Retrospelsmässan 2018

This Saturday me and my Geeky Gals went to Scandinavia’s largest retro gaming convention, Retrospelsmässan in Gothenburg! Like last year we got to host a Tetris competition in Super Tetris 3 for Super Famicom, and this year we also held a tournament in GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 :D You can read more about the competitions on Geeky Gals blog, meanwhile here’s some pics the convention :)

Since I left my little girl at home with her dad I couldn’t stay at the convention much longer than the duration of the contests we hosted, but I did get a few minutes to quickly scour the market XD Also I had made a few deals beforehand ^_^ I am really pleased with all the items that came home with me :D First of all I got 4 more Tetris games for the Tetris collection!! One was a gift from Sonefors <3 the other three I bought from my friend Kralleman :) The three I bought are a bit rare to come by here in Sweden, one is a prototype of Tetris Attack for the Super Nintendo. It reads SNS-AYLE on the label and I think it’s either North or South American. The other two are games I already have as well but from different regions, one is the NES classic Tetris but the Asian version, this one has a beautiful light grey cartridge <3 The other is a Brasilian Tetris 2 for Nintendo NES. From Sonefors I got a PC CD-rom big box version of The Next Tetris :D I am happy to have also brought home an old PC that I bought a while back from my friend Nesfrk, he has been fixing it for me so I hope it works now, if it does I have SO MANY PC CD-ROM Tetris games to try out :D :D

Here’s the cool vintage PC that Nesfrk brought to me at the convention, it is clever since the screen is mounted on top of the computer so it doesn’t consume as much space <3

Compaq Presario 5226 PC

I also found a few Philips Videopac games! (Or Magnavox Odyssey as it was called in North America) They all had some sweet boxart, and Blobbers was apparently quite rare, but the best one is definitely Hot Love! XD It has been my latest focus in my collecting to find Erotic games for various retro video game systems! :D I just find it so fascinating and funny, especially when it’s really shitty graphics! XD Hot Love for Magnavox Odyssey 2 even came with a free condom!! LOL Unfortunately though Turtles had the wrong game inside, Turtles is number 49 in the series, but inside I found cartridge 52 which is a game called Killer Bees, so now I have to start searching for the Killer Bees box and a loose cartridge no. 49…

Lastly I also found a Sega Genesis game that I’ve had my eye on many times. Boogerman A Pick and Flick Adventure! Now I came across it at a cheap price and in really minty condition ^_^ Thanks to MSX at Butik Mackapär for always selling such cool games! I also recently acquired a Genesis so I can play it too! :D

Sega Genesis Boogerman A pick and flick adventure

I wish I had more time to explore the rest of the convention, but I’ll have to do that next year :) Then my daughter can come with me as well :D I’m still really happy with my findings in such a short amount of time ^_^

Retrospelsfestivalen 2017!

Last weekend I visited Retrospelsfestivalen in Malmö. A retro gaming convention in the south of Sweden that is now running for the fourth year in a row. This year they had changed the venue to a place called Inkonst. I really liked this new venue, they had used the stage downstairs for the marketplace which was awesome. So many retro games for sale, awesome sellers and tidy tables filled with retro gaming goodness ^_^

Apart from games you could as usual also find a lot of retro gaming merchandise, artwork and crafts :)

Upstairs there was a large area decorated with various console demo kiosks and arcade machines that were set to free play. They also had a demo corner surrounding the small stage where the competitions were held. Unfortunately I didn’t have the energy to stick around all day (I’m over 7 months pregnant right now), so I missed all the competitions and the lectures that were being held :( It was all really nicely set up though, and well organised :)

Scattered around the place were small personal collections on display, like Final Fantasy and Game & Watch :)

I had a great time at Retrospelsfestivalen and I’m already looking forward to next years convention! It’s always great to get to meet all the friends I’ve gotten to know in the retro gaming world of Sweden ^_^ And of course I bought some cool stuff as well ;D I’ll make a post of that soon! Meanwhile, check out Geeky Gals post from the convention to read more about a cool game called Wünderling that was being showcased at Retrospelsmässan :D

Various Atari 2600 carts & other Atari l00t from Retro Gathering VCE 2017

This is part 1 of my Retro Gathering l00t :) I will go through everything bit by bit once I’m done sorting and cleaning stuff ^_^ As you might have seen on my Instagram it was quite a large haul XD So let’s start off with all my Atari related pickups! I found quite a few Atari 2600 games thanks to my friend nesfrk who pointed out to me the big box of Atari carts that was hiding under a table that I had missed! I ended up buying 22 Atari 2600 games in total, and many of them were in different shapes and sizes. I haven’t really read up a lot about these, but it started fascinating me after I found out about the Atari V-carts that I recently bought from a friend, and now I kind of wanna know what the rest of the weird looks of the Atari 2600 carts are about XD

Some of them are a bit more obvious, they were released by a certain company that just made their own style of cartridges and labels, such as Parker Brothers or ActiVision. Parker Brothers’ Atari 2600 carts have a really cool shape in my opinion, and the labels are silver. I don’t know if there were other variants, but all the ones I own which read Parker Brothers on the back all have silver labels. And the ActiVision ones are a bit more dull, just black and white but with the ActiVision logo printed in the plastic on the back, just like the Parker Brothers logo. ActiVision does have other labels as well, more colourful, I own a few of those as well, but I think these black and white ones might be region specific.

These are the common Atari carts that I’m used to seeing. Either with a silver label, a black label with a colourful name on the side or the black with silver frame labels. Also there’s the full color ones, that have one bright background colour and same colour on the end label.

I found some odd carts with 2 games in 1 called 2 Pak Special. I’ve never seen these before. The seller told me they were Australian (if I’m not mistaken). Kind of ugly, but still charming in a way XD

I also got Hero by Imagineering, from 1990 (!!), and I just read that they didn’t discontinue the Atari 2600 until 1992! 25 years later!! this blew my mind XD Then there was a Telegames game called Armor Ambush with a silver label and finally three unidentifiable games. Two of them have the same cartridge case, it has S.S imprinted on the back, but other than that it only reads the game name and no publisher, so I’m thinking they might be bootlegs? They’re German at least I can tell from the names XD Funny names! Super-Cowboy beim Rodeo and Vom Himmel durch die Hölle (From heaven to hell). The last one called Lilly Adventure has a similar cartridge case but it’s a little bit shorter and doesn’t have anything printed on the plastic..

So many variations right! :D That’s probably far from all of them as well XD I also found two joysticks for the Atari 2600. The Driving paddle controller :) It was apparently needed for the Indy 500 game, so I ran and picked them up from the place at the convention where I had seen them earlier that day, by Butik Mackapär ^_^

I also picked up a few Atari 400 games. I bought an Atari 400 not too long ago, haven’t got it up and running yet, but I will make another attempt soon. Meanwhile I found these game cartridges for it :)

And I also got one Atari ST game ^_^ It was cheap, in nice condition and I liked the cover art :)

More posts are coming with the rest of the loot from Retro Gathering soon ^_^

Retro Rumble 2016 ~ Winter Edition ~

I managed to squeeze in another Retro Rumble before the year ended, on December 27th. This time was an all-time high in the amount of visitors! We were over 30 people! At least 21 of these were competing in the Retro Rumble competition ^_^ It was great, and a bit crowded XD A lot of old friends who I haven’t seen for a while came this time, and also a bunch of new friends who had never visited my game room before! :D My godson Benjamin is now the youngest Retro Rumble visitor ever XD

The competition consisted of 5 games that everyone had to play. These were:
1. Race on Philips Videopac 7200, one try, 2 minutes, get the highest score.
2. Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time on VIC-20. One life, get the highest score.
3. Spaceman Splorf on C64. One life, get the highest score.
4. Cycho Rider on PC Engine CD. One try, 2 minutes, get the highest score.
5. Katochyan & Kenchyan on PC Engine. One life, one stage, get the highest score.

Everybody competes individually but they’re also divided into teams, there’s a winning team score as well as an individual score :) The winning team was team “Spökplumpen” with Mattias, Matte and Leigh! :D The individual scores were really close this time, so we had to have an extra match to see who would make it into the semi-finals. This stood between Christian and Klas. They got to play The Kick Boxing on Sega Mega Drive and Christian came out victorious! :)

In the semi-finals the 4 highest scoring individuals battled in 3 different games on Super Famicom. I usually have these games or similar ones, because it’s so convenient using the Super Famicom multitap, and there’s just so many games on the system which has 4 player compatibility. The games they competed in were VS Collection, Sugoi Hebereke and Super Bomberman 2.

The two highest scores from the semi-finals were Matte and Christian. They went on to play in the finals which started of with Freeway on Atari 2600 :D Christian won this one, and the second game was Air Sea Battle on Philips Videopac G7200. They couldn’t seem to win over eachother in this one, after two rounds it was a draw XD So it ended with a game of Combat on Atari 2600 and Christian came out victorious! Congrats! :D

I know a few people have contacted me about what their scores were, here you can download the PDF >>

Thanks to everyone who attended! Hopefully I’ll see you again for a new Retro Rumble coming up in 2017! :D

Trading games for games ^_^

A guy recently contacted me because he saw that I had some games for trade on my blog, we started emailing back and forth and he actually had a bunch of Famicom games and a few other games that I didn’t have, so we made a nice deal ^_^ He received a few boxed Sega Mega Drive and Master System games for a few loose Famicom and Game Boy carts. I’m really happy with the trade, especially with the cute handheld I also got! It’s TETRIS :D And I played it for almost 2 hours when it first arrived XD

What’s odd about this Tetris game is that it only gives you points for each block you place, you don’t get points for making rows or even a “Tetris”.. it’s seems to be more mission based, once in a while you level up and they clear the board and give you a piece of the rocket it seems :) Then it starts over, slightly more difficult. It also took a while to get into the controls, since it doesn’t have an up or down button, at least down I’m used to pressing when I wan’t them to go a bit faster, here there’s only left and right. Instead there’s a drop-button where A or B usually sits, I accidentally pressed this one so many times and just threw the piece down XD It was a nice challenge though!

The Famicom games I got were mainly the ones you’ve gotten to see my first Famicom Impressions posts of ^_^ There’s yet another one coming soon ;D

I picked a bunch of Game Boy games that I thought looked interesting, these Japanese carts still deceive me though XD Only a handful were playable, the rest were mainly RPGs or some kind of strategy or weird Japanese game that was just boring.. Maybe I should start making Game Boy impressions as well :)

The final one  among the pictures above is a game by Konami called Hunter X Hunter: Hunter no Keifu, not to be confused with Hunter X Hunter: Kindan no Hihou. I briefly looked up the gameplay beforehand, which I usually never do, and I thought this was an awesome Castlevania-like sidescrolling platformer (which Kindan no Hihou is), but this one is not that… I don’t even know what genre this specifies under.. RPG/Strategy/walk-around-pointlessly-on-grids-without-any-action-what-so-ever?!? Anyway, below is some gameplay from it.. it has some nice music that quickly becomes repetitive, but apart from that I’m completely lost to it’s purpose.. I have since ordered Hunter X hunter: Kindan no Hihou through eBay, can’t wait for that one to arrive! :D

Korean Tetris games add upp to 100 different Tetris games! :D

I’ve reached 100 various Tetris games! :D I think I will celebrate with playing some more Tetris tonight!! ^__^

My two latest additions are not that common. One is Tetris on MSX from Korea, or Zemmix as they called the MSX there. Apparently Korean government banned Japanese companies from selling products in Korea, so they made their own knock-offs. The Zemmix / MSX Tetris game is not the greatest Tetris I’ve played. It’s odd. It only gives you 1 point per row cleared, no bonus for making a Tetris (4 rows at once), and the sound effects and music is scarce and dull. Also the controls are quite jumpy, I don’t know if it’s my joypads that are glitchy, but I tried 3 different ones and it was equally difficult to steer the tetraminos..

Anyway, here’s some gameplay of it,  I sat for hours last night trying to record gameplay through my Elgato but I just couldn’t get the signal unscrambled, it has some serious anti-pirating code built in or something XD So I ended up just shooting it with my phone.. sorry for shitty quality, but at least you can see what it’s like ^_^ I couldn’t find a video of it anywhere else..

The latest addition is another Korean game, but for the Gam-Boy, which is Korea’s equivalent to the Sega Master System or the Sega Mark III. The Gam-Boy was produced by Samsung in Korea. It reads 테트리스 which means Tetris ^_^

This was better than the MSX/Zemmix version of Tetris, it had a lot of different settings. One cool feature that I’ve only seen a few times before in Chinese Tetris games is the scrolling. If you set it to scroll the blocks at the bottom will shift one block to the left or right (it changes each level you increase) and makes it more difficult to plan how you want to build! It’s interesting :) But you can of course play without the scrolling feature as well. In the beginning there’s also the choice of Easy or Hard mode, hard makes the floor rise with random blocks once in a while, and you can also set speed to Low or High, once you get to the next screen though you have even more selections where you can set level and height, the height starts you off with blocks already on the board. You can basically make it really difficult for yourself by setting highest speed, highest level, tallest height and add some scroll to it XD Basically impossible! I enjoyed it, except for the music that was kind of shitty and the controls being a bit jumpy. There was like a delay every time a new tetramino appeared in the top.

I recorded some gameplay of this one too so you can see what it’s like ^_^ Here’s Korean Tetris for the Gam-Boy / Sega Master System / Sega Mark III:

Some other recent Tetris purchases that has helped adding my collection up to 100 Tetris games are these ones below ^_^ Two quite rare ones for the Japanese MSX and the Sharp X68000. I still need to find myself an X68000, so I can play it! That one and the PC ones are the only ones I can’t play right now. I also need to find an old PC with Windows 98 XD… Tetris Elements and Tetris Gold are both PC games. Then there’s a ZX Spectrum Tetris game, Tetris Attack for Game Boy (which isn’t quite Tetris in my opinion, but since it’s called Tetris I’ll count it..) and a Japanese PS2 Tetris Kiwamemichi game ^_^

See the entire collection of 100 different Tetris games >>

Here’s some gameplay of Tetris Ultimate that I usually play when I’m on my Xbone. Just to show that I don’t suck completely at Tetris XD