First update since early February! No, I am not dead. It’s just been crazy busy for such a short month. Midterms are tomorrow so I have been studying my ass off, and work and family and blah blah blah. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been collecting games, though. I have been very Ebay-centric as of late due to my almost total lack of doing anything except school and work, but unfortunately not much of my bounty has arrived yet. Expect many updates in March. Anyway, down to brass tax:
I actually picked this up at a local comic book shop, of all places. It is the soundtrack to one of my favorite 8-bit RPGs of all time, Final Fantasy 3 for the Famicom. This comic book joint actually has a fair selection of video game soundtracks, however most of them are woefully overpriced.
This OST only set me back about $16 brand new, so I was pretty happy about that. Not only is the soundtrack amazing, but it came with this overly-complicated inlay that has three separate parts to it, including a pretty killer fold-out poster;
This next cart comes from one of my favorite places on the entire internet, GameReproductions.com. I have been bugging Phillip over at GR for months on and off about perspective SNES titles that he should add to his site, and about a month ago I just happened to ask for the right game at the right time. He offered to sell me a fully translated board of Seiken Densetsu 3 that he had been experimenting with. I, of course, jumped at the offer to get the holy grail of SNES RPG fanatics the world over. Since I received my board, Phillip has put teh SD3 cart up for sale on Game Reproductions , so by all means head over there and join me in my radness.
If for some reason you don’t know what Seiken Densetsu 3 is, I will enlighten you. We saw a localized and slightly altered version of Seiken Densetsu 1 on these shores as Final Fantasy Adventure for the original Game Boy. The series was originally a action/RPG gaiden of the Final Fantasy franchise, but all connections were pushed under the rug when Square released Seiken Densetsu 2 for the Super Famicom. We also got a re-branded version of SD2 in North America called Secret of Mana, which is one of the greatest game ever made. So, if you have been paying attention, Seiken Densetsu 3 is basically Secret of Mana 2… which makes it full-on fucking awesome.
Next up, I have something that I have been searching for for a long time. I finally found it at a really good price:
Colonel’s Bequest. I would place this right up there with Hero’s Quest as one of my favorite adventure games of all time. I guess I am just a sucker for art-deco noir mysteries. Colonel’s Bequest, while not a huge success for Sierra, did do some pretty impressive things and push the adventure game in new directions such as creating a game world that gave the illusion that events where happening all around you while an in game clock ticked the hours away. It gave you the opportunity to play the game multiple times without ever having the exact same experience twice, which was a pretty thrilling and novel concept at the time of the games release.
Colonel’s Bequest was released in the late 80’s when Sierra was in the midst of upgrading it’s adventure game engine, the Sierra Creative Interrupter 0 (SCI0) to SCI1, and rather than wait for the eventual advent of VGA graphics that SCI1 would provide and a resulting lull in releases, Sierra pretty much gave their creative team free range to try and push the aging build of the Sierra Creative Interrupter 0. This resulted in a fist full of games that, although lacking both visually and sound-wise behind software created with more powerful engines such as LucasArts’ SCUMM version 3, the game designers at Sierra instead dove into experimentation. This led to such unique and diverse titles as Codename: Iceman, Hero’s Quest (which basically invented the adventure game RPG as a result of this experimentation), and of course, Colonel’s Bequest.
This copy that I tracked down is for the Amiga 500 and it’s pretty much in mint condition. I got it for a $11 best offer on Ebay, so the price was right. If you have never played this title, I definably recommend downloading DOSBox and digging it. It is truly a classic not to be missed.
Last, but certainly not least, I finally have a CIB copy of Mario Paint.
I have been passively searching for one of these for a while now, and when this one came up in a local game shop for $15 i couldn’t pass it up. Yes, it’s dated, but it’s still fun to play around with every once and a while.
More later in week, as that’s when I expect the packages to start rolling in…
Video Games are Rad 