Some Halloween Worthy Pick-ups!

I've picked up quite a few things recently that have been of a slightly spooky nature, so I thought as I'm a bit busy today, I'd just share a few pics of those! As always, remember to click the pics to make them bigger...

First up, I found a load of horror comics in a charity shop yesterday! £2.50 each...and most of them are old Alan Class comics! Alan Class Comics were mostly random collections of old reprints from various American sources, and were my first introduction to the wonderful world of 1950's horror and sci-fi publications.

Among the stories were quite a few early Marvel comic-strips, and a fair few by Stan Lee with art by Steve Ditko......

The DC comics in the bundle had a few interesting ads..one for a comic I've never seen in the wild (above) and this great Slim Jim Werewolf ad (below)....

Here's some pics of a full strip for you to read...The Man Who Saw Too Much!

I particularly like the odd Slender-man style insect weirdo on the cover of this issue of Sinister Tales below....sadly, if he's from an actual story I didn't notice it in my quick flick through the comic....

This werewolf I found in another charity shop for £1 is apparently a Dr.Who toy....I haven't seen the episode it's from though.

The werewolf is rather well articulated, perhaps a bit too well articulated! It's feet and hands bend in ways I'm pretty sure a real werewolf's wouldn't....then again, I've never actually met a genuine werewolf yet...

This next toy was a bit out of my usual price range at £12, but I couldn't pass it up when I saw it!

It's only the bloomin' Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in die-cast metal! I've been keeping him in the box, but he's even better out of it!

I finally picked up Resident Evil - The Darkside Chronicles on Wii, but as I'm planning on covering it (eventually) in the Gruesome Games, I won't go into much detail about it here...

Likewise with the Evil Within 2, but if it's as good as the first game I'm in for a treat! As you might have noticed from this pickup, I have managed to get an Xbox 1 since last year, so perhaps a few other horror titles on that system might be making appearances in Gruesome Games soon (okay, not perhaps...definitely..)

As a little bonus to finish up, here's a doodle below by the excellent artist Mike Ploog of his Werewolf By Night that I picked up a Comicon a few years back...I didn't find out until afterwards that he had also done a lot of work on Dark Crystal or I would have got him to draw something from that! Gutted! But also, not gutted because look at that werewolf! 

So there you go! Hope you enjoyed those!

Be sure to keep checking out everybody else's work on the countdown via the hub badge below, and as My Two Yen Worth gave me a special shoutout yesterday, let's return the favour! Click the name to hop straight over to a post about a certain smiley-faced chap who likes to torment bats! 

Latest Pick-ups (June 2017 - part 1)

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 this Reg 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! :-)

Back To The Future Games Special - Part 2

Wow, the Future is now in the Past..well here at least! It's the 22nd! But if you're reading this when I'm posting it and are in America, then it's still the 21st! Time travel, eh!? It's weird!!!

Anyway. lets get on with this next lot of Back To The Future Games..... 

Super Back To The Future II (SNES) : 

 See, now this is more like it! In this Japan-only SNES game, you're back on the hoverboard again, but in a much better platform-style adventure. It plays a a bit like Sonic The Hedgehog, with Marty zooming through the levels collecting coins and pulling tricks whilst avoiding policemen and futuristic robots..

There's also people flying around in cars, some of which you can use to reach higher platforms. And these weird hover bike things that look really cool....it's just a much more atmospheric and fun game than any of the previous ones I've looked at!

There's even boss Levels where you get to beat up baddies like Griff, and again these look great and emulate the film way better than any previous title. It's a bit of a mystery as to why this was never released outside of Japan really, as it's not as if it wouldn't have sold.....

But yes, so far the only game that I would actually recommend giving a proper bash even if you're not a Back To The Future fan!

Back To The Future Part II & III (NES) :

Oh god....no, just no! I can't do it, I can't play this game after playing through the wonderfulness of the last one! Made by LJN, the same people who did the NES version of the first film, this combines the two sequels and transforms them into something even less recognisable as being Back To The Future than that game.

Biff has stolen the almanac and dropped items all throughout time, y'see and you're supposed to go and collect them all back up again. Only he's ruined time so much, that no-one has ever seen the Back to The Future films and forgotten what was in them. Well, at least that seems to be what's happened, because I certainly don't remember killer fish, walking hamburgers or weird, disembodied faces from any of the sequels.

Although it could be argued that you'll find some small amount of fun bouncing about the levels, it won't be enough fun to warrant putting this into your NES. Avoid, avoid, avoid.....bleurch!

Back To The Future III ( C64,Spectrum,CPC, Amiga, Atari ST, Megadrive/Genesis, PC) : 

Ah! This is the only Back To The Future game I actually bought when it came out. On the ZX Spectrum! Fairly good reviews, good graphics and the fact it looked like it used the licence well made me want to buy it and love it....but then I loaded it up....

I never made it past the first level. Ever. Even now, trying the different versions, I still can't get past it. It's just too damn tricky to judge what's going to fly at my face when I'm sitting on that bloody horse. And you need to have pixel perfect jumping skills to dodge the ravines and chests and whatnot...

It's a shame as the later levels look less frustrtaing and more fun, but I've never been able to play them, and as such, I can't recommend this game either...even if it does have groovy music and presentation. But yeah, even the Megadrive version is really frustrating. I'll put a video here though, so you can have a look at what the later levels will look like if you're not as rubbish as me and can actually see them!

Back To The Future - Blitz Through Time (PC) : 

You can pretty much ignore this. It's just another one of those games. You know, the sort that are everywhere online or on phones, and you end up playing them for hours because they're so addictive, but ultimately pointless and you wonder why you've wasted so much time on them. The type I hate because they make me realise how pointless playing any game for hours actually is. One of those games....  

Back To the Future - The Game (iPad, Mac, PC, Playstation 3, Wii) : 

And this is the one I've been unlucky enough not to have played yet, and probably the only one that actually makes proper use of the licence. Made by Telltale Games, it's that sort of updated Point-and-Click style of adventure that they do so well. It's basically a sequel to the movies, and looks really good! Having not played it though, I don't know what it's actually like, but I'm guessing it'll be the best game in this list by a long shot! You should probably go find out....

So there you go, a quick and rather depressing look at the Back To The Future games! Only the SNES and Telltale game are worth actually tracking down to play. Hopefully someone will get their act together and invent actual time-travel soon, and we can go back and erase the rest from history and make decent ones. Although, then the SNES and Telltale games would probably fade away or something as we'd have ruined the need for them to be any good! Best leave it alone then....