Sunday Roundup: 6/5/16

It has been a busy couple of weeks! The end of May I went back home to watch my brother get married! It was amazing, of course, and it was the first time I was back home in Indiana in almost two years! The weekend immediately after was Fanime, an anime convention here in California that we’ve gone to for the past few years. We dressed up, we bought stuff, and we had a good time. Following that we had a friend move in with us until he can find a place of his own, and now Laura’s sister is back home for a couple weeks before her job starts! Phew! Thankfully though, a visit home means a ton of new video games I can’t get here in California! Let’s break it down!

 

Sunday Roundup: 4/24/16

A visit to Los Angeles for family and friends is great, and being able to hit up a couple used game shops along the way is even better! I haven’t been to LA in six years, so it was nice to get back there and see that some places were still the same, but others were totally revamped! Par for the course for a major city I suppose. Anyway, after a visit to a shop that wasn’t all too thrilling, my brother and I hit up a place that was literally, and I mean this in ever sense of the phrase, packed floor to ceiling with games from every console. It was a little piece of heaven that I can’t seem to find in my neck of the woods. Anyway, let’s get to it!

 

Sunday Roundup: 3/6/16

Mega Man Star Force: Leo DS Release Date: August 7th, 2007 Purchased at: GameStop (Sunnyvale, CA – $7) Another random stop into GameStop after work, another sweet find! I believe the last time I was at the store someone had dropped off a boatload of quality DS games which I was more than happy to swoop in and call my own. I am pretty sure these Mega Man Star Force games were hers as well, because I remember the GameStop associate telling me they were in there. I passed then, but this time around there was a Buy 2 Get 1 Free on old DS and Wii games, so I went to town and essentially got a near-complete Star Force series!

Mega Man Star Force 2: Zenker x Ninja DS Release Date: June 24th, 2008 Purchased at: GameStop (Sunnyvale, CA – $6) The first game had three iterations; Leo, Pegasus, and Dragon. Not unlike the Pokemon franchise, these different version offered up exclusive stuff you could only get in that specific game, but largely offered the same gameplay otherwise. After the first game, there were only two versions released per entry.

Mega Man Star Force 2: Zenker x Saurian DS Release Date: June 24th, 2008 Purchased at: GameStop (Sunnyvale, CA – FREE) Seen as a sort of spiritual successor to the Mega Man Battle Network series, the Star Force series is actually set way in the future and doesn’t have any direct connections to its predecessor. Apparently this was done to not alienate new players by having a backstory set in, believe it or not, six prior Battle Network games! Despite this, the gameplay is largely the same, with grid-based combat decided by chips the player can use to battle enemies. RPG elements abound!

Mega Man Star Force 3: Black Ace DS Release Date: June 30th, 2009 Purchased at: GameStop (Sunnyvale, CA – FREE) The final chapter in the Star Force series! I haven’t played any of series but I hear this one is left off on a cliffhanger. I haven’t heard of anything else coming for this series, so if you ever find yourself looking for Star Force 4 you can probably keep hoping. Sadly, Capcom seems to have forgotten almost entirely about the Blue Bomber. Even if it is another one of these off-shoot games, at least we’d know the company still cares about him!

Mega Man Star Force 3: Red Joker DS Release Date: June 30th, 2009 Purchased at: GameStop (Sunnyvale, CA – $3) Back in 2001 I was pumped for the release of the Battle Network series. It was Mega Man but in RPG form, what wasn’t to like? And in most respects that original game was great… it just wasn’t the Mega Man I grew up with. Much the same here: this just doesn’t feel or look like Mega Man. It’s almost as if they attached the name just to make it sell better. Which is sad, because as its own world and series I might have been more interested.

Mega Man Zero Collection DS Release Date: June 8th, 2010 Purchased at: GameStop (Sunnyvale, CA – $16) Another series originally starting out on the Game Boy Advance, the Mega Man Zero games had their own storyline and characters (and gameplay style) separate from the core Mega Man X games. The biggest defining factor of these games (of which all four are collected on the DS cartridge) were playing as Zero instead of Mega Man exclusively (at least I think exclusively, I only played the first), and a hardcore difficulty curve. Nothing unbeatable, but it looked back to the original Mega Man games of yore. I really liked the first game, and it’s a shame there aren’t any more of these coming out, either!

Pop Cutie DS Release Date: September 30th, 2008 Purchased at: GameStop (Sunnyvale, CA – FREE) Sometimes it’s the games you’ve never heard of which are the most fun to find! Pop Cutie is a fashion editor simulation game which has you creating the next big fashion line! Believe me, I wouldn’t be caught with this game if it didn’t have a great premise and a killer price tag. Usually it sells for much more than, well, FREE, online. Oh, and your clientele aren’t normal people: instead you sell to eccentric people who want all kinds of ridiculous things! It was a hit in Japan, and honestly it sounds like a pretty good time! And for free? Yeah…

Time Hollow DS Release Date: September 23rd, 2008 Purchased at: GameStop (Sunnyvale, CA – $2) Dude… Dude! When I saw this title on the bottom shelf I literally said outloud (though to myself), “Time Hollow, holy shit!” I’ve been looking for this game ever since I found out about it nearly five years ago. A visual novel in the same style as Virtue’s Last Reward or Hotel Dusk, Time Hollow lets you travel through time to solve the mysteries around you, your family, and the strange pen that’s letting you time travel in the first place. I think it’s been well received, but I feel like the real reason I’m happy to have it is because it’s been so damn long since I’ve wanted it, and this is the first and only time I’ve ever seen a copy!

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD Wii U Release Date: March 4th, 2016 Purchased at: Amazon (Online – $58) The only mainstream Zelda game I’ve never played came out this week on the Wii U. Annnnd I can’t play it right now, because our TV is broken! Ugh! Well, we do have a second TV, but Laura’s been playing through Mass Effect, so it’s kind of hard without another option. But I swear, I’m going to play this one and make sure I can say I have at least played it! Also fun fact, I now have the game on the Wii U, Wii, and the GameCube! Booyah!

Laters,
Jsick

 

Sunday Roundup: 2/14/16

Way back in 2013 when I was just visiting California I decided to check out one of the local used game stores. While I found some games there and the owner had an impressive selection, I never decided to go back there once I moved here because of the prices. They weren’t terrible, they were just fair. And while fair is fine, I’m not usually looking for fair (I’m looking for great!). This week I decided to check out Game World once again, hoping maybe some things had changed. Well, the place was just as cramped and overflowing as before, and the prices were just the same. Regardless, maybe I’ll have to check out the place more simply because it’s really the only place to get PS2 and earlier era games! Let’s take a look at this week’s haul.

 

Sunday Roundup: 1/31/16

A handful of DS games and a duo of games I’ve literally been spending years trying to track down finally fell into my collection this week! After our move, I’m living closer to a different GameStop than before, but seeing as I still work at the same Target, I happen to be close to that ol’ GameStop of mine. And man, this week they delivered: apparently a “regular” who goes to this store often turned in dozens of great DS games. They were all loose, but some of them had incredible prices! I couldn’t say no to these and a few duplicates for possible reselling. Hmm… maybe I’ll finally start getting into that this year…

 

Top Ten Game Pickups of 2015

Another year is coming to an end, and with it a great assortment of new games added to the collection. This year was a lot more memorable than the previous years, mainly because I was actually able to play a lot of the new games that came out! Just check out my Top Ten Games of 2015 and see what I mean! 2015 Was also the year I really got to enjoy my PS4! I’m looking forward to what the next year has in store for Sony’s home console. And who could forget the Wii U! Haters gonna hate, but I still love that system, and this year saw several great titles added to Nintendo’s black box. The 3DS is still going strong, and the next game I’m most excited for in 2016 happens to be for the 3DS (Fire Emblem: Fates!!). I never mentioned it before (or at least I can’t recall if I have), but this year also happened to be the year I surpassed 2,000 games in the collection! Yay for game collecting but boo for my aching wallet! Just like last year, instead of doing a complete rundown of all the games of 2015, here are the top ten best games I found last year!

 

Top Ten Party Games

One of the best things video games can do is bring people together. Multiplayer has been around for decades, and with a general shift toward online multiplayer being the only way to play with others, local multiplayer and party games have been declining. Despite this, some of the greatest video games created were made specifically with local multiplayer in mind. Recently Nintendo seems to be the only publisher making games to fit in this genre, but there have been dozens of games released over the past years that exemplify the party genre. Here is my list of the ten greatest party games ever!

 

Sunday Roundup: 10/18/15

This is going to be one of the biggest Roundups for the site! I made it a goal last week to hit up literally every GameStop in the greater San Jose area in hopes of finding some harder to find gems in the ranks of old DS, Wii, and even some Xbox 360 and PS3 racks. While most of the GameStop’s I won’t be making special trips to again, there were a few stores in some nicer areas that really surprised me! Unfortunately none of these games I would classify as “Super Rare” or anything like that, but there are some fun games here that I’m happy to have in the collection. And I can safely say if you are looking hard enough, you can still find some diamonds in the rough that is retail video game shopping.

 

Tao’s Adventure is a Portal to When Designers Didn’t Know How to Make DS Games

You take some risk when playing games from nearly a decade ago. In that span of time many developers and game designers have time to hone their craft and really get a grip on what a system or console can do. The Nintendo DS is a perfect example of this, because not only was it a more powerful version of Nintendo’s handheld line, it also introduced a second touch screen to play around with. Early games on the DS used that second screen as an inventory management screen, a place to show the map, or a different way to control the game. Perhaps we’re all spoiled now in 2015 after 10 years of successful games on the system, because going back to Tao’s Adventure on the DS just reminds me how far we’ve come.

 

Sunday Roundup: 10/11/15

While Laura’s out of the country for work, I decided to do a bit of a game collecting experiment: Determine of GameStop’s in my area are conducive to collecting. There have been many negative comments on the internet about GameStop, how they’e a terrible place to shop for games, they charge too much for games and give too little with trade-in prices, and in general that they’re a bad place/thing for gamers. Personally I’ve never had a problem with GameStop: they don’t have all the stuff I want all the time, but I can usually find some quality games there time to time. So this week I’m going to try to hit up each of the dozen or so stores in my general vicinity and see if I can actually find decent stuff at each one. Here’s the first part of that, with two brand new GameStop’s I’ve never been to giving me some games I’ve actually been looking for for nearly 5 years!