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!

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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!!

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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! :)

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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!

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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...

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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! 

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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! :-)