Been a while since I put up any Games Collection posts, so here's a lazy Sunday posting of my entire Wii collection! There's a couple of stinkers in there, but most are are pretty good or even awesome, and the ones that are bad I only paid about £1 for. Oh, and a couple of the games are actually my mother's as she got them when she picked up a Wii and Wii Fit...but I'm still the only one that really plays them! :)
I will single out a few later in the blog, as stuff like No More Heroes, Little King Story and Disaster : Day Of Crisis needs to be talked about...until then, just enjoy perusing the pics!
Here's the rest of my pick-ups from the last month or so! First up is Game On! - The 50 Greatest Video Games of All Time, a book that acknowledges the fact that these are just some of the greatest video games of all time, thus making the title false right from the off! And there's only about 3 pre-16-Bit games mentioned....the focus being stuff released around the time of publication!
Still, what is there looks nice at least...and it's alright for a quick read through!
I never manage to get to Forbidden Planet in time to pick up the Free Comic Book Day stuff, and it's always long gone by the time I arrive...However, I can always rely on some of the comics showing up in charity shops for about £1 each later!
The ones I've managed to find from this year are what you see here...Wonder Woman, Avatar, Riverdale (basd on the new TV series, based on the Archie comics), Hilda/Garbage Night & the one I really wanted to pick up, Buffy The Vampire Slayer/Plants vs Zombies! I might post some of the stories from these at a much later date.....
A trio of original Xbox games next, two of which are sequels to Crash Bandicoot, who is back in the limelight due to his original trilogy getting a remaster! These games probably aren't quite as good as the first three, but are still pretty decent and fun platformer/arcade adventures!
Aliens vs Predator - Extinction is perhaps most famous for being the game that disappointed everybody by not being a First Person Shooter, but is gaining some love nowadays among Real Time Strategy fans. I've yet to play it, as it is probably another game that once I start playing I'll lose hours to!
I found this old movie-mag for £3 in the same shop as the Cheeky comics in the last post...Fantastic Films is an interesting read, with 2 articles about Superman - The Movie, which show that the development of that comic-book adaptation was almost as troubled as recent DC movies! It seems to be the opposite though, as producers wanted it to be more campy like 60s Batman, whereas Richard Donner, who was the 2nd director after the first had visa issues, wanted a more serious picture!
It also has some amazing 70s artwork, like the poster below that shows Superman, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon!
Then there's another interesting piece on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that covers the original movie, the remake..and the novel that both films were based on!
The Conquest Of Space is highlighted as probably being as important a Sci-Fi movie as the later 2001 - A Space Odyssey...
And there's also a few more articles, including an interview with actress Jean Rogers who played Dale Arden in the original 1930s Flash Gordon serial (see link in the poster comment above)...who shares some rare pictures from her own collection! All in all, a pretty grand read!
Moomins books just seem to be making themselves known to me these days...this is one I found sticking out from below another book in a charity shop, and after forking out £1.50 it came home with me to join the rest!
It's a properly crazy story about the time a comet threatened to destroy everything...which was the same story that featured in the Moomin movie a few years back, and that 'm almost reaching in my re-watch of the Fuzzy Felt-style Moomin TV series I became obsessed with in my youth!
Another trio of Xbox games, but this time for the 360...and two of which star everybody's favourite walking-tree voicer, Vin Diesel! I picked these up from my local CEX for a few quid each...
The Chronicles Of Riddick - Assault On Dark Athena is obviously based on the Riddick films, and also includes original Xbox FPS Riddick game, Escape From Butcher Bay, remastered for 360! Both games are cool, stealth-based shooters...well, I say shooters, but you spend a large amount of time snapping necks and knifing people..so...
The Wheelman is a surprisingly mad, over-the-top driving game, where Mr. Diesel uses the driving skills he picked up in Fast 'n Furious to drive backwards and fling himself over, out-of and in to all manner of vehicles whilst shooting bad guys in the face! A whole load of fun and probably a bit of an under-rated gem!
Inversion is another game that probably doesn't get the attention it deserves, being poo-pooed at the time of it's release as a shameless Gears Of War clone...That's a bit unfair, as it uses a pretty cool gravity/physics engine to shake things up a bit, and is actually has very decent gameplay! I've been having a great time with it so far, and may cover it in more depth some other time...
I also found another Fighting Fantasy Gamebook that I didn't already have in my collection, Sword Of The Samurai! So. come the next power-cut or long train journey and I'll be fighting Japanese demons, ninjas and the like...which is not much different from how I spend most of my time in videogames, but it'll be nice to do it whilst reading for a change!
My Super Mario toy collection is growing too, as I've picked up another few figures for £2 each in The Works....and an old McDonalds toy Yoshi that sticks his tongue out, which I found for 50p in a charity shop!
I think we'll end it there for now! I do have quite a few more video game pick-ups, but I'll save them for next time as I'm going to try and slow down a bit with those so I can actually play some of them! That's the plan anyway, but we all know how well I do with plans, so expect to see more pick-ups soonish, most likely including another 100 games or something...hehe...laters, stuffers!
Although I've been selling a lot of stuff on Ebay, I've also been accumulating more stuff over the last few weeks..which I shouldn't be doing really, but it's such cool stuff! And retail therapy goes a long way to keeping me relatively sane! So here's part one of my latest batch o' goodies....
First up is a book that probably goes a long way to explaining my obsessive collecting of various stuffs! Way back in the mists of time, my family got the offer of a house in the wee village where they still stay now..before the move, my dad told everybody to leave the rest of our stuff that still wasn't packed behind, and he would bring it up to the new house later...Only he didn't did he. No. He took it down to the local dump and put a match to it....hundreds of old books, toys, clothes etc....he didn't want to bring the accumulated junk with him to the new place! Cue evil music and moustache twirling.....
However, because he didn't ask us what our favourite stuff was, most of it went up in smoke...and so for years, and years my brother and I have been slowly gathering back all the stuff we lost, but also picking up a lot of extra stuff along the way!
One thing that I'd been hunting for for years, was a book I had hazy memories of. I knew it had something to do with aliens, and had some sort of evil, spiky, dark beasts in it too...And then Two Headed Boy put up a picture of it on Facebook and the memories came flooding back!
Yes, the book in question was Quest For The Gloop, by the people who brought us Meg & Mog, and it now sits happily in my collection of stuff once again after I bought it from Amazon for a few quid! This makes me incredibly happy, so thanks again to Two Headed Boy for reminding me of its existence!
I found this Retro Mini Games TV thing in a charity shop for £3....Hawkins Bazarr have it for sale for considerably more! It's filled with rubbishy hacks and cheap NES games, but still has quite a lot of enjoyable stuff to make it worth the money..including the amazing Police Dog Lasy!! In fact it seems to share a lot of the games available on the DreamGEAR 75 plug 'n' play...but this has 200 games!!
Next up are a couple of Wii games....Endless Ocean & Little King's Story! Both a couple of quid each from charity shops!
Endless Ocean is a diving simulator, which is pretty handy for someone like me who can't swim! Haven't really played much so far, but it seems pretty cool and a good game to get rid of stress!
Little King's Story is a cutesy Pikmin/Animal Crossing/RealTimeStrategy/RPG mix of a game, of the sort I'll start playing and then realise 3 days have passed...should be a lot of fun! :)
For £5 in Barnardo's Bookshop, I found this massive Halo Encyclopedia!
The shiny cover is a bit scratched up, but it has all 368 pages of info and backstory on all the games up to Halo Reach! Apparently there are quite a few bits of erroneous info in here, but the wealth of stuff contained is still hugely impressive and goes to show just how much effort Bungie & 343 have put into creating a massive universe around the games...
Definitely a lot to read whilst supping my coffee!
Another few games next, this time on Playstation 2....Le Mans 24 Hours, Star Wars - The Clone Wars and TOCA Race Driver! These were about £1 each, again from random charity shops....
Le Mans 24 hours seems like a pretty decent racing game, but bizarrely I don't like it as much as the PS1 game of the same name..but I'll maybe get into that in a later Blog post! ;)
Star Wars - The Clone Wars I've yet to play, but looks like it'll be a fairly decent, drivey shoot-em-up!
TOCA Race Driver is a great racing game, slightly ruined by the fact that Codemasters tried to spice things up a bit by adding a story mode....sort of like what EA are doing with FIFA nowadays! This was a bit of a failed attempt though, and they got rid of the idea again in later TOCA titles...
One of the bookshops I frequent in Edinburgh has a large selection of Cheeky comics that nobody else seems to want, so I keep picking up a few for £1 each whenever I'm in town...
I actually have more fun finding old adverts for stuff or the random old stories to the normal Cheeky stuff...which I still enjoy, but I try to look for issues with the most interesting or odd things inside!
Like this 'Spotter Book', where the basically just give pictures of things you'll find around town with a box to go and tick them off when you see them! Kids must have been really bored in the late '70s, eh!?
Or thisReg Varney As A Boy oddity from 1955! And what a boy! He was apparently chasing the ladies before he ever got near the buses!
And I remember these Corona Fizzical badges, so they must have hung around for a few years as I was only 1 year old in 1978...
(Here's a TV Ad from 1976 with the same campaign........)
And lastly, an amazing Trebor ad starring the dynamic duo of Batman & Robin!
And to finish off part one, here's an Xbox 360 Wireless Mic that I found for £3 in the same charity shop as the TV Game thing! I never usually find stuff in there, but it seems to be upping it's game for..well, games stuff! Now I can finally sing my heart out in my Guitar Hero games....yay!!
Anyway, like I said, that'll do for now! Expect the part two of the pick-up post in a day or two..or three....Laters! :-)
