Summer 2016 Plans Update

I am pleased the planning for the Summer 2016 is going very well, a few more people scheduled to turn up. For me its a series of social events centred around my passions in life, gaming, consoles and role-playing.

I have been looking into various ways of getting some of the retro consoles up onto a modern LED TV and decided that this summer I will be biting the bullet and investing in a Framemeister. I feel confident about spending the right money on a device which will enable me to play my old consoles for the foreseeable future.

I still intend to buy and build a JAMMA unit based around the Pandora's Box/Game Elf unit.

My View on the Different Sources of Retro Games

I've tried most methods of getting hold of retro hardware and software for gaming purposes and want to give my thoughts on all aspects of these.

eBay
It's rare to get a bargain on eBay these days and if you do manage to spot one you'll be outbidded within minutes. eBay is an unsatisfying way to sell hardware and software and a minefield if you buy. The only good thing is that as a buyer you have a fair amount of protection.

Amazon
I have never seen a piece of retro gaming less than the market price on Amazon. It may be a good source of hardware or current tech but you won't find any bargains on Amazon or its sellers.

Retro-Gaming Shops
While these kind of places are considered the backbone of the gaming community in reality they are commercial operations that are only as good as their current stock and the relationship they have with their customers. Sadly both of these are wildly different.
Most retro shops that do well engage their customers via Facebook and Twitter. Stock ranges from the expected and routine hardware and software to some genuine gems. Most commonly these items are snapped up by serious collectors and rarely get into the hands of an average collector. It's almost as if the best stuff is already earmarked for an existing customer and a casual visitor is lucky to get anything half decent. It's almost as if the stock in the shop is the leftovers the hardcore collectors didn't want.

CEX & Game
You won't find anything retro here. The PS2 games they stock are the most common ones and the odd Gamecube games they have aren't worth looking at. There will come a time shortly when they will out all their "retro" games and all that will remain retro in these shops will be PS3 and XBOX360.

Friends, Family and Word of Mouth
If you haven't already you should at least ask, but in reality your mum and dad would long ago sold anything you left behind after you moved out.

Car Boot Sales
Private traders and the odd lucky strike are your only hopes for these kind of places. It doesn't take long to burn out on these as greedy collectors and existing car boot traders scour the early visitors buying up any stock and reselling quickly.

Facebook Groups
I recently joined one of the many Facebay groups and it's rare to get any retro games or consoles here. You may get lucky with a CRT TV but in reality the "big" collectors are already posting "wanted" ads and most people who sell here are clearing out old Wii crap.

Gumtree & Craigslist
I recently found out that Gumtree is part of the eBay network so while I have found the odd bargain most of it is overpriced and like Craigslist can be mostly discarded as who wants to sift through hundreds of daily adverts for that one bargain.

Is the Golden Age of Retro Game Collecting Over?

Once a console manufacturer is getting ready to launch its next console, it does everything it possibly can to liquidate any old stock of hardware and games. It is at that point the console is on borrow time. The moment they stop making the console its at that point the console is considered a retro machine. Of course you will still be able to buy the equipment for most likely a year after its final manufacturing date.

So as of now the Playstation 3, the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360 I would considered as being retro and surprisingly also the best time to acquire any of those games you missed first time around.

The trouble is collecting games for any console older than these 3 is nothing short of a nightmare.

Any console from the 1980s is impossible to find working units or games that arent already in the hands of collectors, and those machine you find up for sale are not the pristine units you would hope to find.

Any console from the 1990s has an unrealistic price tag associated with it and it was during this boom era that console and gaming started to impact on other forms of media.

Any console from the 2000s would have already been snapped up by collectors already, as Im certain that during this decade the savvy collector would have kept hold of any games or consoles worth keeping. For instance a good quality Gamecube is proving to be very hard, and the good games are impossible to find.

Adventures in Gaming Part 10

Adventures in Gaming Part 10

In the 1980s I was a huge fan of of the weekly British comic 2000AD. One of the most popular stories was about the anti-hero Nemesis the Warlock. The Nemesis the Warlock computer game was a platformer released by Martech which had one of Rob Hubbard’s finest pieces of music, a very slow build to an epic score. The game was not very well received at the time and deservedly so, as it was difficult, demanding and fundamentally unfair to play. It had some lazy game design choices, but despite all this I still enjoyed it. It was a static screen platform shooter where enemies would appear from the sides and top of the screen and you could kill them with your sword or limited ammunition gun. If the enemy touched you or shot you with their guns you slowly lost energy.

Once you completed a level (which involved you killing 99 enemies), you had to choose which direction you exited the level. Up, down, left or right. This was where the lazy game design choice came into being. You could only exit the level in one direction, but there were no clues or indications as to which was the correct exit direction. If you choose the wrong exit, you died and had to start that level again. So it was always trial and error, and at best you had a one in four chance to find the exit to a new level. Because each level could take several minutes to complete, in some instances ten or fifteen minutes, getting far in the game was not easy. I think I managed to get to the third level after many hours of playing. The secret to getting far in the game was to always keep moving, save the ammo for difficult combats and find brief safe havens to wait and slowing eliminate the enemy. Oh and always make notes of what the exit route is once you complete the level. It could be several days between chances to playing the game. The game didn't have very many levels and got generally average to poor reviews in the magazines of the day. The graphics were chunky and the bloody “chestburster” animations were vivid and noisy, and the sword and gunplay was satisfying. Every dead body would litter the screen and slowly build up, making difficult and impossible areas to reach much easier, but also it would affect the route the enemies took, making it easier to hunt you down.

Also from the pages of 2000AD came Judge Dredd computer game released by Gremlin Graphics, but it was a platform game with some static three dimensional shooting elements, similar to Operation Wolf. They also made a Rogue Trooper game, but I never got it to load more than three times as it seemed to be a very temperamental loader, despite being an original copy. It looked interesting as it was an isometric arcade adventure.

Star Strike 3D on the Spectrum was a stunning game that managed to get the entire Star Wars arcade game running in wireframe on the humble home computer and running at a respectable speed. An official version of Star Wars would later appear, but the stunning technical achievement of Star Strike 3D rightfully stole this game’s thunder. They did eventually release an official version and it was very well done, but a little late.

The Sacred Armour of Antiriad was a Commodore 64 game that was a platform arcade adventure but was also a difficult game but with a back story worth playing to find out the ending. It was one of the best arcade adventures for the machine, and rivalled the best that the Spectrum had to offer. The music and ambient sounds were brilliant, and most notable for being very hard.

Barbarian was a notorious computer game released for all the 8 bit machines. I got the Commodore 64 versions. It was a single or two player fantasy fighting game. What made it notorious was two factors. The first was with the decapitations that were fairly easy to pull off. And the blatantly sexist adverts. It actually was a decent fighting game under all those huge graphics, despite all the anti-sexist and anti-violence crowd complaining. It had two venues, a forest glade or a mini arena and an opponent which got ever harder. It was a very good game that was helped by Maria Whittaker (a popular Sun newspaper Page 3 topless model at the time) posing on the box art and the blood and violence of the game itself. Barbarian was far superior to the Ocean Software game released around the same time. Highlander that was released that year as well, based on the film and was a terrible game. The game is limited because it only had three opponents for you to fight, but each opponent had to be loaded as a completely separate game.

Barbarian proved to be an immensely popular game despite the outrage of a half naked man and woman on the cover. It proved to be that popular it spawned a sequel, Barbarian II, which was visually the same fighting game, but introduced an arcade adventure element which had you wandering around dungeons, forests and other locations and encountering different creatures as well as human opponents to fight. This kind of exploring and beat em up gameplay would not be revisited until the release of the almost legendary Moonstone for the 16 bit home computers.

Pitstop 2 on the Commodore 64 by Epyx was a driving game that was legendary for causing severe hand ache and for being the first driving game to introduce the infamous pit stop sequence. Pitstop 2 had a very good driving game model that was far superior than even the highly acclaimed Atari Pole Position game. Pitstop 2 was made even more special by the addition of a two player element, tyre wear and fuel. Driving around six different tracks you had to pay attention to the wear rate on your four tyres which slowly changed from green, to yellow to orange then to red. You also had to watch your fuel level as you could run out of fuel. Red tyres blew out and reduced your speed to a crawl, while running out of fuel had the same effect. The game therefore became a very basic strategy game where you were watching your tyre wear rate and fuel consumption and decided when to make that all important pitstop. You then played an arcade sequence wherein you filled the car with fuel and changed all four tyres at the same time. The pitstop element blended time management and strategy together to ensure you were not wasting valuable seconds. You had to manually change all four tyres and ensure you didn't over spill the fuel nozzle, which if you did reset back to zero and would count up again. Races would last over many laps would take up to twenty minutes to play, and if you played a whole season of six tracks, that was a whole afternoon gone. The actual tracks themselves were named after real world counterparts, but none of them actually bore no resemblance at all. It would be a a few years later that we’d get to play the original Pitstop game and it was nothing special at all. It was one of the most iconic Commodore 64 games of all time.

If I Ran a Retro - Gaming Store pt1 - Stock

If I Ran my own Retro - Gaming Store there are quite a few things I would do differently.

There are 3 types of customer

Regular Visitors/Collectors - usually local
Casual Visitors/Collectors - not as local but still a customer
Online Customers

Each one requires a different approach and also feeding of information.

When new stock comes in not everything would go on the shelf. Stock rotation is essential and a big haul of stock requires careful planning as to what goes in the shop and what stays in the stock room.

Something CEX would do well to bear in mind, you need only stock 1 copy of a game on the shelf for it to sell. Having 10 copies of FIFA 2002 just looks desperate.

I would cultivate a relationship with all collectors so I knew their wants.

Most retro shops I have visited seem to have a feast or famine approach to stock which seems to be unique to this industry. By holding some stock back it ensures the regular visitors are catered for, plus you get to tell them in advance of stock items which will be coming in "next week" and the irregular visitors are guaranteed to get to see something worth the trip.

Those stock items that take a while to shift I would put on eBay to free up shelf space for quality and genuinely collectible games.

Xenoblade Chronicles X Wii U

I own but haven't played more than an hour yet of the original Wii game but from the reviews and YouTube videos I've seen this is something special.

When I heard a remake/revisit was occurring on the Wii U I was excited but not by the price point.

£50 boxed is too much for a game that I may never get to play and I started to see it appear on the 2nd hand market at a £35 price mark. I managed to pick it up today for £25 at CEX and it's gone on the shelf for when I can dedicate a couple of weeks to play it.

1st Charity Shop Hunt - Eltham

Inspired by a few YouTube videos I thought I'd make an effort and just reall look to see what games and odds and sods I could find.

Being stuck in Eltham, London for a couple of hours I managed to visit every charity shop in the high street and picked up 5 items all for £1 each.

Metallica DVD S&M live concert which is readily available on YouTube but this set comes with 2 DVDs bonus and extras particularly the unusual feature of being able to switch cameras on the fly so you can edit your own concert on several of the songs.

I also picked up The League of Gentlemen BBC series 3. I have series 1 somewhere but it's one of BBCs most important and influencing dark comedies.

Rounding this off was 2 sealed games (Theme Hospital, Sim City 2000 Game of the Year) and Battlefield 2142.