Archive for the ‘Collectibles’ Category

Zap Pax Video Game Cards

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

One of the relics of the 80’s and 90’s that I kind of miss seeing is the video game trading card. They were kind of like baseball cards, but for video games. Or, to put it another way, they were like Pokémon TCG cards, except you couldn’t play a game with them, and they covered more than one game.

So, totally rad, in other words.

Zap Pax Unopened Box

Enter the Zap Pax, pictured here in Unopened Box Form(tm).

These are trading cards that feature Battletoads, Adventure Island, and… probably others?

To be honest, I just couldn’t bring myself to rip open the plastic and kill the collector’s value of these things, so I don’t really know what they look like. The Internet is surprisingly unhelpful here. Outside of the odd eBay auction, there don’t seem to be too many pictures of these things floating around out there, either. That’s too bad, because after all this time, I kind of wanted to see what was in my box, without actually opening my box.

I suppose I won’t be able to do one without doing the other, but I can dream, can’t I?

DREAMJK

Posted in Artifacts, Collectibles, Nintendo | 3 Comments »

Pac-bears

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

As I’m looking back at the things I’ve collected over the years, I can’t help but notice that I’ve gotten a lot of Pac-Man stuff. That shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, even though I’m pretty sure he’s not as popular as he was a few years ago, he was absolutely huge in his day, and I was around for most of that day. But he’s still around, and tends to pop up from time to time in the most bizarre places. For instance, take a look at this:

pac-bears1

What we have here is a couple of bears wearing 3D-glasses (you know, like everyone did in the 80’s), and on their bellies, we have… Inky and Pinky?

A closer look at the tags reveals that these are a product of the Peek-A-Boo Toy Company

pac-bears2

Which has only been around since 1995, meaning that these can’t possibly be authentic 80s toys. They don’t appear in their current catalog, either, and I can’t find anything else on the Internet about them, so I’m forced to make the following conclusions:

  • These were made for a carnival or fair and distributed as prizes
  • They’re some kind of throwback, retro thing to get parents to spend money to try and win a reminder of their childhood
  • They’re totally rad to the max!

But now I kind of think I need to try and find the other two… assuming there are two more.

ITSABEAR

Posted in Artifacts, Collectibles, Pac-Man | Comments Closed

Game Boy Wallet

Thursday, January 10th, 2013

WRITER

You’ve heard of the Nintendo Game Boy, right? Hand-held gaming device, spinach-green screen? Came in lots of variations and revisions including the Color Game Boy (came with colored shells), Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color (came with a color screen), Game Boy SP, and on and on? Looked kind of like this:

Game Boy... kind of

Hm, most Game Boys didn’t come in tins, so this may not be the real deal. Let’s open this up and see what we have.

It's a Game Boy, it's a bi-fold wallet. It's madness.

It’s a Game Boy, it’s a bi-fold wallet. It’s madness.

That looks practically the same. Well, sort of. What you’re looking at here is a representation of the Game Boy in the finest leather (well, maybe not the absolute finest, but pretty close). With pockets for cash, credit cards, and ID cards, but you’ll probably fill it up with receipts and phone numbers without any names attached to them.

So, it’s almost as fun as a real Game Boy, and it uses fewer batteries. That’s pretty awesome, right?

Posted in Artifacts, Collectibles, Nintendo | Comments Closed

Nintendo Mini Lunchbox

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

Super Mario Kart seems to be one of those games that most people have heard of, even if they don’t play many video games. For the two or three of you that haven’t heard of this series, it essentially takes a selection of Nintendo’s characters from the Mario universe, sticks them in go karts, and makes them race around increasingly-ridiculous tracks. It’s pretty great.

And, with anything that’s even remotely decent, it spawned… er… ‘inspired’ lots of similar games, including something called Diddy Kong Racing. Diddy Kong Racing is a whole lot like Mario Kart with a couple of minor differences: the Mario Universe characters were replaced with mostly original Rare characters, the go karts were replaced with, erm, go karts, planes and boats (reminds me of something that I can’t quite place) lots of licensed non-video-game things for you to waste your money on. Including this thing.

Mario Kart lunchbox.

Mario Kart/Diddy Kong Racing lunchbox.

Pretty great, right? Popcorn, double-dipped (in what I assume is chocolate), tiny lunchbox covered in racers from both of these fine racing games? What else could you want?

What’s that? This lunch box is too small to put a sandwich in without folding it in half? Hm, yeah, that could be a problem.

And what did the popcorn taste like? Unfortunately, I don’t know. I figured that opening a lunch box to eat 15-year-old popcorn wasn’t the best idea, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

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