My god, it’s been over two months since I’ve written one of these. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t feeling up to doing my usual thrift store trips. Then the bug, the urge to go thrifting hit me a few days ago, and thankfully I lucked out. It’s gonna be a bit short, but I snagged the following items over the course of yesterday and today:
ABC Sports Presents: The Palm Springs Open (CD-i, $1.99)
Parasite Eve (PS1, $2)
El Matador (PC, 75¢)
Play TV Legends: Sega Genesis Volume 1 (Plug and play console, $4.99)
First, I never thought I would ever find a CD-i game in the wild. At a Goodwill, no less!
The CD-i was Philips’ attempt to make a CD-based game system. It didn’t do so well, even with amazing infomercials like “A Day with Sid, Ed and the CD-i.” Seriously, watch that infomercial if you get a chance, it’s incredibly corny.
The most notable things it’s known for are the weird interactive CDs, game show adaptions like Jeopardy! and Name That Tune, and of course, those Nintendo-licensed games that have been talked about to death like Hotel Mario and Link: The Faces of Evil.
For a long while the system wasn’t much of a big seller, but increased exposure to the FMVs in the Nintendo CD-i games alongside certain Angry Gaming YouTubers caused the prices of the system to jump exponentially, from sub-$100 to nearly $500 in some cases. It’s ridiculous.
The Palm Springs Open has never been opened. Which doesn’t mean much, really, but you don’t see find unopened games often. I should probably give this to someone who’s more into golf games than me, but with the ridiculous prices of the CD-i, I’d probably be better off keeping it.
Since I just got back from going to two conventions in the course of a month, it’s about time for me to show that I Bought Stuff. It’s gonna be a double-header this time around: We’re gonna be covering not only the stuff I got from last weekend’s haul at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, but also what I stumbled upon after PAX back in early September. It’s gonna be a fun one, indeed.
A bunch of Sierra and some Pat Sajak for your Tuesday. (or any day, really.)
Police Quest 2: The Vengeance (DOS, $3)
The Colonel’s Bequest (DOS, $3)
Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters (PC, $3)
I got these three games the day after PAX ended, on Monday. I had some free time to kill before I had to get to the train station to get home, so I had a doughnut at Top Pot Doughnuts — highly recommend you do so if you’re visiting Seattle — and found a Value Village several blocks away from where the main convention center was. After poking around the store that was in an old building complete with freight elevators, I found these three gems.
Police Quest 2: The Vengeance and The Colonel’s Bequest are classic Sierra-published games. This was back in Sierra’s heyday, when they made a whole bunch of adventure game titles. Granted, most of them have not aged well primarily due to their obtuse puzzle mechanics, but finding complete box copies of both games is a treat.
The Colonel’s Bequest was the first game in a mystery series starring Laura Bow, which she returned in another Sierra game a few years later, The Dagger of Amon Ra. I have no idea where this ranks on terms of quality Sierra games, but judging how I didn’t hear of this until I bought it, I assume it’s one of the forgettable ones.
Police Quest 2 continues the same silly stuff that other Police Quest games did where you had to follow every step of police procedure to the absolute letter. I preferred the later spinoff series SWAT, which went from being a bad FMV game to a strategy game to a solid squad FPS that rivaled Rainbow Six in its day. As an unexpected bonus, Police Quest 2 had extra 5 1/4″ copies somebody made presumably to give to a friend. Funny, considering the original disks are also inside. I guess somebody didn’t watch Don’t Copy That Floppy.
Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters, on the other hand, was more of a gimmick purchase. It had never been opened, and one copy there had a dozen GameStop price stickers on it, going from $20, to $10, to $5, to $2 by the end of it. This is the Wheel of Fortune host’s first foray into making video games after having a weird aversion to appearing in Wheel of Fortune games for a solid two decades. At least he eventually got over that.
This casual game is a hybrid of crossword puzzles mixed in with elements from The Joker’s Wild. Put into a sleek casual games package, it’s an interesting little game made around the time of the casual games boom. There was another game under the Pat Sajak Games label named Trivia Gems, but I don’t know if that ever got a retail package. Bet both of those games are worth looking into.
Update: Eventually I did finally check out Pat Sajak’s Lucky Letters, and it’s surprisingly alright for being a game featuring the host of Wheel of Fortune. You can read about it here.
The rest of my PAX swag was a shitload of buttons, energy drinks, cards and promo stuff, followed by Guitar Hero: Van Halen. I mean, when Dan Amrich (then of Activision and One of Swords in 2012, currently at Ubisoft) just hands them out for just showing up at a panel, you can’t resist. Then again, I heard that lots of people got copies of that game, apparently they had excess stock.
