Another one of these games.

Future Trunks has always been my favourite character in the Dragon Ball series. When I was younger I really wanted to get one action figure of his character but, sadly, those were unavailable over here. The only figurines available at that time were produced by AB Toys and they originated from France. Toys R' Us was the only place where I could find them. The best I could get was a bootleg figurine based on the original Bandai version which had only been released in Japan. I was very happy when I heard a Future Trunks statue was included this time with the Dragon Ball Xenoverse Trunks' Travel Edition. I felt even more tempted to buy it when I saw the first unboxing pictures. That satiny look of the statue makes it even more awesome.

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There are more games of Pokémon than Pokémon in the games

This game isn't particularly interesting, at least to me, but it comes with a very nice accessory. A Nintendo DS Bluetooth keyboard, which is definitely nice. I had to wait for a major price drop in a UK store I could trust. It's just too bad Amazon doesn't protect everything as well as it should. At this point, I'm pretty sure the only Pokémon games I'm still missing are basically Rush and Conquest. Pokémon Rush is such an interesting game that I am still waiting for a bargain deal just to complete the series.

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Real Saturn Chronicles Episode 6: Maybe I should buy it...

So, in the last post, I've mentioned how I obtained my Tomb Raider II game for the brand new Sony console. I eventually finished the game with all the secrets, I made myself a hand written strategy guide and I finally got my own memory card. As I promised, I've lent the game to my friend Angelo after I completed it and he lent me his copy of Tekken 2, which I played quite a lot. Angelo was a really nice kid.

Within the next couple of months I was able to get a few more games to play. I don't remember exactly which ones were. I know my second game was Dragon Ball: Final Bout. Being a huge Dragon Ball fan, I obviously had to get that game. I saw the intro on a TV show and I couldn't believe how epic it was. That game was a Christmas gift. As soon as I inserted the game disc in the console and the opening intro started playing, my mind was blown. Unfortunately the game was not that good. It was extremely slow and the gameplay was poor, but I was still glad with it.

On that TV show about videogames that I used to watch, they started to talk about this really popular game which was already a huge hit in Japan and was coming to Europe. They mentioned that game in more than a single episode. They made quite a big fuss over it, but I wasn't impressed at all. To be honest, I was not even slightly interested. That was until March or April 1998. 

My Grandmother used to give me a monthly allowance. I also had some money left from Christmas, so a few months later I had saved almost enough money to buy a brand new game. I just didn't know which one to pick. On a certain day my parents picked me from school and we went to a small local shopping center that had an electronics store. They didn't have a big stock of games but it was still nice to visit and I was trying to make up my mind about what to buy next.

Sitting on a shelve there was this weird, fat box with a rather uninteresting cover. When I originally started buying games for the PS1, those fat boxes had already been replaced by the smaller formats. Fat boxes were scarce. They were mostly available for multi-disc games and I didn't even know there were PlayStation games with more than a single disc. I picked that game merely out of curiosity. "What the heck is this?" was what was on my mind when I first picked it. As I turned the box around I instantly noticed three things about it that immediately caught my attention. The first thing was the price. I knew the game was just released because I had never seen it before. New games over here would all cost around 50 or 60 euros but that one was priced at just 45. The second thing was that small symbol saying the game had 3 discs. The last thing was... I immediately recognized the small gameplay screens. It was that game they were talking about a lot on that TV show. I also remembered how unappealing the game seemed to me, so I immediately placed in on the shelve.

We came back home for dinner and for some reason that game was stuck in my mind. I knew I was very limited to buy just a few games per year and at that time I was old enough to know exactly what I wanted. I was no longer buying games just because I needed something new to play. I had become more selective. I needed to buy good games that lasted as long as possible because I knew I couldn't buy another one so soon. The fact that the game has so many discs had me thinking... If it had three discs, it probably would take a lot of time to beat and that's something I was looking for. At that time I still didn't have enough money to buy a 60€ game, but I did have almost 50€, which was enough, so that had me thinking as well. The only thing that was bothering me a little was the fact that I didn't like that game when I saw it on TV.

I kept thinking about the game for a couple of hours before going to bed: "Maybe I should buy it... Maybe it's not that bad and I should give it a chance. It's 'cheap', it probably takes a lot of time to beat

and those guys on TV said the game is very good... yeah, maybe I should buy it." So that same night I asked my parents if we could go to the store again the next day so I could buy the game. The next day I've bought it. Needless to say, it was the best decision in my entire life.

I'm very sure you've already realized what game I am talking about: Final Fantasy VII. Best. Decision. Ever. I'll leave the rest of the story for the next post :D

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Limited Edition Zelda Wind Waker Slipcase ('cause this title will get me more views than any other)

This is another one of those things that took me a pretty long time to get. Basically, this is a limited edition copy of the Wind Waker for the Gamecube that comes with this unique slipcase. I assume this is a HMV thingy, I'm not too sure. I've known this for many years now but, for some reason, I never really felt like buying it. Once in a while I still remembered I was missing this in my collection. Too bad its price was nearly twice as much as it was worth some years ago, but with so much stuff to buy all the time it's pretty hard to guess what to leave behind. Now that the Majora's Mask came out for the 3DS, I suddenly had the urge to get this slipcase. I'm sure many people can relate to this feeling because whenever a new game for an old franchise gets released, the general interest in other things related to that particular franchise seems to receive a small boost, even when it's Zelda.Yeah, because Zelda stuff never gets unsold-

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Do you have an invitation, sir?

There are some really weird games out there, and this one I'm now posting is probably one of them. I'm not sure what type of game this is... a hentai-ish JRPG with turn-based system and very limited animations that don't really make justice to Vita's capabilities is probably just one attempt at describing what this game is like. Again, this wasn't something I planned to buy on day one, but I had two good reasons to preorder it. First, it was nearly sold out. Second, it comes from an awesome company called NISA Europe that recently opened an European website and is finally selling limited editions and bonuses from all sorts of Japanese games that otherwise would never see a release date. And these are the companies I like to support. These are the companies that break the rules for the European videogaming market and they have my full support. Yes, I am still traumatized with the fact that I couldn't play so many JRPGs because the big companies didn't even bother releasing them in Europe. That fact will never go away. Some of those games were meant to be played at the time they were released, when they had that really amazing impact on players. Those who missed that right moment to play might still enjoy them a lot but it's never the same thing. Yeah, I'm pointing the finger at you, Squaresoft. 

These are the games that you need to watch out for if you're trully a collector because these things will become nasty to find in the future. The only bad part about the website is how much they actually charge for these editions and especially for shipping. However, considering how outrageously expensive Royal Mail international deliveries became in the last few years, it's only natural smaller companies can't do much but charge some impressive shipping costs. That's a shame though.

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No comments...

I was one of the first persons to complain about this new model when it was announced, and now I have both the regular console and the Limited Edition Majora's Mask XL model (that one will be posted later). I'm such a weirdo, I know. All I'm missing now is the Spirit Tracks model of the DS lite console in order to have all the Zelda-related models released in Europe (or so I think...). This is bothering me a bit, but the truth is that model is out of my price range and it's particularly rare. It's not something I can buy just like that, unfortunately. And since I'm complaining about Nintendo models I'd like to get, I'd love to find the Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire Limited Edition Paks too...

This move from Nintendo was unnecessary to be honest. They could wait to release a brand new, better console instead of adding just a couple of improvements that don't really affect the gaming experience. At least that's what I think, but then I'm stupid enough to actually support their decisions by buying two of these models as soon as they become available. What's pictured here is the Ambassador Edition, the model that's only available to a few selected Nintendo Ambassadors. Just in case you're clueless about what these Nintendo Ambassadors are, they're the people that bought a 3DS console in the early dates before the major price drop. In order to compensate those who paid a lot more cash for the console before the price drop, Nintendo created the Ambassador program, giving some bonuses such as free games and exclusive news. In order to enter the Ambassador program, all you had to do was access the internet with a 3DS model during a certain date before the price drop. The original compensation consisted of 20 Virtual Console games from NES and GBA I believe. It's been years since that happened and I thought that the Ambassador program was now useless, but I guess it was not. A few randomly selected ambassadors were  given the early chance to buy this exclusive New 3DS Ambassador Edition a few weeks before the official release date. I was not one those persons though, but someone gave me his chance to get this and I took it.

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You know something's wrong when...

... you're in your early 30s, single and buying Skylanders. Yep, something is odd... I don't have much of an interest in Skylanders to be honest. I don't know who had this weird idea of releasing figurines that interact with a game. These are the most annoying "DLCs" someone released because there are hundreds of these things, some of them are limited, exclusive and extremely rare and... of course, they cost a lot of money, even the regular ones... damn! 

I do have a few exclusive figurines though, including a crystal clear one from the first game that seems to be quite rare. The only reason why I've bought this Trap Team Dark Edition starter pack was mainly because I've also bought the dark and light expansion sets and I completely missed/ignored the Kaos trap, which seems to be worth something. This set is already sold out everywhere and it includes an Ultimate Kaos Trap. This was the very last edition I've managed to find in a store and I didn't buy it immediately. I took some time to think about what to do because, honestly, Skylanders is not exactly my main goal. I have a near complete Smash Bros Amiibo set but let's just not talk about that...

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It's all about that bass

Now here's something I really wasn't expecting to do so early! Another update - a big one this time. The template was changed even though it looks the same. I didn't really feel like changing the layout but  this one has some improvements over the old one. The background's all black for now. The left bar was updated as well, but just slightly. A couple of changes on the way its contents are organized was enough to leave me satisfied for now.

The blog is much, much lighter now that I've added the "read more" functionality. That wasn't very easy to do, even when I had the full code and instructions. Instead of seeing large sized pictures on the main page and lots of annoying text, now you can only see a thumbnail and a short piece of the text. I've been wanting to do this for a very long time but for some reason I never really invested my time in doing it. Now that it's done, I feel that the old layout with the bigger images made this blog look much better and more appealing overall. At the same time, I also prefer the "read more" link and smaller posts of this newer setup, so I'm still a little confused about what to do. I will reevaluate my reaction to these new settings in the near future and see if I will leave it like this or return to the old style.

The full posts are available by clicking the "read more" link.  Clicking the "read more" link also counts towards the number of visits per post, something that did not happen when they were fully displayed at the home page. I'm a little interested about the number of visits my posts will receive now... humm!

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Instantly worth it just because it's Zelda

Yeah, Majora's Mask for the 3DS arrived and so did this little Special Edition that I obviously had to get. It reminds me of the moment when I originally bought the Limited Edition Adventure Set for the N64, the first huge purchase that made it to my collection back in 2005 or 2006 I believe. It's been around 10 years!

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Hagane means Steel

This is proof of how some uncommon older titles became hell on earth to buy within just a few years, after the recent retrogaming boom. I've known this game for quite a while but I never really paid much attention to it. At that time, I noticed it was an uncommon title but not that amazingly expensive compared to most SNES rarities. My interest for this game only grew a couple of years ago. For some time it became my number one SNES priority. However, this game was far harder to track down than I originally imagined. I've seen complete copies of this game going for less than 100 euros many times in the past but once I've decided to buy it it seems the price more than tripled. Eventually, one opportunity popped up and I've decided that it was now or never. Best decision ever, because this copy of the game is as good as new.

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All your update are belong to us

I believe I'm done with the updates. There are some stitches that still need to be removed, but most of the important things are done. All images now have the same aspect throughout the entire blog, many texts were aligned, a few errors and typos were corrected and all the labels were updated. I obviously didn't correct my own grammar because I can't even tell what kind of mistakes I write but I spotted some atrocities written a few years back and I had to fix those. I also removed most of the group pictures with a mess of regular games and editions as I explained earlier. Those are gone forever. Editing hundreds of older posts is an easy task, but a really boring one at the same time, especially in a slow computer like this laptop I'm currently using. It took me many hours to finish this task and it's hard to imagine it's not completely finished yet.

I still have to update three older pictures because I've used inappropriate images for the background, two of which have watermarks that belong to paid websites which I obviously didn't pay for. The third one has a background with soft nudity in it, which seemed fine when I originally posted but I now considered it to be a little bit too explicit. I usually don't favour censorship but there are limits, so I'll be replacing the background on that one as well. All that copyright stuff kinda sucks, honestly, but I've been a victim myself. I was quite amazed to receive a newsletter some time ago from ShopTo and they've used my picture posted in this blog to promote their sales for the Xenoblade Chronicles controller bundle. I am that kind of a nice guy and I just let them do it because 1. the background belongs to the game which has nothing to do with me and 2. it's just a non-professional picture I've taken myself with a replaced background. Maybe I should have sued them and asked for a lot of money? Nah, that only works in civilized countries, not in one like this that's in the second world, just like an immature teenager who's still determining its sexual orientation. And of course, I don't really care if they used it and would never sue anybody for that, even though they could just have asked. I like educated people.

The Facebook page is now up and running but still with zero contents. I will only use it to "post the posts" that I keep writing here anyway, as well as some other random stuff related to games that I might just feel like posting. No big deal.

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Updating this...

Oh no, another text message with no pictures. I'm a terrible person! But there's good reason for this.

I am doing some small updates to this blog. First of all, I've recently created a Facebook page where I'll post all the latest stuff that I write here. All the information, pics, comments and gibberish will be posted exclusively here, so the Facebook page is  not much more than a heads up of what's new here. I still like to keep my low profile. Next year will be this blog's 10th anniversary. I thought that I would eventually grow tired of it after a couple of years but it seems that it's still my favourite place to write stuff that I really can't write anywhere else.

Secondly, I am updating most messages in this blog since the very first one. When I changed the layout a few years ago, most of the older messages remained in the old format, with smaller images and outdated, inaccurate labels. Since I've kept all the original photo montages posted in this blog, I have the chance to update all the old style posts with bigger images to match the same format I'm currently using in the newer messages. And since I'm updating almost every one of the 400+ messages I've posted here so far, I'm also taking my time to update the labels and fix some small errors. I've added at least three new labels, such as Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Basically, you will now have more options to filter all the posts to the themes you like the most. Up to now, you were able to filter my posts per platform but not per company. So if you are only interested in checking my Nintendo or Sony stuff, you'll now have that chance. As an added bonus, I've also created labels for some of the most popular companies such as Square (Enix), EA, Bandai Namco, Capcom and a few others.

Finally, I'm kinda sad to say that a few of the older posts and pictures I've placed here over the years will be removed. This blog has a very simple recipe: whenever I buy something interesting, I take a picture, edit it on photoshop in order to remove the background and then post it along with something I feel like writing at the moment. I don't post everything I have over here and I usually prefer to leave regular games out of this, unless they mean something. This basically works as a special gallery that I can enjoy myself and share with a small number of people. I'm nothing remotely close to a pro photographer and I don't have the patience to take fancy pictures of my stuff, so I came up with these easy, quick and enjoyable editions to remove the backgrounds and give my pictures a better look. It seems to work fine for me and it became a "signature move" of this blog. However, not every post I've placed here follows this criteria. Shortly after creating this blog several years ago, I posted some images with all my latest acquisitions. Some of those images are just messy bundles with too many regular games that don't look good enough. Now I've decided to remove them because I don't consider them interesting enough to be here. I will still leave some of the early compilation photos with multiple games from the same series because those make sense to stay and I still enjoy looking at them. The only problem is that some of those regular bundles sometimes contain important items that deserved individual pictures that I never took. It's okay, I still own all that stuff and I can take those pictures when I have the chance. 

And that's it! I hope this is the last big text in a while :)

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Some more love to the old GG

This one cranked my mind for quite some time. I've seen many pictures of the Master Gear Converter before, but I've actually never seen one with an official box. This is kinda confusing because it's pretty damn hard to find one of these things with the grey patterned box. I don't know where this comes from but for many years I was only able to find the exact same accessory but with different boxes that suggest they are not official. The converter itself seems the exact same no matter what the box looks like, so I don't know what's going on. Once I found out there was one with the official box, I had to wait to find one and that wasn't an easy task. Thankfully, it's here now, and this one is by Sega :).

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When you finally get it...

It took me a pretty long time to finally put my hands on this game. This was another tough one from my wish list. For some reason, it took me quite a long time to get. Tails Adventure was the last Sonic exclusive title I was still missing, and I am pretty glad that I finally have it!

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Not that easy to get...

I was amazed at how fast this one sold out even though it was quite pricey... Kingdom Hearts was a game I played and loved back in the days, but the second title didn't catch my attention as easily as the first one did. I never managed to finish the second game because I eventually grew bored of it. True story...

Considering the price, I don't know why they made such a fragile box. It's a shame some big companies simply try to catch the attention of consumers and collectors in general without really caring for them at the same time...

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And yet another thing I wasn't expecting to buy...

After all that talk about the PS4, I've decided to post a pic of the GameCube Smash Bros controller. Then I posted a picture of the PS4. Now I resume the talk about Smash Bros. This is just not satisfying. But that's okay.

This is another thing I certainly wasn't expecting to buy at this moment. I never imagined the demand for these controller adapters would be so high. This thing is sold out and selling for absurd prices. I completely missed it, even though I had several copies on my hands. Thanks to a friend, I managed to get one copy of this bundle, which now happily lives in my house.

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Missed it.

Yeah, missed it and had to pay 100 euros to get it, which isn't that bad considering how much this is currently selling on eBay. This is definitely the rarest physical copy of a game released so far for the PlayStation 4. It would be nice if I knew about it. By the time I learned about its existence, it was sold out. As expected, a ton of copies ended up on the hands of resellers and popped on eBay from all sorts of different countries. I am glad I have one, but I'm kinda upset for missing the original orders. I mailed the guys from the website but I received no response. It's a shame some companies don't give a crap about consumers in general.

I don't know much about the game because I never got to play it. Retro City Rampage DX. I really want to play this thing... Unfortunately my life right now is no good to be playing games, but once I sort my problems I will spend a few weeks without doing anything else but sleeping, eating and playing. Yup. I need to rest my mind. Being unemployed doesn't help my mind, but neither does all the crap that happened in the last 6 months. 

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Seems unfair...

I just realized that, after all this talk, I still haven't posted a picture of my PS4 20th Anniversary model. I mean, it's nothing THAT impressive considering this is just a picture of sealed box... But still, so much tantrum over this thing and no pic? Nah, this needs to be posted. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what you'll be buying off eBay for exorbitant prices from now on... because you don't know what you'll be getting until you actually open it. 

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My showers are taking longer...

Well, I guess I still have quite a few things to write about... but this blog is becoming more and more text-based with less pictures and I don't really want this to be happening. So, in order to clear my mind about all the sh!t that still needs to be fixed with my life, I'm spending some time taking some pictures of my latest acquisitions. And I shall start with this tiny thingy released not too long ago and suddenly it became sold out. It's a Super Smash Bros. Controller for the Nintendo Gamecube, to be used with the controller adapter. 

It's quite impressive that one of the less successful consoles ever released by the big Nintendo is still leaving its mark on the market after such a long time. In my honest opinion, I think Gamecube was a pretty decent console. It certainly couldn't outmatch the PS2, but I still prefer Gamecube over the original Xbox console. I definitely had some hate over the original Xbox console, which now came back with Xbox One and that's one of the reasons why I didn't buy it - and I seriously don't expect to get it any time soon. It's true that my collection was largely focused on every mainstream console released since the 8-bit era, but  - I've said it before - it's time to change something now. It's becoming increasingly hard to collect videogames nowadays, so a couple of months ago I've made up my mind about just focusing on the most important games I was still missing. In order to do so, I had to sacrifice a ton of recent games. I've decided to stick with the PS4. Sorry Microsoft, but I've always disliked your policies and I always had a crush on PlayStation.

I had no serious intentions of spending the few money I currently own in on this controller at this moment. I really thought no one would pay attention to it, especially considering how poor the GameCube sales were in this country. It's not that special to be fair.. That logo alone doesn't make it impressive. But... knowing it was the only Smash Bros related item, the low number of units available and the fact that it was nearly sold out, I've picked the last opportunity I came across to avoid regrets.

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