This year at Retrospelsmässan I actually had a table shared with my friend Cleareyes where I spent half the time selling some of my doubles. I also spent time on the Tetris competition that I was hosting, so I didn’t get much time to shop around. There were LOADS of games for sale this year! I wish I had more time to scour through everything! But I did manage to find a few cool things :)
First up are some really nice Japanese Sega Mega Drive games! The Swedish Pong champion, Barkis, was selling off his personal collection. I managed to score Gleylancer, Splatterhouse Part 3 and Awesome Possum! I also got Rastan Saga II and Shijou Saidai no Soukoban which I had no clue what they were but I was hoping they were playable XD
Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer is an awesome shoot-em-up. It’s quite pricey and I didn’t think I would ever find a copy that I’d be willing to pay the price for. But together with these other games I made a good deal :) It’s a pretty good shmup! It has nice graphics, varied stages, power-ups and various settings for your side-guns. It was fairly easy, but once you die you loose your power-ups and side-guns which make it a bit more challenging.
Awesome Possum is a classic platformer, unfortunately not as awesome as I had hoped >_< You could basically just jump around, and Mr. Possum was very difficult to control. It didn’t feel like you could steer him to where you wanted to go. And the story was a bit lame.. you have to run around the rain forest and collect trash to save the environment, and stop robots from cutting down the trees.. in between stages you got a quiz, felt like you were back in elementary school XD A poorly produced game if you ask me..
I have a few games in the Splatterhouse series, the second one for Sega Mega Drive, the one for PC Engine and Wanpaku Grafitti for the Famicom (although that one can hardly be counted as the same XD) and now I also got Splatterhouse Part 3 which I think was better than what I remember from both the 2nd one for Mega Drive and the PC Engine version. The controls were a bit smoother, it was more fluent. It wasn’t just a regular brainless beat ’em up where you can just button mash the attack button and get away with it. Even though Rick only had one attack button you still had to use timing and strategy to outsmart the enemies. You had to be on your toes a bit more than in usual beat ’em ups. I liked that about it :) But some rooms were ridiculous, like the flying hands or the books/objects’ room where stuff just came flying at you constantly, pushing you backwards with no way of you being able to attack them back.. super annoying.. I also ran out of time on the third stage, but nothing happened, I could just continue to look for the boss room until I found it and beat it o_O
Shijou Saidai no Soukoban was a puzzle game where you pushed blocks around to get them to the marked spots to clear a stage. The graphics/colour and overall look of it was kind of boring. I played a couple of stages but eventually got stuck and I don’t have patience for these kind of puzzle games. I prefer Tetris ^_^
The final Japanese Mega Drive game I got was Rastan Saga II. Everybody has told me it’s the shittiest game ever. And sure, the character was a bit stiff, he looked silly and was badly animated, but I liked the colourful graphics, it was definitely not as bad as Sword of Sodan XD But yeah, after reaching the second stage boss I agree, it’s definitely not a good game. I wasn’t able to get a hit on Medusa without her hitting me like three times first >_<
I picked up an original grey Nintendo Game Boy as well, mainly because it came in this funky carry case. I already have this carry case, but it’s my favourite, so now I have two :) I also got two games with it, Tetris and Motocross Maniacs, and it was a good deal.
Apart from that I picked up a few Game Boy titles: Star Saver, Migraine, Booby Boys, Volleyfire and Sanrio Carnival.
Migraine is a typ of puzzle game where you turn levers to steer a laser that pops bubbles. It was extremely boring and frustrating. The controls were slow and the stages had an annoying time limit..
The Adventures of Star Saver on the other hand is a great platforming shooter :) And the music is awesome!! I recommend trying this one out :D
I thought Volleyfire would be a shmup as well, but not really. You’re only on one screen, facing an opponent and you have to shoot down his health by getting your shot in between the moving obstacles in the middle. It’s kind of like the old school Outlaw on Atari 2600, but with space ships.. boring.
Booby Boys is a top down platformer where your objective is to collect all items on a stage, find the key and enter the next stage. Your weapon is that you make traps for the enemies, dig a hole and they fall down, push it again to kill them when they’re stuck. It was so-so..
Sanrio Carnival was just like Columns! Except with the heads of Sanrio characters instead of gems XD You make matches of three horizontally, vertically and even diagonally. It was ok :) There’s a hard mode where the blocks just stick mid-air when you destroy a row, that was different O_o
I also found some PC Engine titles that I had been looking for, and some that I didn’t know I wanted XD I found Winds of Thunder which I have been looking for for quite some time, and PC Genjin 3 which is a great platforming series. Then I also bumped into a game called Lady Sword.. I had no clue what it was but it looked absurd so I had to get it XD
I got convinced to buy a boxed Super Famicom as well XD I already have 3.. but none of them are boxed and two of them are in really shitty condition. One is extremely yellowed, and the other one has been spray painted in silver, a really bad paint job at that.. So it was mainly because of the content that I picked it up. The console is complete and in really minty condition :) And it was a fair price.
The first and last thing I bought at the convention were Atari 2600 carts! I just love these, especially when they’re some weird bootlegs and stuff XD A lot of them are German and have some pretty funny names, like Raumroboter :) Spider Fighter is not in very pretty condition, but I recently bought a bootleg of it and realised it’s an amazing game so I wanted to try the original cartridge :) Phantompanzer I bought together with an Amiga CD32 game called Gloom. It’s been suggested to me before, I think it’s supposed to be an FPS game kind of like Doom…
At the end of the day I picked up some odd things over at Butik Mackapär. Markus always has some weird things and lots of Japanese goodies ^_^ I found a newly produced game for the Sega Dreamcast, it looked cute :) I also got a bunch of odd third party controllers. And some of the Atari 2600 games above were from him as well. He threw in an odd cartridge for the Sega Mega Drive, an Interceptor Specify Card.. I have no clue what it does XD
Well this turned out to be a pretty long post XD There’s even a few more games I forgot to mention that I got at RSM, but this will have to do for now ^_^
Retro Video Gaming 