Areala Asks: Favorite Game-Related Item (20160608)

[Areala]

Brace yourselves, forum-goers! Areala's about to ask you another question!

In this thread, I want to know your favorite video game-related item that is not an actual video game. So "Super Mario Bros." itself is out, but if you have a set of Mario sheets that help you drift off to Sub-Con each night, that's totally in!

Soundtracks, films, art books, stuffed animals, game novels, anything that isn't an actual video game itself is all up for grabs. It's more fun if you own it, but feel free to name something cool that you'd like to own if that's more your speed. Pictures and links always welcome.

*huggles*
Areala

[kitsunebi]

TLDR spoiler: my favorite game-related item is Shigeru Miyamoto. I just wish he'd pee in the bucket I gave him and not on my closet floor.

For everybody else:

I don't know if these count, since I made them myself.

But anyway, I love the (long dead) Wing Commander series. I love the space flight combat parts, but what really made it special to me was the story and characters. I own all the games, of course, but I also own the strategy guides, the entire series of novels based on the games, and the DVDs of the Wing Commander Academy animated series.

But that's not what I'm going to talk about.

Beginning with Wing Commander (1990) and continuing through the two expansion disks, followed by Wing Commander II and its two expansion disks, I dutifully recorded (in a series of thick notebooks) the entire scripts to each game, including every branching win/loss scenario, as well as incidental and optional scenes like deaths and promotions and whatnot.

Years later I followed this by making a similarly comprehensive set of VHS tapes of all the video segments for both Wing Commander III and IV (I believe it was a sum total of about 7 hours-worth recorded from the Playstation versions.)

And even now I haven't stopped. I'm currently using an emulator and video capture software to record the story segments of Wing Commander I from the Sega CD version (which added voices for all the characters' dialogue). I believe due to the way the disc was accessed, the dialogue was broken up into tiny segments on the disc with the result being numerous unnatural pauses in the middle of a line. I could just edit out the pauses in the video, since there isn't any movement or animation during the pauses, but then the background music would get messed up every time I made a cut. Of course, an even bigger problem is that the Sega CD music soundtrack sucks. They created a new soundtrack that has nothing in common with the original. That just won't do.

So...I've ripped the soundtrack from the Japanese FM Towns version, which re-did the classic Wing Commander soundtrack with an orchestra. Laying that soundtrack over the recorded video, the voices can no longer be heard, so I also ripped the dialogue tracks from the Sega CD disc. I then edit the video to remove the unnatural pauses and carefully lay in the ripped dialogue to match up perfectly with the animation (since the characters' mouths are all lip-synced with the dialogue.)

Because that isn't enough work for myself, I've decided to create an entirely new (for the most part) sfx soundtrack, pulling hundreds of different sfx and atmospheric tracks from online sfx repositories and layering them on top of one another until I get something that sounds the way I imagine in my head. And then there was the Star Wars-style text crawl I wrote and layered into the opening credits to adequately set up the story.

It's a slow process that I only find the energy to work on every once in a long while. I may never finish. But even the bits I've finished so far are my "favorite game-related item," and probably always will be.

[RetroDefense]

I can think of a few.

My Mario vans. My daughter custom painted 'em for me years ago. I wore 'em 'till they wore out.

My wife's Super Mario Bros. 3 cross-stitch project. She spent weeks working on it, in a mad rush to make an impending deadline for our favorite charity event, the Mario Marathon. We only had minutes to appreciate the final product before it was rushed off in the mail as a prize donation. Not to be selfish but I hope she'll make me one someday.

My collection of SMS cheat sheets. Back in the day (pre-web, mind you) I was big into information-gathering for the Sega Master System. Operated a SMS Mailing List, wrote a SMS FAQ, etc. I met many fine SMS fans online and one fellow was kind enough to donate a huge set of SMS cheat sheets he had received from Sega support. I began the process of transcribing these for the 'net (my only real option as scanners were expensive and OCR flaky) and shortly into the project was contacted by a Sega employee/game enthusiast who kindly sent me a disk filled with nearly everything already digital. I still have those cheat sheets today and they're a highlight of my ephemera collection. Not necessarily for the content but for the memories of gaming folk working together to share and preserve info. Probably one reason why I appreciate RetroMags so much, actually.

In a similar vein, my PC. It lets me surf the Internets.

[te72]

TLDR spoiler: my favorite game-related item is Shigeru Miyamoto. I just wish he'd pee in the bucket I gave him and not on my closet floor.

Wing Commander stuff...

Bwaahahahahaha! Man I hear those gaming geniuses can be a bit socially awkward sometimes. Thanks for the laugh.

As for the WC stuff, I tip my hat to you sir. You are making the world a better place with your efforts and passion. I have a couple fond memories of playing WC3 with a friend who had passed the following year. I remember staying up until WAY late into the night, to the point my dad finally came in and told us to shut if off already. Looking back, I feel a bit bad for my dad, but that game was amazing for the era...

Myself? I'm a big Resident Evil fan, always have been. About 10 years ago, I discovered that I had disposable income for the first time in my life. I had just moved to Wyoming, and didn't have much of a social life, but I did have an ebay account, and discovered that people sell some odd stuff on there. Managed to pick up, among other things, a clock from the original RE game, with the zombie my brother and I affectionately call "Whitehead" and the logo underneath on the backing panel. Apparently it was a display at an EB or some other game store back when the game first came out. Mine now!

I'd be amiss to not mention my cars though. I blame video games for at least half of my car addiction. From Rad Racer to Micro Machines, Road Rash to Ridge Racer, Wipeout to Gran Turismo, Burnout to that one really great series of rally games on the original Xbox... I could go on, but suffice to say, I'm a car nut, and it likely started because of gaming. I've had a lot of fond memories of the cars I've owned over the years (I think I'm on either 14 or 15, maybe 16 now, in as many years), and at the moment, I daily drive one of two Miatas. They're like go-karts with a place for a passenger, way more fun than anything this affordable has any reason to be, I love the things.

However, like Kitsunebi and RetroDefense, I have a passion, and that is my Supra. I've spent the last 6 years planning how I wanted this car to turn out, which had a nasty habit of snowballing into something WAY beyond the scope of the original project. For the last two years, I've actually been working on it, as time, weather, and motivation would allow. I've torn the car apart to effectively mechanically restore it, mostly by way of custom, made in the USA parts. I find that part funny actually, a Japanese car, built almost entirely of American parts. First backwoods frittata to give me grief over where it was built is getting a ratchet up their clank and told that it was built in my hometown, almost entirely in my garage...

Anyway, that's my story. Off to bed for now.

[twiztor]

this is probably my favorite non-game gaming item. i'm not sure why, but i just think it's freaking awesome. it's a foam banana (shown here next to a Donkey Kong amiibo for size). it was some sort of promotional item for Donkey Kong 64. a member on a different message board i'm a part of was wondering what it was worth, and when i saw it, i knew i had to own it. i keep it always on display along with my Wii/Wii-U games.

since the topic specifically says "video game-related item that is not an actual video game" i have to show these off too.

video game BOARD GAMES!

i got the Zelda one at a garage sale when i was a kid. the box is pretty beat up, but all the pieces are there, so i'm happy. the DK one i grabbed when a dude posted on a facebook garage sale site, showing a stack of games. he didn't respond, so i basically harassed him until he finally got a hold of me and we worked out a deal. i saw the Mario one at a video game store, but they wouldn't sell it. i finally found it on eBay about a year ago and got a hell of a deal on it.

for those curious, the Zelda one is quite a bit of simplistic fun. the DK one has a plastic donkey kong that dispenses barrels, which is pretty neat, but the gameplay is fairly boring. the Mario one is the least fun of the three, although it is ok.

i've been keeping my eye out for a vinyl copy of Buckner & Garcia's "Pac-Man Fever" album, but one at a good cost has thus far eluded me....

[MisterXiado]

www.ebay.com/itm/361563000964

This ain't such a bad price, I guess, but the record is pretty cringe-inducing, even when listened to with early-eighties ears.

I guess Figma Samus is my favorite? Not that I really care all that much these days.

[twiztor]

www.ebay.com/itm/361563000964

This ain't such a bad price, I guess, but the record is pretty cringe-inducing, even when listened to with early-eighties ears.

oh, i've listened to all of the songs on the album, so i'm fully aware of the cheese factor involved.

thanks for the heads up on the auction. it was over by the time i saw the link tho. i'm in no real hurry, it's just something i keep an eye out for if i'm at a record shop or whatever. eventually it will be part of my collection.

[te72]

They made board games out of just about everything back in the 80's...

You know what though, I really enjoyed the DOOM books, written by uh... Daffyd Ab Hugh or something like that? Had a bit of an odd name, perhaps a pseudonym. For the time, to an early teen aged mind, those books really hit the spot.

[MisterXiado]

They made board games out of just about everything back in the 80's...

You know what though, I really enjoyed the DOOM books, written by uh... Daffyd Ab Hugh or something like that? Had a bit of an odd name, perhaps a pseudonym. For the time, to an early teen aged mind, those books really hit the spot.

I have both the Pac-Man and Donkey Kong board games in my basement, and I read at least one of the DooM books back in the nineties. They were surprisingly good, I'll agree.

[te72]

...and I read at least one of the DooM books back in the nineties. They were surprisingly good, I'll agree.

Read all four of them. Perhaps it was because if you read them, combined them with what you experienced with the game in your imagination... you got a pretty nice result. Perhaps the game's lack of a detailed story allowed for some creative freedom on the author's part.

Sadly, it seemed as though they were going to continue the series of books, but never released a fifth book. Just... ended... on a bit of a cliffhanger, if I recall. Oh well.

In a related note, I also still have my copy of the novelization of the first Mortal Kombat. Not sure if they were going after the movie or the game, but either way, I enjoyed it.

[Areala]

There were actually two separate Mortal Kombat novelizations. Nerd power!!

The first was from 1992, by Jeff Rovin, and it's an attempt to make some sort of sense out of the first arcade game's rather thin storyline. It's...uh...well, let's be nice and say it's OK for what it is.

The second was in 1995, by Martin Delrio, and it's a straight up adaptation of Kevin Droney's script, although it's based on an earlier draft than the final shooting script, so there are scenes that don't appear in the film, and there are a number of differences in the way certain fights turn out (most notably, Sonya doesn't kill Kano at the conclusion of their bout, the Cage vs. Goro fight ends with Johnny trying to help Goro up once he's fallen off the edge, and there is no battle with Liu Kang vs. Reptile in the outworld). This one's much more enjoyable to read, in my opinion.

Jerome Preisler also novelized Mortal Kombat Annihilation, but as with the movie, the less said about that, the better.

*huggles*
Areala