I know we’re not supposed to use AI images anymore, and especially not for the featured image, but I wanted to and so I did.
I could have gone with this picture, instead, I guess:
… but I felt it would be more fun to have folks fighting a giant Pikachu. I had the same sort of picture last year. It’s a theme now.
Alright. I went to the expo today hoping to find either or both of “Un Jammer Lammy” or “Parappa the Rappa”. Un Jammer Lammy is a rock-oriented side story to Parappa’s adventure; she appears in both his games. Both games are super uncommon these days. I thought they were pretty well-known, but apparently, they weren’t as popular as I’d thought.
I also wanted to work on my Vectrex game collection. And boy oh boy, there were a lot of Vectrex games there.
They had games for the light pen, games for the 3D imager, games complete in box, loose games… I’m constantly surprised at how much love there is for this old forgotten console. A guy in the Retro Console booth was happily playing Defender on it when I walked by.
The ones that look new and complete in box were auction lots. I figured, conservatively, each lot would go for a minimum of $300 in auction. Minimum. That’s money I don’t have. With a vacation coming up, too… it just wasn’t going to happen. I don’t think I’ll ever see such a pristine collection of Vectrex games in one place again. Even when it was new, I never saw so many games for it.
Okay, so what games did we get? Well, we got a few. Most of them even worked when we got them home. There was even a Vectrex game.
Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance for the PlayStation 2 is an action RPG by the same folks who did Champions: Return to Arms that I talked about the other day. The graphics and control are somewhat better. You play an adventurer who comes to Baldur’s Gate, is robbed, and is thrown into levels and layers of deception and intrigue as you struggle to get back what was stolen from you.
Final Fantasy Legend II — Gameboy
Presumably a sequel to Final Fantasy Legend, that weird take on mobile RPGs that I played a bit back. I think it probably was released as part of some other series in Japan and just renamed to be Final Fantasy because every JRPG has to be Final Fantasy here or something. The first one had nothing to do with Final Fantasy’s normal themes of heroes of lights, crystals, Magitek, chocobos and stuff.
Mahjong Quest — GB Color
Kasul continues on his endless quest to obtain every Mahjong game. This is the latest. I only was making sure it worked; I don’t know what the quest is. I think it would be cool if it were a JRPG, but instead of killing each other, you sat down to Mahjong. That’d be cool. I doubt that’s what this game is, though.
I looked it up. It’s solo Mahjong, the tile matching puzzle game.
Mazes of Fate — GBA
First person RPG in the vein of Eye of the Beholder and similar titles.
Wai Wai Mahjong — PC Engine
It’s a Mahjong game that Kasul didn’t have, and now he does. We didn’t see any Othello games I didn’t already have, btw. In this Mahjong game, you play against just one opponent instead of three. This could make scoring tiles more interesting, as there’s rules on picking up discarded tiles based on where you’re sitting in relation to the player that discarded them.
Yes, the Analogue Pocket can play PC Engine games.
DragonQuest Monsters — GBA
All these games were run on, and screenshotted from, my Analogue Pocket, btw. Such a nice machine.
I think DQ Monsters is a monster breeding game, like Digimon, but I’m not sure. We also bought DragonQuest Monsters 2, but I couldn’t get it working.
Dino Breeder — Gameboy
We saw a lot of pet raising games. A few hamster ones, a bunny one, and bins and bins of Tamagotchi and clones. This is one such. It has cute dinos.
Card Game — Gameboy
That’s the name of the game. It has four different card games you can play, including one called “USA game”. I’d have thought that was Texas Hold’em, but it seemed to be a draw poker variant.
Tamagotchi: Osutchi and Mesutchi — Gameboy
You can argue with my romanization of the title if you like. This version of Tamagotchi has its own sound system so you can carry the cartridge around with you. When your little tama needs attention, it will let you know, and you can pop it into your Gameboy and see what it needs.
Ogre Battle Gaiden: Prince of Zenobia — Neo Geo Pocket Color
I actually got this awhile ago, for Christmas, but I didn’t have the adapter set for my Analogue Pocket to see if it worked. It works fine.
Other games
There was another Gameboy game I couldn’t get working, the original Puyo Puyo. The version for the Saturn, I think — Puyo Puyo Sun? I don’t remember. Anyway it helped me learn Japanese back in the day. I’ll have to open it up and see if I can get it to do anything.
I didn’t try the Vita games; that’s Kasul’s collection. Three Super Famicom games; the one in Japanese says Super Double Mahjong, and you can guess whose game that is. Forspoken is a PS5 solo action RPG that came out a year or two ago and was promptly forgotten; I enjoyed the demo and it was cheap, so I got it. Melody Master for the Vectrex is a light pen game where you write music. I’ll need to get the light pen. They had an original one for $150 at the con, but there’s a guy who makes aftermarket ones for $60.
The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King manual was meant to go with my LotR GBA cart, but it turns out my cart was the Two Towers. So I guess I need to get the RotK one now.
The little Gameboy and controller charms are on my Crocs. I talked about the Crocs recently.
A decent haul, all things considered. If I were rich, I’d have all those mint Vectrex games, but I hope whoever did get them appreciates them.
I have fond but vague memories of Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance. In fact I might still have my copy kicking around here. Somewhere in the back of one of my closets I have boxes of games going back to the 3DO and Atari Jaguar.
There’s two systems I never had 🙂
Vectrex is a console I remember wanting when it first came out. The graphics were so different from everything else at the time.
The problem with ‘mint in box’ games is that you can’t play them. They are collectors items. Better to my way of thinking to get ‘gently loved’ games that you can actually play.
Overall, though, it looks the the expo was a good bit of fun nostalgia 🙂
That’s the thing with the Vectrex; someone made a multi-cart, that I have, that has every single Vectrex game on it — including some unreleased games and student games. So I already have all these games. I don’t have the colored overlays or the instruction manuals, but yeah — buying these would be buying them only to collect them, and I am not rich enough to care for such a collection. It would just be a lot of money gone for shelf decorations.