PixlBit

                                                                                                        Pokemon Snap [N64] (1999)

2005 - Advance Wars: Dual Strike [DS]: If I was to be stranded on a desert island with a solar panel and one video game system, I would have the DS and Advance Wars: Dual Strike. Maybe with all that time on my hands, I could finally figure out how to beat this difficult turn-based strategy game containing some of the cutest cartoon tanks ever drawn.

    So here it is again. Another week of random ads from the pages of bargain bin comic books. These come from several Marvel TeamUp issues all written by the now famous Robert Kirkman. Remember him accepting the award for The Walking Dead game with the Telltale Games guys at the Spike TV Video Game Awards Show? Kirkman is a class act he is. He's also a great writer and even though I have little interest in a Marvel TeamUp comic series (unless it has Doctor Strange), I found these really fun. As a bonus I got six video game ads from 2006. So, by the hoary hosts of Hoggoth, here they are.

   1984, the year after the great video game crash of '83. For me, console video games fell off the frickin' Earth. I forgot about my Atari 2600, my neighbor's Intellivision, and my friend's ColecoVision. I moved on to PC games with my first dungeon crawl, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. I went to the occasional arcade to play Xevious, but in my mind, arcades were dead too. Amazingly though, console games were still coming out before the NES hit and here are ads for two of them I got from Doctor Strange No. 68, released December of 1984.

    Exceptionally bored today. My gaming buddy got himself a girlfriend, my other friend was busy doing maintenance on his car, and my girlfriend was busy with chores, so I spent the day in Starbucks writing and thinking about games. After starting to freeze from the air conditioning after about three hours, I left to do some shopping. I had $20 left after buying the Season Pass to Bioshock Infinite, so I went to Best Buy and priced some of the games I mentioned in my previous blog about 2012 stuff I still needed to play. Not finiding anything for $20 or less, I went to Walmart and found Far Cry 3 at $20. (They had Assassin's Creed III for $20 too but I had to stay with my budget and leave it be for now).

     I was just going through my database of games I listed from last year and decided to apply my new rating system to them. I call it my "desire-to-play" column. I give each game a one to five star rating and then focus my attention on only the five star games until I play them all. I'm getting to the end of buying all my most desired games of 2013 so far, so I need another list for when I'm done with this year.

     This week I picked up a bunch of Doctor Fate comics on the cheap after a friend said Doctor Fate was like DC's version of Marvel's Doctor Strange - a favorite comic character of mine. I found out later that Doctor Fate preceeded Doctor Strange by about twenty years (DF started in the 40's and DS in the 60's). Anyway, I noticed DC tends to not have as many ads in their comics as Marvel, most of them being ads for other DC comics - like the way indie comics do. But they do have video game ads here and there and I got six of them out of issues 32 to 41 of Doctor Fate all released from Sept 1991 to June 1992.