New Pick-Ups & Birthday Stuff....(part 1)

Okay, so it's been a while since I properly posted and as such, I've amassed a whole load of other stuff from charity shops, and also reached the rather-scary age of 40, so have a few things to show off from my birthday presents and birthday money spending too!

First up is the Madballs Head Poppers Dust Brain figure, and an awesome Madballs mug for my Birthday! Got these from my Mum who is doing well finding random madball stuff for me lately! :)

I got some cool stuff from my niece and her family too...like this Goonies T-shirt and two tubes of bubbles! 

They also got me some fudge, but the Sega Superstars Eye-toy game I bought myself for £1 in a charity shop...

These cool Marvel Pocket Books were £1.50 each from a charity shop! The Chiller books have Dracula and Man-Thing stories in them, and Conan Obviously stars the barbarian himself, but also has a Kull The Conqueror strip...there's some good ads in a couple of these that I might upload at some point too! :)

From the same shop I got this Beano Comic Library which was a bit pricey at £1.50 (they usually go for about 50p each), but the subject matter made it worth it. The Sugar and Spike book was only £1, which was odd because it was the biggest of the comics at 100 pages! Might upload a strip from it at a later date so you lot can have a read! 

Another couple of strategy guides for a couple of quid each...the original Pokemon guide for Gameboy, and Carmageddon 2 : Carpocalypse Now on PC!

From the same shop as the above guides, I found this Game Genie codebook for £1. I'll probably just chuck this up on Ebay as I don't have a Game Genie, but I thought it was too good a find to leave there!

This next item cost me a £1, and I've yet to get it to work on my PC....it's a CD of loads of Freeware titles. I got my brother to test it on his PC, and have worked out how to get it to run on mine now, so after I write this I'm off to try some of the games out. I'll let you know if I find any gems...or real stinkers! 

I also found these 360 games for £2 each....Call Of Duty: Black Ops and Armored Core 4! Both seem okay from the little I've played...although Black Ops doesn't feel as good to play as Ghosts, which I'm currently playing through. It seems to have more screen clutter...if you know what I mean? Too much going on for my poor old eyes...

Right, that's probably enough to be getting on with for now....I'll post the rest of the pick-ups in my next post, and then get back to posting a bit more regularly again! See you in a bit, stuffers! :)

More posts soon....now the lurgy has gone!

Blargh! I was hit by a 4 week flu-bug that then became a double ear infection with added sinusitus! This was a whole load of fun as I'm sure you can imagine, and I didn't really feel like posting much...

The meds have done their trick though and everything seems to be reverting back to my normal allergy-type usual lurgy, so I'll get back on the case with posting more stuff soon...probably early next week, so keep an eye out for that! Just thought I'd let you know I'm still alive...anyhoo, catch you soon, stuffers! 

Pick Ups - Last Few Months.....(part 3)

Right, a bit later due to being busier than I had planned, but this last post should bring us up to date with the best of my pick-ups! Well, I say best, but this first lot of games might not fit that description very well at all....

I've got about 450 games for the PS2 now, but instead of stopping collecting like any sane person would, I'm continuing to pick up games for 50p or £1 whenever I find one I don't have. Because of this, I'm picking up a lot of lesser known, but pretty terrible, games...

Trigger Man is a third-person shooter, that despite seemingly having a budget that the developers could blow buying a sandwich, actually kept me playing for way longer than I probably should have. The AI of the enemies is pretty terrible with baddies standing around doing nothing, and when you try to shoot them they take about ten shots unless you manage a headshot. Levels are boring and blandly designed....it's a mess basically! But I still played it for an hour....

Police Chase Down is a hard-to-control, fiddly police-motorbike game that lets you shoot enemies as they try to destroy the VIP vehicle you're trying to protect, At least, that's what the first mission consists of. I dunno about the rest, as the fact my bike moves way faster than the slow-ass limo that I'm protecting and the fact that to shoot the bad guys I have to rotate the camera around meaning I have no idea what I'm driving into, put a stop to me playing the game any further....

The Shadow Of Zorro gives an initial impression that it might be quite good, but then when you start playing it quickly becomes apparent that it's a shoddily designed mess, with a stealth mechanic that doesn't quite work and a weird QTE combat style! Might be worth playing a wee bit longer to see if it improves, but it seems to be a huge disappointment so far...

Maniac Mole is a side-scrolling platformer that feels like it was made with one of those game-creator programs that lets you do your own graphics but only has the most basic of gameplay. It's pretty poor, with crappy level design and annoying collision detection....and the music is infuriatingly awful!! It's terribleness might keep you entertained for 15 minutes or so, though....

Legion - The Legend Of Excalibur I've only recently picked-up, and so have yet to really play it properly. It's a mix of RTS and action RPG, and seems like a fairly average example of such, but it was probably the first of it's kind on PS2...Might be worth looking into further, but I generally don't have much patience for these sorts of things unless they're amazing!

Cocoto Platform Jumper is one of a series of games starring a cute little red devil, and this one does exactly what it says in the title. Taking place in rotating-tower like levels, you create Rainbow Islands style platforms to make your way to the top, killing and avoiding nasties along the way! It's actually quite fun, and easily the best of the bunch! Maybe one worth returning to later on the blog....

Another recent pick-up is this Moomin book...found it in a charity shop for a couple of quid, and having been a fan of the Moomins since I was tiny and used to watch the creepy fuzzy-felt-style series, I had to snap it up! It tells the story of Moomintroll building a house for himself and the Snork Maiden, after Little My decides to invade his room at the Moomin house and basically annoy him into leaving....

Can't really remember where I picked up these Buster comics, but they'll be added to my collection....I lost loads in a previous move when my dad decided to burn loads of stuff instead of bringing it to the new home! Packed all the best stuff up into boxes and he told us just to leave it and we could get it later, then went out and burned the lot so we didn't have clutter in the new house! 

Old books, toys (including my entire Matchbox car collection and some vintage Starsky & Hutch dolls), games, and hundreds and hundreds of comics.....Never forgiven him for that and never will! Probably goes a long way to explaining why I collect as much stuff from my childhood these days too!! Hehe...

Another charity shop find was this bunch of old gaming magazines for £2.50 each! They had loads more, but I just grabbed what I could afford...including issue one of the classic SNES mag, Super Play!

Definitely a bunch o' bargains! Was interesting reading the Club Nintendo member's mag as well, as I never ever joined but remember seeing the ads for it at the back of all of SNES game manuals...

A few more 360 games next, and these were between £3-£5 each...yet to play any of them properly, as they've been piled up on the increasingly massive backlog of 360 titles.....

Infinite Undiscovery looks like it'll be a fairly decent RPG to get my teeth into once I've finally got back to finishing another 360 JRPG, Lost Odyssey.....

The Last Remnant is another one that will be eating up large chunks of my time If I ever get around to playing it! It seems to focus a lot on large battles, so it'll be interesting to see how it plays...

Warriors : Legends Of Troy is an Ancient Greece themed entry in Koei's Warriors series of games. It seems to be quite a bit gorier than the Dynasty Warriors games, but has similar hack-n-slash gameplay. Looks like I should have fun with it....

Another trip to the charity shops unearthed these Strategy Guides, all for £2.50 each! The Dino Crisis and Devil May Cry ones still have their posters attached and have interviews with the game devs,  and all of them are filled with some great maps and artwork! I was very happy to find them....

I found in yet another charity shop this selection of Comic Book Day 2013 comics! These were given away free at comic shops on the actual day, but obviously I had to pay 50p each for them. A couple (Star Wars / Avatar and Dragonball / Rurouni Kenshin) are double-sided. A nice find, as usually by the time I get into town for Free Comic Book Day, Forbidden Planet has run out of copies of the freebies...even if I manage to get there for 10am!!

In the same shop I found this Dirty Pair book, also for 50p! And that's the last item in this bunch of pick-ups!

So there you go! Quite the grab-bag o' goodies, I'm sure you'll agree! I'll do another pick-up post once I accumulate enough new things and stuffs....but should be back later in the week with some more scans of things I'm finding in boxes! Probably best not to promise that though, eh!? ;)

Laters, Stuffers! :)

Pick-Ups - Last Few Months....(part 2)

Blimey! It's tomorrow today already! So let's get straight back into looking at the next set of pick-ups! 

First today are these The Real Ghostbusters comics from Marvel UK, to add to my already sizable collection from when I was 12 and used to have the comic ordered at the shop down the road! The stories in these ranged from okay to terrible, with more terrible ones towards the end of its run. The best bits were the text stories and, of course, Spengler's Spirit Guide...which was a page supposedly written by Egon about the various entities the Ghostbusters would come up against in their adventures. I'll probably look at the comic in a bit more depth in a later blog post, when I get round to shifting my collection into boxes! But yeah, these were about 50p each....

Some PS2 games next, and these ones are a bit of a mixed bag...all picked up for about £1 or £2...

Impossible Mission is a version of the classic C64 game that includes a few upgraded graphics, although you can play it in the original style if you like...and you probably will, as there's little difference really! Anyway, it's alright, but ultimately pointless if you have the original...

 Final Fantasy VII - Dirge Of Cerberus  is a third-person shooter set three years after the events of FFVII, and I have yet to play it properly despite wanting it for ages! I played it briefly and it seems a little odd control wise, but I'm sure I'll be able to work it all out after a while...

Sub Rebellion is a submarine-based shoot-em-up, and is actually quite interesting and a bit different to the usual shooty-fare! Definitely almost a bit of a hidden gem, but not quite worthy of that status....maybe it's a hidden shiny-pebble!

Legion - The Legend Of Excalibur is a real time strategy / action RPG game, that I only picked up at the weekend, so again have had little time to actually play it yet. First impressions are that the voice acting seems a bit iffy, and that although gameplay seems to be okay, it probably isn't going to hold my interest for long enough to give the game much time...might be wrong though...we'll see...

Downforce is a slightly-futuristic, arcade style F1 racing game, and a reasonably decent one! There's not really much more to say about it other than it does what it sets out to do, and is a fair amount of fun...

For Christmas, one of the presents I got from my mum was this Madball annual/comic combo! It seems that the annual features reprints of the first two issues, and the comic is Issue 3...a fact that my mother was unaware of! She was also unaware that I already had the Marvel UK reprint of issue 4, meaning that I now have the full first four issues in readable print! How's that for Deadpan Flooky-ness!? 

It's pretty cool being able to read the supposed origin of the Madballs, as I love the toys! I'll need to remember to put up some pics of my collection of those at some point on here too....

Some DVD pick-ups now, and I've yet to watch any of these, although I have seen parts of Babycart in it's mashed up Shogun Assassin version, which was made famous by Tarantino in Kill Bill! That collection was a charity shop find for £2.50! 

Triangle is a film that I saw the trailer for years ago and have been looking forward to watching ever since, but suddenly finding it extremely hard to find...I finally found it in a charity shop for £1 a week or so ago, and will most likely be watching it tonight!

 (And yes, that is Angel from Home & Away in the starring role!)

Next pick-up....a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook called Armies of Death to add to my gamebook collection! Haven't played it yet, but apparently it's a bit different in that you and your army have attributes for combat.... 

Lastly for today's post are some Minecraft books, the first being a straightforward Strategy Guide.....

The other one is a bit more interesting...It's the 2017 Official Minecraft Annual, which was on sale in Poundland for, yes..a pound!

It's filled with lot's of tips from Youtubers on how to build things, ideas for challenges and information about various Minecraft stuff, including how it's helping to improve slum areas around the world with it's Block by Block programme...

But yes, that's enough for now....I reckon I should fit the rest into one final post tomorrow! Pop back then to see my last lot of stuffs and things!