Three months goes so damn fast. I can’t believe it’s time again for another haul post. I was hoping to have done some other content but just haven’t had the time. But I will soon! Anyway, here’s the latest goodies I’ve picked up!
A HUGE Nintendo DS/3DS haul!
So I joined a new website/app that is basically a place for selling used clothes. But tons of folk are clearing out their cupboards of old games consoles and games. And this lot was being sold for £30! Which is a steal! I sold a fair bit of it or traded in at CEX to fund some other things I wanted, but it just goes to show some decent things can be found for a good price now and then.
Metroid Zero Mission, GBA
So this game is expensive as hell these days. I wanted it years ago but never managed to acquire it. Luckily with a whole bunch of CEX credit from trading in stuff from my £30 DS haul, I could afford this no problem.
GTA games!
I’d wanted to replay some of the older GTA games for a while, and with some CEX credit, decided to pick up the PS1 collection (featuring GTA, GTA2 and GTA London), and the PS2 Trilogy (GTA3, San Andreas and Vice City). And then the GTA games released for the PSP as my PSP library gets a little neglected. In my search for GTA games, I also picked up GTA for the Game Boy Advance, and China Town Wars for the DS (both were under £10 each which seemed a good buy). So now I have an abundance of vehicular based crime to get through!
Wii, Wii U, PS2 and DS games.
More games from the clothing sales app. I hadn’t picked up any Wii U games for a while and when Mario games are going for a fiver each, I can’t NOT pick them up. Ratchet and Clank was £1 with £1.99 postage, and I don’t remember the cost of many of the others. But they were much less than CEX trade credit. So I was happy to add all of them to my collections for a very good price!
Shovel Knight OST, Streets of Red and Pokemon Pearl!
These are a bit out of place but I forgot to put them in photos with other things. The Shovel Knight Soundtrack was something I ordered from Limited Run Games a long time ago. I don’take a habit of buying soundtracks, but Shovel Knight is phenomenal for its retro-sounding melodies that are as catchy as hell.
Streets of Red is a Limited Run title I’d never heard of before but it didn’t have any bids on eBay and looked cool as fuck, being a blend of Streets of Rage and classic ’80s Slasher-horror. I was sold on this premise, and it necessitated a bid.
I’ve just started getting back into Pokemon games, and the early DS Pokemon games are becoming harder to find for a good price. Pokemon Pearl wasn’t too bad, so I’m looking forward to discovering what I missed out on back when it was released.
LOTS of Switch titles!
Most of these are Limited Run Games titles that took ages to arrive but there are a few I picked up for a good price on FB, or on the clothing app. Little Nightmares II was £10 which seemed a steal, and I got the second one for around £15 on eBay. I finally added Zelda: Breath of the Wild to my collection after buying it off my friend Carrie, who also sold me Ni No Kuni as well. She also gave me a little box of GTA themed sew-on patches gifted to her from Rockstar, from back when she worked at the game studio. Which was nice as hell of her. So yeah, a whole bunch of Switch games.
DVDs and BluRays!
A few different 50s B-movies for my B-movie collection, and a couple of movies I picked up from HMV. Infra-man looks like an Ultraman knock-off, and I cannot wait to see it.
Gamera Showa and Heisei collections!
So I had most of the Gamera movies anyway, but when Zavvi were selling these two nice BluRay box sets of the Showa and Heisei era movies for an absolute steal, I couldn’t not pick them up! I’ve since sold my other versions of the Gamera movies, as these look much nicer on the shelf. I can’t remember exactly how much I paid, but with temporary promo code I think they were around £20 a set with free postage. I love the artwork on the boxes.
Alfred Hitchcock collection!
So a couple of weeks back, I went into town for some reason. That morning I’d just saved an online sale to my watch list, being the Alfred Hitchcock collection for around £25. I was tempted to offer £15 as there are a few titles I was keen to see that I never had before. But before I could, just an hour or so later, I walked past a charity shop window and spotted this lot with a price label saying £10. I was in a rush but not so much of a rush that I couldn’t hasten within to claim these! I’ve never actively gone looking for Alfred Hitchcock collecions, so it was absolutely a coincidence that I discovered this set just an hour or so after being tempted by the same set online.
’90s Pokémon soft toys!
Whilst looking for Pokemon video games, I discovered these beanie toys on eBay. I had most of these toys as a kid, and can still remember the look of disappointment on my dad’s face when he saw I was taking a shoe-box full of soft toys on holiday with me, instead of something a little less wussy. Nevertheless, I fucking loved these toys as a kid. I made them battle a bunch, and could throw them around in ways that I couldn’t with my smaller Tomy figures. Anyway, moving on to smaller Tomy figures-
’90s Pokémon Battle Figures and Poké Ball Blaster!
The countdown to Christmas 1999 was agonising for me. I desperately want to own some physical Pokémon themed products. I played the shit out of Pokémon Red, and poured over a little comic/magazine that was given to all Nintendo fan club members, which was subsequently gifted or swapped with me by the kid next door. But I needed plastic toys to re-enact the battles in the games. Anyway, the Poké Ball Blaster set with the different Pikachu toys was one item I unwrapped Christmas morning. And it’s fucking weird. I gather that Pokémon first appeared in a Game Boy game. But it still seems odd that plastic Pokémon figures would be packaged with a plastic, ball-firing Game Boy, with the intent that you’ll use it to knock over Pokémon to “catch” them.
The other set is a Gloom and Vileplume set which I remember getting from a little shop called Martin’s models in Leominster. My dad was very into radio controlled planes, so used to spend a while in this little shop, and I used to ogle the Lego sets. Occasionally they’d get some Pokémon toys or card sets in, and this was one I remember getting. A weird thing about these Pokémon two-packs, is that they All came packed with a plastic Masterball. The Masterball was a rare item in the games, with only one found in each title. It could be used to catch any Pokémon without fail so was best used for a rare, strong Pokémon. But the toys they were packed in with were mostly common, weaker Pokémon so it really didn’t make much sense. It wasn’t for a good while later that you’d find the more standard Pokè Ball in toy sets. I have no idea why these decisions were made by the toy companies, but twenty years later, it still keeps me awake at night.
Pokémon Adventures Manga set!
I don’t buy many manga, and I didn’t buy this one (it was gifted!) but this had been on my want list for ages. It tells the story of the original Pokemon games (Red and Blue), only many of the Gym Leaders are members of Team Rocket, and shit happens in these books that you just wouldn’t see in a game or animé, like Pokémon getting decapitated in battles. Edgy as fuck, but still with cute and adorable cartoon mice and the like.
A new Boglin!
I’m not going to say much about this as it deserves its own Halloween post! Stay tuned!
More Pocket Shockers!
I think I must be the only person in Britain who collects this UK exclusive, ’90s toyline. Whereas Monster in my Pocket and Mini-Boglins seem to be very sought-after, no-one seems to give a damn about these. I was especially pleased to snag the Headless Honcho figure which was only available if you sent away for it with proof of purchase tokens.
Goosebumps books and action figures!
The figures deserve their own post. But the books were acquired from the clothes selling website for about £1 each. Nothing takes me back to the ’90s quite like gazing at the colourful, bubbling covers of Goosebumps books
Japanese soft-vinyl monster toys!
I love collecting Japanese monster toys so much that I’ve decided I need to post about them more often on here. So I shall. This lot has some Marusan originals, some Godzilla monsters, some Ultraman, and some Western movie monsters like Gorgo, and the Rat Bat Spider from The Angry Red Planet. I’m all kinds of excited to get toys based on older Western B-movies like the latter, and the Bat Rat Spider really looks frickin’ awesome. But yeah, I plan to cover Japanese vinyl toys more extensively on here in future.
So there we go! Another three months worth of goodies. It’s quite a haul this time, as I have been selling a few things (I’ve been clearing out some of my Final Fantasy collection, just stuff that doesn’t spark joy anymore), and having extra money from sales always brings temptation to pick up more stuff!
As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll try and post some Halloween themed content before the month is up!
The Forgotten Starship 