Category: Catalogs, Trinkets and other promotions

For promotional items and other things I find that I think are neat.

My e-Reader Card Collection: Nintendo’s Last Straw.

  • July 17, 2018

I have made a fair share of questionable purchases over the years. Back when I was still a Nintendo apologist, during the heydays of Gamecube puttering along way behind the PS2 and when the Game Boy Advance was king of all portable gaming, I had bought stuff that in hindsight wasn’t that useful. Such as the GBA-GC link cable that connected a GBA to a Gamecube to transfer data, or in the case of games like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, have all the action take place on the GBA.

Nintendo-e-Reader
Doesn’t this look neat at first glance? Oh, if only.

But that isn’t nearly as much in terms of questionable purchasing decisions as me buying into Nintendo’s e-Reader. Not to be confused with an eBook reader, the e-Reader was a Game Boy Advance add-on where you could scan cards with codes printed on the side to get cool goodies. It sounds like a good idea on paper, but the execution was poor: Games sometimes needed 3-10 codes scanned to play something, you could only hold one thing on the e-Reader’s memory at a time, and you needed a GBA link cable if you wanted to transfer anything from an e-Reader to another system, or the Gamecube.

It was a mess. Needless to say, Nintendo of America wasn’t having more of this and discontinued the thing around 2004. Thus leaving me with a bunch of cards I had acquired that I didn’t really have much use for anymore.

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52 e-reader pickup (digital photography, 2018)

Over 15 years after the e-Reader came out, I still have the damn cards. And I’m gonna show some of them off here. Now, these aren’t the most rare, or the most valuable, these are just cards I find interesting, because they have a story to them. Note I’m only gonna list cards I personally own, as much as it would be interesting to write about Japanese exclusive e-Reader cards, I don’t have those.

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Props to Nintendo for using the original Famicom cover art, at least.

Donkey Kong Jr.-e

One of the two pack-in classic games – the other being Pinball – this was part of the “Classic NES Series” which featured almost nothing but early NES games, the ones you see crop up everywhere on Nintendo platforms: Donkey Kong, Balloon Fight, Ice Climber, even much-maligned brawler Urban Champion got the e-Reader treatment.

The first card shows how to play the game, with each subsequent card giving some important tips on how to play and eventually master the game. It’s nice considering people even of my generation never grew up on the older NES catalog, but them not being based on more “powerful” NES games like Super Mario Bros. really made this particular series only interesting to diehard Nintendo fans.

It also didn’t help it came on five cards, with one set of two dot codes each. That’s 10 codes I had to scan to play this thing. Worst off, if I wanted to play any other game, I had to remove the game from memory, thus requiring me to scan all ten codes again if I wanted to replay it.

Funny enough, some of these games later got treatment as part of a brief stint of a different “Classic NES Series,” which was on traditional cartridges. These featured more of the NES classics you’d be familiar with, like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid. Why scan 10 codes of Ice Climber when you could buy the same thing for a higher price on a traditional cartridge? Nintendo probably didn’t think that one through too well.

I’ve seen some of these Classic NES Series card packs on sale during the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, and I sometimes get the temptation to get another one of these. Then I realize I’d have to scan 10 codes, and I could play that game elsewhere with less hassle.

…Have I mentioned I hated having to scan 10 freakin’ codes yet?

2003’s Sega Hot Wheels, featuring your favorite Sega properties.

  • January 4, 2014

Back in late 2012, I wrote about Hot Wheels cars featuring iconic Atari brands. The cars featured were based on the 3-4 existing brands Atari already have milked dry but on rather dubious car brands. At the end of that post, I had mentioned that I also had some other Hot Wheels based on a video game brand, and that I’d get around to writing about them someday once I completed the set. Well, that time is now because I finally completed the whole set.

Hot Wheels cars were quite a fascination to me when I was younger. I grew up in the age of the wacky race tracks and those automated machines that moved the cars at high speeds. It was quite an entertaining toy, and naturally I ended up grabbing a bunch of them over the years.

When I bought the Atari Hot Wheels back in 2012, I wasn’t really expecting to have another set to complete. Since I had three out of the five, I thought it was a fairly easy goal to attain. After all, unless it’s from the 80s or earlier, the more recent cars don’t really have high demand, and thus are easy to snatch up for a few bucks each. After all, the Atari Hot Wheels only cost me $12.

But enough rambling, let’s take a look at the cars themselves:

So many interesting games to make as cars…

Much like the previous set I covered, these are all cars based on various Hot Wheels car lines or real cars. These cars give a perfect snapshot of Sega from this period. By this time Sega had already abandoned their console heritage after the Dreamcast floundered, beginning to publish games for their previous rivals the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox.  This was back when they were experimenting with old series frequently and making sequels to Dreamcast titles most people didn’t play originally. Here are the cars in question:

Super Power Supplies: The Fall/Winter 1999 Nintendo Power Catalog.

  • January 23, 2013

I’ve been in a funk lately. I’ve had no drive to write any new entries or make new videos. Since I come from a packrat family, There’s bound to be something in my room that’s worth talking about.

While combing through my magazines, I had stumbled upon this catalog that had been buried among the stack, and I think it’s an interesting time capsule: Nintendo Power’s Super Power Supplies catalog. From 1999! Everybody loves old catalogs, right? Well, at least I do.

Pokemon! Donkey Kong! Yoshis! A combination only Nintendo could give you.

I honestly don’t know how I got this, but judging how it’s from Nintendo Power, I likely got it when I had a subscription to the magazine from 1998-2000. That was an interesting time: Pokemon was becoming a big thing, the Nintendo 64 was winding down, the Game Boy Color was a new and colorful way to play handheld games, and there were magazine covers dedicated to stuff like Tonic Trouble. This makes me realize we’ll never see anything cool like this again, now that Nintendo Power’s gone.

By this time in my gaming career, I was still a hardcore Nintendo nut, but my interest in the Big N started to fade, looking at the cool Sega Dreamcast, and later, the PlayStation 2. I still respect Nintendo, they make good stuff on occasion, even if my mom used the Wii more than I do. But enough waxing nostalgic about Nintendo, let’s crack open this catalog.

Pokemon: Starring a bunch of characters you don’t care about, and PIKACHU!

The catalog was released during the height of Pokemon fever. I played Pokemon Red in its heyday, but I later traded it with a classmate for The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which was a better decision, especially after my friend borrowed my copy of Red and finished the game with my save, giving me less interest in playing it.

By the time this catalog was released, Pokemon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition just hit the US, so Pikachu is featured prominently on a lot of the merchandise, such as the sweatshirt shown above. I like how it’s some of the well-known Pokemon like Charizard, Snorlax, Eevee, and Meowth in a group shot, but Pikachu’s in the corner, as if they’re saying “You don’t give a fuck about the rest of these guys, only Pikachu.” I was more into Charmander myself, but I guess with the popularity of the anime that they decided to capitalize on making Pikachu the face of Pokemon.

I wonder if someone who served in the military had Meowth dog tags in addition to their name and rank.

When I said there’s a lot of Pokemon stuff in the catalog, I wasn’t exaggerating. You could have such wonder Pokemon products like Pokemon hats! Pokemon watches! Pokemon card game holders! VHS tapes of the Pokemon anime! You could get freakin’ Pokemon DOG TAGS! I could understand T-shirts and hats, but dog tags? Really? I guess if you wanted to show off how much you love Blastoise, then I guess the dog tags would be cool.

This is the 1999 version of the controller condom. It’s like Nintendo never forgets their past!

The catalog does feature stuff besides Pokemon. One other hot ticket item in 1999 was Nintendo’s other big release that year: Donkey Kong 64. Featured are Donkey Kong 64 hats, T-shirts, wallets, plush toys, even Nintendo 64 controller gloves. If you wanna protect your controller from getting nasty germs or other things on them, I guess those would be an interesting purchase.

I’m surprised they didn’t sell actual gloves for your hands, considering Mario Party came out around this time and was causing issue with people’s hands due to people palming the analog stick on the more intense minigames. Pair them with the controller gloves for maximum protection.

If I had a Nintendo 64 carrying case, I could’ve been the cool kid on the block.

As I dip further into the catalog, I find some more cool accessories that I would want even now: Protective plastic cases for loose Nintendo 64 carts, or carrying cases for your game systems. I always found those pretty cool, because you could stash your system in a bag and take it with you to Grandma’s house.

I wish I ordered the magazine holders, it probably would’ve been a tidier way to stack my game magazines. At least I finally bothered to get plastic magazine sleeves to preserve some of those older Nintendo Power issues.

Of course, if you’re buying the games, you might want the strategy guides too, right? I still have a bunch of these “Player’s Guides,” and they’re nice when you wanted some game hints before everybody had the internet at their fingertips. Fun fact: That Donkey Kong 64 Player’s Guide cover got changed to one featuring the ensemble cast. I should know, I own two of them.

Nintendo Power was also selling the game soundtracks if you wanted to listen to those kickass tunes in the car, which was still sort of a novelty back then. Though, that Diddy Kong Racing soundtrack disc looks pretty creepy. Plus it’s not round, how the heck would it play in a CD player without shattering in the drive? I will have to find that soundtrack some day so I can find out how that magic works, as I usually don’t see very many non-round CDs.

This is an interesting little item for me to stumble upon. These are great time capsules, as they give me an outlook on some of the silly swag that Nintendo was selling even during that period where Sony was gaining dominance in the video game landscape.

Alas, I don’t have any more of these “Super Power Supplies” catalogs, so this will be it for now. However, I do have some old Nintendo and Sony catalogs, including a Nintendo DS catalog from 2005 which has a few unique things about it. I wonder if anyone has talked about those…

(Thanks to user fauwf of The Internet Archive for a clearer scan of these pages, which I used when updating this article.)