#728-730 - Merry Happy!

Games #728-730
Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball, Uncharted Waters, Rad Racket Deluxe Tennis II
Santa Claus
12/25/11

Happy belated Christmas and an early Merry New Year from LGS (fancy abbreviation for my blog that no one reads)!! Hope you had a good holiday spent doing whatever it is that makes you happy. We had a good time moving into a new house and taking a play out of A Christmas Story by eating Chinese food on Christmas day.

Santa managed to find our new address and drop off 3 NES games to add to the collection shelf. Rad Racket Deluxe Tennis II is one of those funky AVE unlicensed carts - anyone ever heard of Deluxe Tennis I? Neither have I.

Uncharted Waters is a military strategy game that my feeble brain cannot understand, so it's going on the shelf for good.

I was most excited to finally get a hold of Dusty Diamond Softball. It's got a slightly different take on the usual baseball formula. You get to choose your players sandlot style before the game - and these are some funky looking kids (I think I saw Dracula in there somewhere). Each player has slightly different strengths and weaknesses that you can play around with. What's really interesting are the baseball fields themselves - strange locations such as the schoolyard complete with a set of different ground rules for each. There's no outer fence in some of the fields, so players can keep running if the ball bounces or rolls past the outfielders all the way to the buildings. It's a nice touch.

Side note - this is the final baseball game I needed. Ever wonder how many baseball games there were for the NES? Take a look:


We're just a few days away from a new year, so this is likely the last pickup before 2012. I started this blog back in April, and since that time I've added 39 games to the stockpile. There are 38 total games left to complete the full set, but only 15 of the gray licensed carts remain. That will be my goal for 2012 - to get those last 15. OK, so maybe Stadium Events will have to wait. 14 games in 12 months? Let's do this!

#727 - Ms. Pac-Man Deluxe!

Game #727
Ms. Pac-Man (Namco)
eBay
12/2/11

The opportunities have been few and far between for me to show you some poorly lit, grainy phone pics of Nintendo games. Today is your lucky day! You can breathe once again! Behold!

The games pictured above are essentially the same game - Ms. Pac-Man. The one on the right is the unlicensed Tengen version. Common. Get it everywhere for a few bucks. Move along.

The one on the left is the harder to find, licensed version published by Namco, released 2 years after the Super Nintendo in 1993 when the NES was collecting dust in closets everywhere.

You would think these two games would be identical, but you would be wrong. The black Tengen cart offers a spruced up version of the arcade classic with some interesting power ups and maps to play around with, while the gray Namco cart gives you a straight up port of the arcade game. Given the choice, I'd rather play the Tengen version - it offers more variety to what can become a stale game.

I'm really glad to cross this cart off my list - it's been a pain to sift through eBay listings for Ms. Pac-Man. Not only are most of the results the black Tengen cart, but you've also got Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and just about every other game system to weed through. Ms. Pac-Man gets around. The gray cart usually gets listed in the $20-25 range - I lucked out and found an auction that went unnoticed and snagged it for half that.

The Pac family is finally all here. In addition to the 2 Ms. carts, I've got the 3 versions of the original Pac-Man (same game, 3 carts) and the bastard son that fell a little too far from the family tree - PacMania.



And finally I'll post up a shitty picture of a box. Yes, I bought a box. 25 year old cardboard. But it means something to me - this is the box that the Nintendo Deluxe Set came in. This was the super groovy version of the NES - it came with a Zapper, Duck Hunt, Gyromite and R.O.B., the friendly robot who will sit and very slowly play video games with you. This is the version of the NES that I got for Christmas in 1988. I actually kept my box for years - but somewhere down the line it was purged and probably ended up in a landfill. So now I've got it back - I've already got all the games that I had as a kid back in their boxes - the only things left to get to finish up my personal history collection is a box for the NES Advantage joystick and an actual R.O.B. himself.


That's all for now! Next time I post will hopefully be to show off a new nerd cave. Moving to the new casa in about 2 weeks...