I first learned of VTech’s V.Flash console in late 2006. Shortly thereafter, I purchased a game to be played on the system so that I could study the optical format and understand the data formats therein (it’s a weird hobby of mine).

Eventually, I found a new in box V.Flash console for relatively cheap and snatched it up. It arrived but I never got around to opening it at the time. I have accumulated several more games for the system in the meantime. I got it down from a shelf today:

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I thought it had only been 6 or 7 years since I bought the system. Turns out that it was almost 9 years ago that I picked it up:

I checked my Amazon order records for more details– turns out that I only paid about US$26 for it. I guess I snagged it during what is called “the trough of no/low value” because when I look it up now, asking prices for an NIB unit are substantially higher.

Surprisingly, there are no YouTube unboxing videos for this thing. So I guess it falls to me. Unboxing videos aren’t really my thing. Instead, please accept this series of photos documenting various aspects of the unit and its packaging. There is a lot to cover.

Just when I think I might be hitting a point of diminishing returns, I find 16 more items on my new favorite eBay store that don’t show up in the MobyGames database.

This lot contains 2 items that are in obscure franchises first seen in my last acquisition log entry (Dropout Trivia and Brain Bytes):

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• Earth Scout: Another in the “Brain Bytes Bite-Size Learning Fun” series. 1999 title that purports to teach geography skills. From Edmark, by now an IBM company.
• Search & Rescue 3: From Global Star Software, copyright date unknown. MobyGames has a number of the games in this series, but not this one yet.
• Dropout Entertainment Trivia Game: Presumably the entertainment counterpart to the sports variant I found for the last entry. 1996 game from Elsinore, published by WizardWorks.
• Jubilee’s Journey: “A Jane Goodall environmental journey”. 1996 educational game from Mind Magic.

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• Enemies From Space: A SoftKey release of “the next generation of an arcade classic”. 1997 title by TLC Properties, a subsidiary of The Learning Tree. The screenshots look a bit Galaga-like. The cover art also promises 10 free hours of Compuserve.
• The Fox & The Pussy Cat: This is a Mumbo Jumbo title and I usually expect better from them. However, the screenshots on cover art of this 2004 game are fairly uninspired, appearing about 10 years out of date.
• Slot Car Racing: It’s possible that this is supposed to have “3-D” as a prefix; I’m not quite sure. The cover art does state that a 3D video card is required. 1998 game by Toys by Phil and published by ValuSoft.
• Race Driver: Another rather generically-named game. This one is from Codemasters. It comes with 3 discs. There are 2 copies of disc 1, one in English and one in French, while disc 2 is marked as data. The database already contains several racing games from Codemasters, but I can’t match this one to any of the ones on record.

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• World of Shooting 2005: The title of this game from WS Enterprise is rather to the point. The title also implies that there are other versions for different years. MobyGames has no record of these.
• Clue: A DVD game of the venerable classic board game. Copyright 2006 by Hasbro.
• Ann’s Learning Games: 1994 game from Putnam New Media. The title implies multiple educational games.
• Jammin’ In Jamaica: A 2003 title from Mattel. Since it’s from Mattel, I figured it might possibly be a game. However, it bears no ESRB badge. It also says “Approximately 44 minutes, color, not rated”, so perhaps it’s just a multimedia disc exhibiting a video.

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• Canada Hunt: I suspect this is another in the venerable genre of hunting games, only set in Canada. 2009 title, and the companies mentioned include “Maximum Family Games” and “PSR Outdoors: The Most Realistic Hunting Games”.
• Deep Sea Explorer: Another MatchBox title, “with real U.S. Coast Guard video!” 1999 title.
• Casual Combo Collection: Shovelware collection which seems to consist of 4 color-matching games: Woodville Chronicles, Wizard Land, Age of Emeralds, and Lost in Reefs. Published by ValuSoft-Cosmi.
• Film Fatale: Lights, Camera, Madness! Another hidden objects game. 2012 game from Fugazo. It has a ratings system I haven’t heard of before: Family Friendly Ratings Council, or FFRC. I recommend that you not visit the site directly as it’s home to a pr0n squatter. If you must visit, check out the last Web Archive version before the squatter took over.

I have been raiding my new favorite eBay store for stuff that isn’t yet present in the database. This store happens to have lots of cheap games and a surprisingly large collection missing from MobyGames. I load up my eBay shopping cart until such cart gets too heavy to push (this might sound like a joke but it’s true– after a certain point, it took way too long to add a new item to the shopping cart; after 29 discs, I had to call it quits).

This batch was heavy on trivia, i.e., there were at least 2 items revolving around trivia:

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• Sci-Fi Channel Trivia Game: 1996 game by Byron Preiss Multimedia
• Dropout Sports Trivia Game: It’s a sports trivia game. It seems to be crossed with some kind of grid puzzle game. Curiously, you can play this against an AI opponent, which strikes me as a tad unfair. Copyright 1996 Elsinore Multimedia, distributed by good old WizardWorks. I have also learned that there were other trivia games under the Dropout umbrella.
• Neopets Codestone Quest: I don’t know much about NeoPets. I was concerned it was the sort of thing that might need extra physical components, like Skylanders. This is by Mumbo Jumbo, though, and I’ve enjoyed all of their games so far.
• The Scavenger Hunt Series: Africa: Possibly a hidden object game, long before that was an established genre category. Copyright 1993-1994 from oddly-stylized SWeDE Corporation.

Here are the educational acquisitions from this raid:

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• Reading Roller Coaster: 1998 educational title from Edmark, an IBM company. “Brain Bytes: Byte Size Learning Fun!” might be a series of educational titles.
• Trailblazer: This is a 1994 CD adventure by the legendary MECC (of Oregon Trail fame) and it surprises me that it’s not in the database yet. Therefore, possibly not a game.
• Richard Scarry’s Busytown: Best Activity Center Ever: Designed for 3 to 7 year olds. 1998 educational game from Simon & Schuster.
• Animal Genius: A 2008 game from Artech Studios. The cover art promises 5 addictive games, likely pertaining to animals. The cover art is sharp but the screenshots look shockingly primitive for a 2008 title. I’m wagering this was a set of Flash games for the web that was later packaged and sold on a disc.

And here are the girl-oriented titles from the lot I procured:

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• Rider’s World: I Want to Ride: I have covered 2 horse-riding series on this blog so far (Let’s Ride and Time to Ride). Based on the colonized title “I Want To Ride”, I’m guessing there are other titles in this series. Copyright 2006 and the companies mentioned are Aipirinha Games, Calibre, and CDV.
• Girl Talk: The CD-ROM Game of Truth or Dare: Rated E for everyone, which doesn’t really square with what I’ve always heard about Truth or Dare sessions. 1998 game by Humancode and published by Hasbro. Perhaps positioned as competition for Mattel’s contemporary Barbie games.
• Atomic Betty: Intergalactic Conspiracy: This feels like it might be based on an existing cartoon property. Sure enough. From Brighter Minds in 2006 (I’ve played some of their stuff).

A grab bag of gaming oddities:

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• The Game of Komando City: This 1997 title promises to be a game of some sort (the word is right there in the title). A little more googling indicates that this is some kind of computer training. Companies mentioned include Komando Corporation, Peak Interactive, and AT&T WorldNet Service (the latter is probably an ISP offer).
• Camp Make-A-Wacky: 1996 kids game (possibly edutainment) from Turner New Media.
• Tearstone: “A mind-bending hidden object adventure!” This is a hidden object game. I still have yet to actually play a hidden object game. I have a feeling that it’s easy points for MobyGames. Copyright date is confusingly listed as 2002-2013. Companies mentioned are Tag Publishing as well as ValuSoft-Cosmi, which is the first time I realized that those 2 purveyors of budgetware had merged.

And now we come to the section of “stuff that almost certainly contains no gaming elements but is still interesting”:

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• Internet The City (2 CD-ROMs): A Guided Tour Through The Internet. No copyright date on either of the disc. From Simply Interactive. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that their URL simply.com doesn’t host their original site anymore.
• How To Computers: 1994 learning title from CRT Multimedia. I feel like they were decades ahead of the trend, grammar-wise (“How to ‘noun’” seems to be a recent fad). This promised to teach word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and desktop publishing.
• Art Explosion: Seasons, Events, & Holidays: 1998 title from Nova Development Corporation. 15,000 sensational images for year-round celebrations.
• Virgin’s One Tribe: I didn’t get a close-up picture of this title on eBay. I just saw it was a Virgin Interactive title, and that it didn’t show up on MobyGames. I was hoping it was a missing game. Not quite: “An interactive encyclopedia of people and cultures.”

And a final grab bag of general oddities:

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• 3D Action & Adventure: A 1994 Shovelware disc
• Dennis Miller: That’s Geek To Me: 1995 title by Sanctuary Woods.
• TesselMania!: The art and design tool, also by MECC. Create tesselated images.

As the years wear on, it’s getting harder and harder to find games that A) are not in my collection and B) are not yet in the MobyGames database. Yet it’s not completely impossible.

I recently learned that MobyGames added support some time ago for VTech V.Flash games, yet has no entries as of this writing. This educational console’s entire library is 9 games large. I procured a brand new V.Flash console many years ago and it remains in the box. This game is the 4th V.Flash game I have thus far acquired– Bratz Fashion Pixiez: The Secret Necklace:

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I have 5 more games in the entire library to collect. I have resolved to get them all into the database someday.

I used to go scavenging on eBay for video game lots. You don’t have to acquire very many lots before you hit a point of diminishing returns, when you already own a significant number of items in the lot. Instead, I have recently found a few eBay stores that have lots of less expensive old CD-ROM games and which offer reasonable shipping rates when grouping multiple items. This is almost as good as those old lots I used to snatch up.

Here are some recent acquisitions that aren’t in the database yet:

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It wasn’t until I started composing this post that I realized how well 2 of these covers (Final Conflict and The Unexplained) fit when placed next to each other.

• Cluefinders: Secret of the Living Volcano: Many items from this educational franchise are already in the database but this one has slipped through.
• Air Commanders: A 1995 title published by Softkey. Aerospace Publishing Ltd. is also mentioned, as is QSound (sound tech company).
• Riddle of the Runes: The Worlds of TSR: Copyright 1995, mentions Front Street Publishing and U.S. Gold. The acronym ‘TSR’ has a (TM) symbol, so I’m guessing it has something to do with the company that created Dungeons & Dragons.
• Final Conflict: There are numerous games in the database that already include the words “Final Conflict” in their titles. But this 1997 game from Rhode Island (R.I.) Soft Systems (tagline: “Software Engineered to be the Best”) and Sound Source Interactive has somehow slipped through the cracks. I can’t quite tell what kind of game it is, but I think it’s either RTS or 4X.
• The Unexplained: Not a game, but rather an “Interactive Documentary” about, well, the unexplained. 1996 CD-ROM from FlagTower.
• Warren Miller’s Ski World: Also not a game, but rather The Complete Multimedia Guide to Skiing. Windows and Mac CD-ROM published by MultiCom Publishing.

And finally, a few acquisitions that are already represented in the database:

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• Rebel Runner – Operation: Digital Code: 1994 action game, hearkening back to a time when ‘cyber’ was a trendy new word.
• This Means War!: 1995 game published by MicroProse.
• Fighter Wing: 1995 Flight Combat simulator.
• Force 21: 1999 RTS game from Red Storm. MSN Internet is also mentioned on the disc art, so I guess AOL didn’t have a monopoly on that yet.
• Ski Resort Extreme: Build your own ski resort. I have an impressive collection of these managerial games that I never get around to playing.
• Everest: A 1999 Mt. Everest climbing simulation published by GT Interactive.

Over the past year, I realized that the old era had passed long ago. This revelation was triggered by a cereal box, of all things.

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What brought on this revelation? You see, for at least a decade, it wasn’t unusual for cereal brands to actually pack compact discs into their breakfast cereal boxes. What interested me were the games that were occasionally packaged, though some music CDs were sometimes available (my favorite Christmas album of all time came in a box of Chex). But this is not the way of things anymore.

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Alas, the world has long since moved on from optical storage media. As you can see from these photos, if you want to play the included games, you need to install their mobile app and then scan some code in order to access a game.

It’s not just for cereal boxes either. Gaze upon the venerable Cracker Jack toy surprise:

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I’ve heard really old timers complain that the toy surprise used to be a real toy and not some rub-on tattoo. Now I’m old enough to remember when the surprise was a rub-on tattoo and not a code that you can scan using a mobile app in order to access a game:

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Indeed, the last time I remember seeing bundled CD-ROM games would have been in mid-2012 when I found some Atari games at Taco Bell, which were themselves re-releases from an earlier promotion in 2010.

I have finally resigned myself to the reality that I will never collect odd CD-ROMs from a cereal box or a fast food establishment ever again. But I still have some sources on old games. Here are some recent acquisitions that aren’t yet in the database:

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• Disney’s The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea: There is simply an unending supply of old Disney games that haven’t yet gone into the database.
• FishCo: “Become a Master Fishkeeper”: From Cosmi. I guess there is an aquatic theme with this particular lot.
• Mall Tycoon 2 Deluxe: MobyGames has the standard version but not the “Deluxe” edition; that means more fun for me as I attempt to determine if this belongs as a separate title.
• Combo of Championship Cheerleading / Horse Illustrated: Championship Season: What were the odds that the constituent games in this combo pack wouldn’t already be represented in the database? Also, “Play your favorite MP3s.”

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• Barbie as The Island Princess: I’ll also never run out of unentered Barbie games.
• Fisher-Price Digital Arts & Crafts Studio: Probably not a game as opposed to a creative tool, but might still have some game elements. Copyright 2007.
• 101 Puppy Pets: With the tagline “adopt them all”, this feels like it’s aping 2 other franchises: 101 Dalmatians and Pokemon. Companies involved are Viva Media and Selectsoft Games.
• Bears & Pandas of the World: From Webster Publishing and bearing an ad-hoc “Windows 95 plug & play” logo. Unlikely to be a game.

I procured a lot of old games from someone who really enjoyed hunting games. Here are the items that aren’t in the database:

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• Hunting Unlimited 2: The jewel case cover looks photocopied.
• Rocky Mountain Trophy Hunter II: Above the Treeline: I remember seeing this on the shelves a long time ago. From Infogrames.
• Deer Hunt Challenge: Kill more woodland creatures. This one is published by EA.

Some other random missing items:

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• Hot Wheels Rally: 1996 game from Mattel.
• Spell It 3: Presumably educational title from 1995, published by Davidson & Associates. I’m guessing a singing frog figures into the proceedings.
• Crossword Mania 2: The first game was popular enough to warrant a sequel, apparently. From Sterling Software.
• Family Puzzle Pack: Probably a shovelware pack. From Encore Software.

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• Dancing With The Stars: The PC Game: I should examine this one at the same time as Dance With ABC since Google already conflates them. 2008 title from THQ.
• Disney Princess: Cinderella’s Castle Designer: 2003 title. I’m curious what kind of gaming elements this contains, but it does feature an ESRB badge.
• Save Planet Polluto: “An interactive edutainment experience from the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District under a grant from the U.S. EPA Office of Transportation and Air Quality.” Also, the tagline is, “Be the first to save the Pollutonians from the ravages of air pollution!” It raises some odd questions, like where the name Planet Polluto comes from if it’s not supposed to be polluted. I’m sure it will all make sense once I play it.
• Space Missions: Just… Space Missions. The title makes it sound like it’s an expansion pack for another game. 1997 title for Mac and Windows. No ESRB badge, but it does feature an ad-hoc ISO-9660 (CD filesystem) badge.

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• Family Fireworks 6-Pack: Published by Viva Media, this appears to contain 6 2009-era Windows games: Fritz Chess, Card and Casino Games Platinum, Jewel Labyrinth, Sudoku Mania, Mahjongg Platinum 3, and Super Word Challenge.
• Oceans Below: From the Software Toolworks. Probably an educational exploration rather than a game.
• Herbert and the underwater Pyramid: From Swift Jewel, “Jump right in and get ready for cube-hopping fun!”
• 3D Mania: The cover art leads me to believe this contains Operation Over Kill and Condition Red. MobyGames contains no record of either of these games.

This unentered title gets a category of its own:

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Pony Luv: A Pony to Call Your Own. The reason this stands out is that the seller didn’t want to send it without cover art. So they found a low resolution photo of the cover art material, scaled it way up, printed it out on standard paper, and taped that to a generic keepcase. A+ for effort, I guess. I won’t be scanning it for MobyGames, though.

Next up, I have a whole bunch of educational titles published by Sunburst Communications and procured from a retired schoolteacher. Here is the Phonics lot, all of which are marked as published in 2000 for both Windows and Mac:

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• Phonics Beginning Blends: Sunken Treasure Adventure
• Phonics Long & Short Vowels: Max’s Attic
• Phonics Word Families: Python Path
• Phonics Initial Consonants: Creepy Cave

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• Teasers by Tobbs, Mac-only
• Every Child a Reader, 2000, Mac & Windows
• Tenth Planet Explores Math: Number: Fraction Operations: Not sure where the title begins and ends with this one. It’s copyright 1998 by Tenth Planet Explorations Inc.
• Spatial Sense & Problem Solving: Copyright 1992, 1995, and 1996, Mac-only

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• Spatial Sense & Problem Solving: A second copy, and with different artwork. Mac-only CD-ROM.
• Graphers (1997, Mac & Windows)
• Reading Who? Reading You! (1996, Mac & Windows)
• Bailey’s Book House: 1995 by Edmark, Windows and Mac

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• A Mad-Libs interactive DVD game
• First Phonics: 1997, Mac & Windows
• A To Zap: Copyright 1995 and 1998, Mac and Windows
• The Letterbugs: Get Ready To Read: 2000, Mac and Windows
• Key Skills Reading: Letters and Words: 2002, Mac and Windows

Next, I found a series of these CD-ROMs from an outfit called White Wolf Software and advertised to work on “IBM and Compatibles”. Each one purports to contain “Ten Great Programs”. However, I strongly suspect that refers to shareware versions of 10 programs of varying quality.

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• Series 4: The cover art mentions Rise of the Triad, Bio Menace, Race the Nags, and Captain Comic.
• Series 5: Vinyl Goddess From Mars, Solar Winds, 2-Bit Poker, Oil Cap
• Series 9: Epic Pinball, TeleCards, Pyramid, Pirada I: The Fearless
• Series 16 (copyright 1995, US$12.99 price sticker): Alien Carnage, Cosmo’s Cosmic Adventure, Night Raid, Zone 66
• Series 22 (copyright 1995, US$12.99 price sticker): Monster Bash, Crystal Caves, Star Hammer, Television Trivia
• Series 23 (copyright 1995): This one has a more educational bent: Crayon Box, 123-Talk, Jurassic Spelling, Big Math Attack!

As I researched all the titles presented on the cover art, I noticed that the various games’ release dates are a few years prior to the copyright dates on the cover art. More than a few of the games are from Apogee. It’s not unreasonable that they cut deals to distribute the entire games, rather than just the shareware versions.

Finally, here’s a smattering of demo discs I have acquired:

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• Ripcord Games demo disc: Return Fire 2 and Enemy Infestation, 2 games that date back to 1998.
• M1 Tank Platoon II demo, with a demo of Falcon 4.0.
• Operation Bodycount one level preview demo disc
• Red Orb Entertainment CD Sampler for Windows 95, copyright 1997
• The Space Bar: I’m assuming this is a demo disc for the following titles: Emperor of the Fading Suns, Obsidian, Lose Your Marbles, A Fork in the Tale, and HyperStudio
• Rocket Science Game Sampler, copyright 1995
• Bethesda Softworks Sampler: The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall and Terminator: Future Shock

I already found an original Xbox cast off in a recycle pile about 4 years ago. However, that one sits in a state of disassembly for some optical drive hacking experiments I was conducting awhile back. So when I found another unit at my favorite thrift shop for only $6, I snatched it up immediately in case I feel inspired to actually play an Xbox disc.

When I got home and plugged it in to verify that the thing works, I received this surprise:

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A copy of Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects.

Meanwhile, on a separate visit to the same thrift shop, I saw one of these:

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Oops, did I say “one of these”? I meant I saw about 50 of them. They were scattered all around the store. I’d find 10 here, 5 there, 2 in another part of the store. Looks reputable, right? They couldn’t label it as “High Quality” if it weren’t true, right? I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. The color scheme reminds me of the Xbox 360 brand. The price was right (i.e. low enough), so I picked one up. When I got it home, I realized that there were numerous stickers on the box and started peeling them back:

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Ah, so it is supposed to be an Xbox 360 controller. Here’s what the box looks like without the stickers:

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What are the stickers for? It seems clear that this is some manner of counterfeit. Were the sellers legally required to cover up Xbox 360 markings? Perhaps they were barred from selling these and decided to just drop them off at this thrift shop.

So it’s a good bet that it’s a counterfeit controller. But what’s the difference between this and the real deal? I don’t have an Xbox 360 so I don’t have much experience with how this differs from an authentic controller. It looks legit to me and would have fooled me were it not for the weird box stickers. I recently procured a Steam Link device and this controller appears to work perfectly.

However, I dug up this Gaming.StackExchange thread in which someone procured the same counterfeit item. They determined that the analog controller actually acts as a digital gamepad. I.e, it only has 9 discrete positions rather than offering a continuous range of coordinates.

Other recent acquisitions that are not yet represented in the MobyGames database:

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• Elroy’s Costume Contest, from Headbone Interactive (1996): This is interesting. I have previously acquired 2 other Elroy games and covered them in a previous entry. In checking to see if anyone else had heard of these games and if there were any other games in the series, I found that someone had cared enough about this series to set up a dedicated Wikia space for it which only mentioned the 2 games. I assumed that was the last word on the matter. Evidently not.
• Pop! Drop! + Stack! XP Championship, from SelectSoft games (2006): What a curiously punctuated title. The box claims to have “Over 100 Games”. I have encountered this SelectSoft stuff before, in the form of dubious 100,000 Games and 333,000 Games packages.
• Lost & Found Volume 1, from Interactive Toys (1994): An ambitious title promising future volumes that I will need to watch out for.
• Harvest Mania To Go, from Pogo.com (2005): MobyGames has a record of this being a browser game from 2005. This copy also has a copyright date of 2005, so perhaps it was published concurrently. Seems to be a cross between color matching and Farmville.

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• Looney Tunes: Back In Action, from Warner Bros. (2003)
• NHRA Drag Racing 2: Limited Edition (2000): The regular version is already in the database; the Limited Edition probably warrants a separate entry.
• Fetch! from Gamebryo, Virtual Playground, and ValuSoft (2006): You can pretend to care for a dog.
• Go Fish! from Knowledge Adventure (1998): probably not a card game
• Madagascar Animal Trivia DVD Game (Demo Edition), from b Equal: Appropriate for “ages 6-106”

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• KAR Racing, Twin Pak with Mini Golf, from Cosmi (2003): turns out I already acquired a copy of this but without the box or the Mini Golf game
• The Horse Lovers Ultimate Compendium, a DVD-ROM collection from Viva Media (2012, 2014): The box copy claims “Over 50 complete games included”. However, it only seems to include 6 games according to the rest of the copy (front, back, and disc):
  • My Riding Stables
  • Championship Riding Star
  • Blue Ribbon Show Jumper
  • Horse Camp
  • Riding Academy 1
  • Riding Academy 2