This year we finally got to attend Retrospelsmässan again, Sweden’s largest retro gaming convention! Thanks to Sven666 and Quartex who revived the franchise :) It was a blast as always, and bigger than ever! They used a larger venue, and this year there were finally not a single issue regarding the queues! Good job guys! :D

I had a table shared with a my friend Cleareyes this year, where I sold off some of my doubles. I was also given the task of arranging a Tetris competition during the afternoon :) I had picked out a Tetris game and a way of competing that wouldn’t be too time consuming. I chose Super Tetris 3 for Super Famicom. In 2-player VS mode we had tryouts of 64 people that competed :) 32 remained, and then 16, then 8, then 4 and eventually just 2 people who battled for the title of RSM’s Tetris champion ^_^ I hardly managed to take any pics during the competition but I got to borrow some from my friend and also avid Tetris collector Daniel Engdahl :) Thanks!

I got to play a versus game with the winner afterwards. First to 3 wins and he beat me by 3-2. I got distracted in the last match XD

The convention was a blast, unfortunately I didn’t have time to explore all the tables and all the exhibitors as much as I would have liked. I spent most of the time talking to friends that I bumped into :) It’s such a great place for all of us nerds to gather and hang out ^_^ I’m already looking forward to Retrospelsmässan 2018!

This year at Retrospelsmässan I actually had a table shared with my friend Cleareyes where I spent half the time selling some of my doubles. I also spent time on the Tetris competition that I was hosting, so I didn’t get much time to shop around. There were LOADS of games for sale this year! I wish I had more time to scour through everything! But I did manage to find a few cool things :)

First up are some really nice Japanese Sega Mega Drive games! The Swedish Pong champion, Barkis, was selling off his personal collection. I managed to score Gleylancer, Splatterhouse Part 3 and Awesome Possum! I also got Rastan Saga II and Shijou Saidai no Soukoban which I had no clue what they were but I was hoping they were playable XD

Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer is an awesome shoot-em-up. It’s quite pricey and I didn’t think I would ever find a copy that I’d be willing to pay the price for. But together with these other games I made a good deal :) It’s a pretty good shmup! It has nice graphics, varied stages, power-ups and various settings for your side-guns. It was fairly easy, but once you die you loose your power-ups and side-guns which make it a bit more challenging.

Awesome Possum is a classic platformer, unfortunately not as awesome as I had hoped >_< You could basically just jump around, and Mr. Possum was very difficult to control. It didn’t feel like you could steer him to where you wanted to go. And the story was a bit lame.. you have to run around the rain forest and collect trash to save the environment, and stop robots from cutting down the trees.. in between stages you got a quiz, felt like you were back in elementary school XD A poorly produced game if you ask me..

I have a few games in the Splatterhouse series, the second one for Sega Mega Drive, the one for PC Engine and Wanpaku Grafitti for the Famicom (although that one can hardly be counted as the same XD) and now I also got Splatterhouse Part 3 which I think was better than what I remember from both the 2nd one for Mega Drive and the PC Engine version. The controls were a bit smoother, it was more fluent. It wasn’t just a regular brainless beat ’em up where you can just button mash the attack button and get away with it. Even though Rick only had one attack button you still had to use timing and strategy to outsmart the enemies. You had to be on your toes a bit more than in usual beat ’em ups. I liked that about it :) But some rooms were ridiculous, like the flying hands or the books/objects’ room where stuff just came flying at you constantly, pushing you backwards with no way of you being able to attack them back.. super annoying.. I also ran out of time on the third stage, but nothing happened, I could just continue to look for the boss room until I found it and beat it o_O

Shijou Saidai no Soukoban was a puzzle game where you pushed blocks around to get them to the marked spots to clear a stage. The graphics/colour and overall look of it was kind of boring. I played a couple of stages but eventually got stuck and I don’t have patience for these kind of puzzle games. I prefer Tetris ^_^

The final Japanese Mega Drive game I got was Rastan Saga II. Everybody has told me it’s the shittiest game ever. And sure, the character was a bit stiff, he looked silly and was badly animated, but I liked the colourful graphics, it was definitely not as bad as Sword of Sodan XD But yeah, after reaching the second stage boss I agree, it’s definitely not a good game. I wasn’t able to get a hit on Medusa without her hitting me like three times first >_<

I picked up an original grey Nintendo Game Boy as well, mainly because it came in this funky carry case. I already have this carry case, but it’s my favourite, so now I have two :) I also got two games with it, Tetris and Motocross Maniacs, and it was a good deal.

Apart from that I picked up a few Game Boy titles: Star Saver, Migraine, Booby Boys, Volleyfire and Sanrio Carnival.

Migraine is a typ of puzzle game where you turn levers to steer a laser that pops bubbles. It was extremely boring and frustrating. The controls were slow and the stages had an annoying time limit..

The Adventures of Star Saver on the other hand is a great platforming shooter :) And the music is awesome!! I recommend trying this one out :D

I thought Volleyfire would be a shmup as well, but not really. You’re only on one screen, facing an opponent and you have to shoot down his health by getting your shot in between the moving obstacles in the middle. It’s kind of like the old school Outlaw on Atari 2600, but with space ships.. boring.

Booby Boys is a top down platformer where your objective is to collect all items on a stage, find the key and enter the next stage. Your weapon is that you make traps for the enemies, dig a hole and they fall down, push it again to kill them when they’re stuck. It was so-so..

Sanrio Carnival was just like Columns! Except with the heads of Sanrio characters instead of gems XD You make matches of three horizontally, vertically and even diagonally. It was ok :) There’s a hard mode where the blocks just stick mid-air when you destroy a row, that was different O_o

I also found some PC Engine titles that I had been looking for, and some that I didn’t know I wanted XD I found Winds of Thunder which I have been looking for for quite some time, and PC Genjin 3 which is a great platforming series. Then I also bumped into a game called Lady Sword.. I had no clue what it was but it looked absurd so I had to get it XD

I got convinced to buy a boxed Super Famicom as well XD I already have 3.. but none of them are boxed and two of them are in really shitty condition. One is extremely yellowed, and the other one has been spray painted in silver, a really bad paint job at that.. So it was mainly because of the content that I picked it up. The console is complete and in really minty condition :) And it was a fair price.

The first and last thing I bought at the convention were Atari 2600 carts! I just love these, especially when they’re some weird bootlegs and stuff XD A lot of them are German and have some pretty funny names, like Raumroboter :) Spider Fighter is not in very pretty condition, but I recently bought a bootleg of it and realised it’s an amazing game so I wanted to try the original cartridge :) Phantompanzer I bought together with an Amiga CD32 game called Gloom. It’s been suggested to me before, I think it’s supposed to be an FPS game kind of like Doom…

At the end of the day I picked up some odd things over at Butik Mackapär. Markus always has some weird things and lots of Japanese goodies ^_^ I found a newly produced game for the Sega Dreamcast, it looked cute :) I also got a bunch of odd third party controllers. And some of the Atari 2600 games above were from him as well. He threw in an odd cartridge for the Sega Mega Drive, an Interceptor Specify Card.. I have no clue what it does XD

Well this turned out to be a pretty long post XD There’s even a few more games I forgot to mention that I got at RSM, but this will have to do for now ^_^

Even though I just spent a few hours at the retro game convention Retrospelsfestivalen this year, I still managed to pick up a couple of games for various systems ^_^

First of all, I’m super happy to have such good friends in the retro community that thinks of me when they find an unusual edition of Tetris :D Thanks Andreas for finding it for me ^_^ Retro Bit Bros had this Swedish Yapon rental edition of Tetris for the NES for sale and they put it aside for me :) It’s a beauty! A great addition to my Tetris collection ^_^

At their table I also found two Sachen games that I’ve never encountered in the wild before. I had to get Little Red Hood and try it for myself. I’ve only seen a brief video of it from AVGN back in the day. It was even worse than I had expected XD Horrible game mechanics and I couldn’t even get past the first stage. I collected cash enough to buy all the things in the store but none of them did anything useful or permanent, and I found a key in one instance but I didn’t find anything to open with it.. so eventually I just gave up!

Lucky Bingo was supposed to have some half-naked ladies in it I was told, but I couldn’t find any.. :(  instead it was the most boring gameplay I’ve ever encountered! It’s basically just a digital slot machine, put in money, pull the lever, and push again to stop. Completely boring >_< Unfortunately I couldn’t get it running on my Retron 5 so I couldn’t record any gameplay..

Retro Bit Bros also had a few Atari 2600 games, and I had to get these two! Such amazing artwork on the covers :D Frostbite wasn’t very exciting, you just jumped back and forth over what I think was supposed to be ice-blocks in a river. Plaque Attack however was way better! You’re a toothpaste tube inside a mouth shooting at food and candy that try to attack the teeth! A fun shooter where you fight off hamburgers, french fries, hot dogs, ice cream and lots of other tooth-enemies XD

I picked up a newly made Game Boy game by a small Swedish developer crew called Team Lamp Oil. It’s a puzzle game with falling blocks containing rope and bombs which you have to get to match so that you can clear the board when the fire block appears :) It was fun!

At the convention I found two Super Famicom games that looked like fun. I thought that Super Chinese World was a platformer because it looked like it on the back, but it had a lot of RPG-elements that I really despise >_< The actual battles though were platforming action, but it was soooo slooooow and the hit detection was really awful, so I do not recommend this title..

The other Super Famicom game was Astro Go! Go! This was a racing game, kind of like F-Zero.  I tried out two different characters and different tracks, but it was a bit difficult, and it probably would have been a lot more fun if it had a 2-player VS mode. Otherwise the graphics were nice, and the controls were sharp :)

I found a Sega Mega Drive game as well which has a really badass cover! Bloodshot is a first-person shooter kind of like Wolfenstein 3D but more futuristic. Compared to Wolfenstein on Super Famicom it’s a bit more difficult to steer since you don’t have the L and R buttons to sidestep on the Sega controller. But it works, and it’s ok in single player. It has a 2-player VS mode though that I’m eager to try out with a friend :)

I got a boxing game called Heavyweight Champ for the Sega Master System. It was cheap and it was lame XD I’m probably gonna use it for the finals sometime on Retro Rumble though! It’s probably more fun in 2-player mode than versus the AI…

Darius Plus for PC Engine was another purchase, I love the PC Engine and shmups ^_^ This wasn’t the best one in the series though.. but it was decent :) The thing I didn’t like was the power up system and that it was a bit slow for my taste.

Last but not least was Kokotoni Wilf, such a weird name! And an obscure cover.. I tried to get it running on my C64, but it didn’t want to finish loading.. I will give it another try some day, sometimes the old computer just doesn’t wanna play with you XD