NES CIassics collection, so the first one I've found at a reasonable price is a nice copy of Star Soldier. Most of the other Minis appear to command high prices, but I'm willing to wait for bargains. The Famicom game is a complete copy of Spartan X (the Famicom release of Kung Fu) which is for my Jackie Chan collection. Spartan X is the Japanese name for the film Wheels on Meals and the game was released as a film tie-in in that region.
These games were all bought used from CeX. I decided to flesh out my Mega Man collection as the NES games I have in that series were looking a bit lonely. I also picked up a couple of Might & Magic spin-offs. Heroes is good and a nice companion to the PC games, but Warriors is craptacular beyond belief.
These four games are SABA Videoplay cartridges for the German version of the Fairchild Channel F. They are all boxed with German instruction leaflets and are in great condition. The games are Desert Fox, Drag Strip, Sonar Sounding and Space Odyssey. A nice little lot and something that doesn't show up every day. Oh, nearly forgot to mention, they only cost me 99c total (before shipping, of course) from a guy in Belgium. Can't beat that.
After ordering it over a month previously, my copy of the Legend of Wukung finally arrived from the Super Fighter Team. In case you don't know who they are, they are responsible for releasing two new Mega Drive games (Beggar Prince in 2006, Legend of Wukong in 2008 ), which come on a proper cart with a professionally produced case and manual. I missed out on Beggar Prince, but I'm glad I got this one as it is based on the Journey to the West story, known to all British people of a certain age as the plot of Monkey!
A nice big lot of tapes for Commodore 16 and Plus/4. £2.30 for the lot and only four dupes in the bunch. Despite being a commercial failure in most of the world, the Plus/4 is my favourite of the 8-bit home micros. It looks nice, is more powerful than the Spectrum, has more features than the C64 and is prettier than the Amstrad. It was never really marketed as a games machine, which I suppose led to its downfall. It's still hugely popular on the homebrew scene though, especially in Eastern Europe, which means a constant supply of new games and arcade ports.
I picked up Alan Wake brand new in a half-price sale in Gamestation, so it only ended up costing me £19.99. I've been playing it over the last week or so too and I absolutely love it. Stellar stuff from Remedy, can't wait for more (it's been a long time since Max Payne!). The PC games are all second-hand, Broken Sword 4 cost me a whopping 49p complete, the other two games are disc and case only but only cost £2 each. Not bad, especially for Return to Krondor for which I've been looking for ages. I love Raymond E. Feist's fantasy novels (yes, even the recent ones) so it's nice to finally have both Krondor games.
Another lot of games from eBay, this time all fully complete. Starflight was a one-off purchase, the others were in a lot costing around £12 shipped. Some cIassics in there, including my favourite pinball-based video game ever, Sonic Spinball. Awesome game. Starflight is a great game, sort of a huge mash-up between Elite, Star Control and Phantasy Star and is a game I'd recommend to anyone who likes epic sci-fi adventures. The cover art is nice too, kinda reminds me of the old covers of sci-fi novels: Asimov, Heinlein and the like.
A couple of PlayStation games from two different charity shops. Nothing special and they are both Platinum releases, but they were cheap and are decent enough games.
I went to Leeds the other day, which is a bit away from my usual hunting grounds but since I was visiting friends in nearby Bradford I decided to see if one of my old favourite stores was still in business. Thankfully, Arcadia is still alive and well, thriving in the grottiest location possible between the 'adult' shop and the newsies that sells out-of-date crisps. It's actually the only truly great game store I've ever come across, selling everything from Atari and Intellivision to PlayStation 3. I could easily have spent all day and a hundred pound or more in there, but I managed to restrain myself and just picked out a few I really wanted for now. The Atari games were £1 and £2, Urban Champion for NES was £3 and the complete Phantasy Star III was £10. I'm planning to head back soon, armed with a firmer idea of the average prices of a few things and a fatter wallet.
Alpha Protocol is a brand new purchase from Zavvi online, costing me £17.95. Hopefully that will be money well-spent, as I've been really looking forward to the game despite the mediocre reviews that have emerged since release. It seems to me that most of the reviewers who have given the game low or middling scores are missing the point of it being an RPG rather than an all-out action game - so hopefully I'll enjoy it more than they did since that is what I've been expecting all along. The two Dragon Age books (along with a stack of other books) were bought in a 3-for-2 offer at Waterstones (the enemy!) and hopefully I'll find them enjoyable for fleshing out the backstory of one of my favourite recent games.
I also picked up a whole bunch of downloadable games this month. First off, I bought the Special Edition of Monkey Island 2 off XBLA for 800msp. I really enjoyed the SE of the first Monkey Island, so this shouldn't be any different. Now for a remake of Day of the Tentacle and we're set!
The Steam summer sale was particularly good to me as well. I bought Cryostasis, Freedom Force, Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, Gothic II Gold, Gothic 3 and Unreal Gold in the sale for about £19 total, then the other day I picked up the entire first series of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People for just £3.99.
Righty-o, in what is quickly becoming a common feature of these blogs, I've had to once again split my post into two pieces. Part two will cover all the games I've been playing in July and will be up in a few days.