Birfday Acquisitions

So my loving wife bought me a gift certificate for the local vidya game store for my birthday, and I have now successfully spent every penny of gift card (I even had to chip in an extra buck fifty so I could walk out with all these prizes). Anyway, the local store is big on current games and short on vintage stuff, but I'm mainly concerned with the vintage stuff. So I did the best with what I had. Bear in mind that I was buying games because 1) I didn't already own them 2) They seemed at the very least interesting 3) I didn't want to leave any credit behind. It was part of my civic duty to use all of my wife's gift. So here's what I got:

Laser Invasion- I know nothing about this game. I had never even seen it before. I picked it up for a few reasons: 1) The Kiss-style s's in the title 2) It's a Konami game and they have a great track record on the NES 3) It was cheap. I still haven't played it yet, but with all the war stuff on the cover, I'm picturing a Missile Command clone.

Ikari Warriors- How weird is it that I didn't already own this game? I own many many NES games and somehow hadn't picked this one up yet. Well I can sleep easy now because I rectified the situation.

Axelay- I bought this game because I remember videogamecritic giving it a good review. I was right about the good review, but I was wrong about what this game actually is. I bought Axelay but my brain was telling me it was Actraiser. Axelay sounds like a medieval slice n' dice game, but it's actually a vertical-scrolling shooter. I really need to look more closely at label. There's no barbarian with oily muscles and furry underwear on the cover, it's clearly a spaceship.

Fatal Fury 2- Here's two SNES franchises I can't keep straight in my brain: Fatal Fury and Final Fight. The whole alliterative F-name thing throws me off every time. So I didn't know if this would be the side-scrolling brawler or the tournament fighter. All I knew is that I own both Fatal Fury 1 and Final Fight 1, so I was safe either way.

Shaq-Fu- When you can spend a mere 99 cents and pick up one of the most maligned video games this side of ET (for the Atari 2600. ET not only set the tin standard for poorly designed rush-job video games, it also set a precedent for video games based on movies being complete crap) you should do it. Not only does it make your collection look slightly fuller on the shelf, it will make every person who browses your collection stop and say, "Shaq-Fu? Why the crap do you have this game?!"

So those are my new acquisitions. I have not yet played any of these games, so I can't tell you if Shaq-Fu is better than hype would have you believe or if Laser Invasion is the secret shame of Konami. I will review each of these games eventually, but I just wanted you to know I have new stuff. That's pretty much it.