I’m such a mess. Just last night, I finally got caught up on all my outstanding cover scanning work. So how did I celebrate today? By hitting up my favorite thrift shop and grabbing yet more old, unloved games, starting with yet more Barbie titles. Some of these seem a bit of a stretch to define as games. However, at least one of them already lives in the MobyGames database.

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• Barbie Magic Hair Styler — this one is mercifully already present in the database
• Barbie Nail Designer
• Barbie: Talk With Me!
• Barbie Generation Girl Gotta Groove
• Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover — copyright 1997 and published by SegaSoft; when I acquired and cataloged Virtual Makeover 2003, I figured that disc’s title implied that there was another in the series; I’m just surprised that it was so many years earlier (then again, I suppose there might be more of them out there)

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• Demo version (apparently included with a McDonald’s Happy Meal) of Disney’s Treasure Planet: Etherium Rescue
• The Cruncher 2.0 — This is an interesting specimen which claims to be a teaching spreadsheet for use in classrooms (grades 5 and up), and it’s from Knowledge Adventure, an outfit that puts out at least competent educational titles; maybe I can actually learn a thing or 2 about spreadsheets
• Hyperstudio 4 — I still like collecting odd multimedia creation titles; perhaps one day I will review them on my multimedia-oriented blog

This complete box was also available for cheap at the shop– Deep Raider:

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The box appeared to be re-shrinked. But maybe it was just poorly shrink-wrapped in the first place because the jewel case inside still looked fresh and all the other materials were pristine, including a USB “joymouse”:

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Despite never having been used, the d-pad still fell off when I opened the box, as pictured. Still, interesting marketing gimmick. This game has a release date of 2000, so this was very early in USB’s consumer lifetime. This is also the first PC game controller that I have seen which is modeled after the Sega Saturn’s controller.

I’m also a bit surprised that the publishers didn’t get in trouble thanks to main character’s striking resemblance to a Resident Evil 2-era Claire Redfield.

Finally! This post catches me up on all of last year’s procurements that aren’t in the database yet. Let’s get started…

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• Fisher-Price Rescue Heroes: Tremor Trouble (not sure, but I may very well have the entire series of alliteratively titled Rescue Heroes games now)
• AstroRock (SoftKey release)
• Magic Ball 2 (casual game with a Mumbo Jumbo/RealArcade pedigree)
• Sports Illustrated Kids CD-ROM game 4: Skateboarding (yet another Wendy’s Kids’ Meal promotional item)

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• Dragons: Fire & Ice (this is a DVD movie; see below for more detail)
• Ciao Bella: La Bella Romanza (billed as a casual sim game)
• Five Card Drop
• Chess Compendium 3D

Those latter 2 items are Pocketware games that come on business card form factor CD-ROMs. In my experience, they often contain games that are already in the database but with different names.

About that first item, Dragons: Fire & Ice is a DVD I found in a bargain bin. I happened to spot this on the back:

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“DVD-Rom DRAGONS Game”. Might be worth checking out.

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• Thinkin’ Things: Galactic Brain Benders
• R.E.V.s (Radically Engineered Vehicles): Ready to Roll
• Monsters, Inc: Pinball Panic
• Pillsbury Fun With The Family CD-ROM

No particular theme to this log; these are just a whole bunch of games I have procured over the previous year, many of which remain unentered in the database. I’m just finally trying to get organized, if only because I occasionally procure duplicates since I’m not keeping good track of what I already have.

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This batch features 2 mores games in the simple yet addictive Magic Match series that I absolutely adore:

• Magic Match Adventures
• Arty the Part-Time Astronaut
• eGames Fishing (another copy seen in the next batch)
• Magic Match: The Genie’s Journey

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Okay, so maybe some of these batches do have a theme. Here’s a pile of titles from the ever-sketchy eGames publishing house:

• eGames Blast Thru (Breakout/Arkanoid clone)
• eGames 3D Creation Station (may not strictly be a game)
• eGames Galaxy Multi-Pack
• eGames Arcade Multi-Pack
• eGames Strategy Multi-Pack
• Laptop & Travel Games
• eGames Fishing (same as batch above, but different release and distributor)

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Actually, maybe there are themes to each of these pictures (I took them a few months ago). The theme here seems to be odd promotional items:

• I Spy Mystery (distributed with a Wendy’s Kids’ Meal)
• I Spy Treasure Hunt (also distributed by Wendy’s)
• Super Scattergories (distributed with General Mills food products)
• U.B. Funkeys (actually, I have no idea what this is about)
• Eight Legged Freaks (credit card form factor game promoting the 2002 movie of the same name)
• Grossology (this has Kenmore on the front — I’m thinking… household appliances?)
• Amazon Trail 3rd Edition (also distributed with General Mills food products)

I came across someone who wanted to get rid of a bunch of old Windows games, someone who was apparently a fan of real time strategy games. Most of the games are already in the database, but I acquired them anyway because they were basically free and many of the specific covers were not yet in the database.

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Random observation: Check out the back of Lords of Midnight — one of the screenshots has a caption that purports that the game is comprised of an immense world that is the equivalent of 8 CD-ROMs. I’m hoping that the single CD-ROM that I have corresponds to this box copy.

Anyway, out of this lot, Crusades: Quest for Power is the only title that is definitively absent from the database. There is also Superbike World Championship– this is the kind of game that’s difficult to tell whether it’s in the database already. As of this writing, there is a whole category of Superbike World Championship titles but none that just name the basic title, which is all the CD-ROM states. The disc lists copyright dates of 1999,2000, which is a bit earlier than the ones of record, so this probably warrants a new entry.

The other games are:

1. Conquest of the New World: Deluxe Edition
2. Cyclemania
3. Gex (Smart Saver release)
4. Highland Warriors
5. Hocus Pocus (WizardWorks release)
6. Lords of Midnight
7. Patrician II: Quest for Power
8. Renegade: Battle for Jacob’s Star (Sun Moon Star release)
9. Shadow Watch
10. Shadows of Cairn
11. Sinistar Unleashed
12. XIII (distributed through the U.K. newspaper The Sun)
13. XS

The genre of “Tycoon” simulation games is ridiculously vast. Here are some of my acquisitions from the previous year in this field:

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So we have:

• Fairy Godmother Tycoon (I actually remember seeing this when it was first released in 2007 and keeping my eye on it, knowing that I would collect it some day)
• Prison Tycoon 4: Supermax (first 3 games in the series are already in MobyGames)
• Deep Sea Tycoon: Diver’s Paradise (already in MobyGames)
• Mall of America Tycoon (apparently a “special edition” of the overarching Mall Tycoon series, the first 3 of which are already in the database)
• TV Tycoon (I just realized this is already in the database as TV Manager)
• Tycoon Collection (shovelware collection not documented in database yet, though some of the constituent games are):
• Moon Tycoon (in database)
• Marine Life Tycoon
• Ocean Explorer Tycoon
• Coffee Tycoon (in database)

I actually look forward to these playing these games sometime since I had such a good time during my all-too-brief time allotted to Skateboard Park Tycoon.