End of Year/Decade Music Lists 2019

I'm always a bit hesitant to post about music here. I feel like I just don't quite have the vocabulary to really analyze it or fully express my thoughts on it. Emboldened a little, I guess, by my recent album cover art post though, I thought I'd at least share my end-of-year (and decade) top 10s and playlists. Sure it's May, but hey, what else are any of us doing right now?

Here's to better times.

Top 10 Albums of the 2010s



1. Alvvays - Alvvays (2014)
2. Partner - In Search of Lost Time (2017)
3. Weakened Friends - Common Blah (2018)
4. Florence + The Machine - Ceremonials (2011)
5. LP - Lost on You (2016)



6. Charly Bliss - Guppy (2017)
7. CHVRCHES - Every Open Eye (2016)
8. AURORA - All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend (2016)
9. Cathy Davy - The Nameless (2010)
10. Goldfrapp - Head First (2010)



Not sure what Spotify non-users will be able to do with this, if anything, but here's a playlist I made back in December. Fully expecting every other end-of-decade list to ignore everything I enjoyed over the last 10 years, I put together a 100-track list charting my own, sort of, musical journey through the decade.

Top 10 Albums of 2019



1. Charly Bliss - Young Enough
2. AURORA - A Different Kind Of Human – Step 2
3. Tallies - Tallies
4. Miss June - Bad Luck Party
5. Calva Louise - Rhinoceros



6. Sigrid - Sucker Punch
7. Sir BabyGirl - Crush on Me: BICONIC Edition
8. The Chemical Brothers - No Geography
9. Billie Eilish - When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
10. The Wild Reeds - Cheers

Top 10 Pre-2019 Albums Discovered in 2019



1. Miya Folick - Premonitions (2018)
2. Speedy Ortiz - Twerp Verse (2018)
3. Various Artists - The Very Best of Euphoric Disco Breakdown (2004)
4. No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom (1995)
5. Surfbort - Friendship Music (2018)



6. Night Flowers - Wild Notion (2018)
7. Bikini Kill - The Singles (1998)
8. Selena - Dreaming of You (1995)
9. Estrons - You Say I'm Too Much, I Say You're Not Enough (2018)
10. Kitten - Kitten (2014)



As interesting as Spotify's own end-of-year wrap-up can be, for me it's always wildly divergent from what I've actually spent the year listening to, so for the past couple, I've been making my own playlists. If someone issued an official soundtrack to my 2019 (and they should) this would be the tracklist.

Obscure Cover Art-palooza 2020

I don't know about you guys, but there's something about building a new PC that makes me want everything on it to be tidy and clean and fresh: something that's had me side-eyeing the disaster area that was my music collection on several occasions, wondering if this was the time I finally tackled it: tidied everything up, fixed all the broken tags, and, most crucially, got hold of decent cover art for everything.

Well, having starting right after I built my current PC in 2018, only now have I finally finished doing exactly that. The stumbling block that made the whole process take so long: unsurprisingly the lack of good cover art for a large chunk of the VA compilations I've ripped over the years. With the only art available in many cases being some dark, crooked 200x200px photo someone took of the album in 2005, my only option was to scan, clean up and color correct everything myself. Yikes!

While I'm really happy with the end result, with over 90 compilations to take care of, this was definitely no small task. So, in the hopes of maybe saving some other obsessive, oddball music fans some time, I went ahead and uploaded the fruits of my labors. Let's take a look.

So, these are all imgur galleries that you can click into and download the art from in JPEG form, but for all my PNG aficionados out there, I've also put up a zip file with all of this cover art in PNG format. (Well, I say all of it. There were a small number I forgot to save as PNGs that are in there as JPEGs, so, you know, exercise caution.) You can download that here:

high-res cover scans.zip (403 MB)

Okay, to the galleries!

Hits Series High-res Scans

So, first up we have 23 entries in the Hits series - a longtime rival to the UK's Now That's What I Call Music that, despite numerous confusing relaunches, never quite managed to surpass it. Seriously, deciphering the chronology of this series makes the Wonder Boy lineage look like a walk in the park.

(For the purposes of Google searchability) The cover art here includes (and this is, I think, in chronological order): The Hits Album 7, The Hits Album 10, Snap it Up: Monster Hits 2, Hits 96, New Hits 96, Fresh Hits 96, Huge Hits 1996, Hits 97, New Hits 1997, Fresh Hits 1997, Huge Hits 1997, Big Hits, New Hits 98, Fresh Hits 98, Big Hits 98, Huge Hits 1998, Hits 99, New Hits 99, Fresh Hits 99, Big Hits 99, Huge Hits 99, Huge Hits 2000 and Christmas Hits (2007).

Shine Series High-Res Cover Art

Blissfully more straightforward is Telstar TV's Shine series which ran from 1995 to 1998, featuring the best, and, oh boy, the rest of the Britpop era, as well as branching into some alternative US stuff here and there. Not a bad little set of CDs, and always useful to be reminded that for every Pulp or Elastica there were at least two or three Menswears.

The cover art here includes Shine (1995), Shine Too (1995), Shine 3 (1995), Shine Four (1996), Shine 5 (1996), Shine 6 (1996), Shine 7 (1996), Shine 8 (1997), Shine 9 (1997), Shine: The Best of 97 and Shine 10 (1998)

The Album (Virgin)

The Album - a follow-up series of sorts to Virgin's The Best Album in the World ...Ever! series, which was their Shine equivalent as far as I can tell, this ran from 2001 to 2005. I think these albums encapsulate that start-of-the-00's post-Britpop era in UK rock music quite well: lots of downer-ey, middle-of-the-road dad rock from some real second-rate bands, with only the very occasional exception.

But they do also have the little rays of light that made listening to the radio at the time slightly more bearable (And boy, did I do a lot of that back then: this was prime homework-doing time for me.) from a resurgent Ash; to a revival in garage rock in the US and Europe; to innovative, interesting electronic music; even a little hip hop here and there.

Even so, listening to rock radio was still mostly a test of endurance back then: one, I guess, I do have some nostalgia for though. I don't know what's wrong with me. :D

Another Bloody Reblog: October 2015 Pick-ups and More

Okay, I’ll admit it: it's been me all along! :D

No, not much in the way of rarities here, I’m afraid. This lot's mostly made up of a bundle of Mario-related games I bought a few weeks ago, mostly games I already had in some form, but never on the NES/Famicom. It’s been kind of neat to go back and play Mario 2 and 3 without the Mario All-Stars enhanced graphics for the first time though, and it’s proved to be a great refresher course for Super Mario Maker, even though I didn’t quite plan things out that way.

Also picked up a few Konami classics (the two Wai Wai World games and the Famicom version of Kid Dracula, which is super fun), plus Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki da yo Zen'in Shūgō, a follow-up to River City Ransom set in old-timey Japan (JiliK: history expert). I was really temped to grab that one up on the Japanese Virtual Console, but there’s far too much text to try and play it in Japanese. Thankfully though there’s a translation patch out there though and with the cart, I can put it to use on my Retron 5.



Picked up a few Super Famicom and Gameboy games too. Puzzle platformers aren’t usually my thing, but I spotted a copy of Mario & Wario going for a few dollars and I couldn’t resist. Mystic Ark was much the same. All I know is that it’s an Enix RPG that involves collecting people that have been turned into dolls, or something. Eh, it was two bucks and there’s a (really well-done so far) translation patch. It’s got to be worth a shot at least.

The other two SFC games I’ve played a fair bit of already. Magical Taruruuto-kun (top left) looked like a pretty neat cartoony platformer in videos. From what I’ve played of it though, the platforming seems super basic, but the game’s also quite frustrating because if you take a single hit, you not only die, you go back to the freaking map screen. Heisei Inu Monogatari Bow: Pop'n Smash (centre left), I’m enjoying a lot though. It’s a wacky tennis meets soccer game, more or less, where both you and the computer have goals sealed off by blocks. The basic aim of the game is to smash the blocks by lobbing a ball off them with your tennis racket and getting it into your opponent’s goal. There’s definitely a bit of jankiness to it, but it’s been pretty fun, frantic action so far.

On the Gameboy side, I also got the portable version of Kid Dracula, as well as Metroid II and Donkey Kong Land, which I've actually been enjoying quite a bit. It’s impressive how much of the SNES game they managed to cram in there, especially in the animation department. Granted it looks kind of like garbage, and it can be tricky to play with the big character and limited view of your surroundings, but it features all-original levels and the Retron’s save states take a lot of the frustration out. I’d say it’s worth a look if you can get it for cheap and preferably Retron/Retrode it up.



Some new additions to the family. That brings me up to 13 amiibos now. I think. :D Definitely still a few out now that I’m thinking of getting. I’d be surprised if I make it to the end of the year without picking up Sonic and Fox, and maybe the Duck Hunt dog. Overall though, I find most of the amiibos they've released so far either fall into the categories of cool-looking figures for characters I have no attachment to (Palutena, Little Mac, Shulk, ROB) or characters I like with figures that I don’t (Gannondorf, Wario, Link). Chibo Robo will be mine though. Oh yes, he will be mine.



Club Nintendooo!!! Having blown most of my remaining points on the Link Between Worlds soundtrack a few months prior, I was just short of getting the MK8 soundtrack when it appeared, of course, at the eleventh hour before the service shut down, leading me to spend..... too much on eBay for a copy once they started going out to other members. But boy, that soundtrack’s awesome.
That’s not the only Club Nintendo soundtrack I picked up in the last while though. I managed to snag the Ocarina of Time, Animal Crossing and Kid Icarus: Uprising all for about €20 each thanks to a saved search I set up. Not bad. Actually bad though: Pokémon 2BA Master. Thanks, Laser Time.



If the Mario Kart 8 soundtrack hit at the eleventh hour of Club Nintendo, the Endings and Credits CD hit at the twelfth. This time though I wasn’t about to spend *cough* *cough* *cough* euros on the damn thing. Instead, I bought a few unused Club Nintendo codes on eBay, enabling me to clear out the last of my stars in style. (Though it really bums me out to think of how many more I'd still have to play around with if I hadn’t spent all my Gamecube era ones on all those terrible wallpapers. Damn it, Nintendo.)

Also grabbed the Mario 30th Anniversary double CD, and, let’s address the elephant in the room: I bought the Data Discs Shenmue soundtrack...



...which is pretty rad, but it’s the thing that finally got me to cave and get a turntable, and I held out for so long. Vinyl is just something I have no attachment to or nostalgia for. Now I have this bulky-ass player and (already) a stack of records that I don’t know where to put, and I'm just ripping everything to MP3 anyway. Couldn’t we have skipped the middle step and you could have just given me downloadable versions of hard to find/non-existent video game soundtracks, Data Discs/iam8bit?



But no, you had to get me out there buying vinyl-exclusive early Now compilations didn’t you, because hey, I might as well. I’m already swimming in a sea of the stuff!

Clearoutageddon Part Six: Final Destination

After a couple of months of de-cluttering, and disposing of as much stuff as I could online, I was finally ready to head out with the remaining haul to one of our local charity shops - a haul that actually contained amongst everything else a frankly depressing number of bad purchasing decisions from the very recent past:



I'm kind of ashamed to admit it, but there are a lot of DVDs (and Blu-rays) in my collection I've only ever watched once; the four on the left here being prime examples. Unlike many of the others though, these four I was pretty confident I'd never want to watch again.

Face Off, The Grudge, The Eye - all decent, but action and horror are two genres where the movies really have to be top notch, Terminator 2/The Omen calibre stuff before I'll watch them more than once. Unfortunately I bought all these before I'd finally come to realise that.

As for stand-up, I've yet to see a comedy set I've had any desire to rewatch; I'm starting to suspect that maybe it's just not my thing. (Thank goodness I don't get lumbered with any of the stand up DVDs that seem to come out in their thousands every Christmas).

The Goldfinger DVD on the other hand, I never watched at all. I picked it up for €4 in a CD Wow sale back in 2009. Seemed like a great deal, but then I ended up picking up the whole Connery Bond collection for €20 a couple of months later, having barley removed the shrink wrap from this. Whoops.

And finally, The Ministry of Sound Annual 2000. Or is it?



Actually, no. Inside, to my dismay, was the previous year's compilation which I'd already picked up a couple of years before. Not that I blame the seller on Amazon, with MoS using the year 2000 to market their CDs for two years running. I can only hope that the eventual charity shop buyer doesn't mind a bit of surprise. :D



The only engagement I had with Omen remake up until very recently was listening to a really softball interview with the director the Summer it came out while checking out the copy of Tekken 2 I'd just bought on eBay, simultaneously thinking "Yeah, this movie's going to be shit" and "Man, I should have that PS1 I ordered like, tomorrow. This is going to be awesome!". No, it was my brother who picked this up while we were browsing around GameStop several years later. I'd never watched it and I had no intention of doing so either. But, curiosity finally got the better of me last Halloween and I popped in another bloody copy of it I've ended up with it in the Omen box set, and yep, it's every bit as pointless and lame as I imagined.

Speaking of lame: Revenge of the Sith. So having finally accepted that Episodes I and II were mostly junk, I pretty much ignored this when it came out in '05. Over the following year though I started buying more and more into the consensus that "hey, this one was actually pretty good" to the point where I finally caved-in and bought the DVD. And it was terrible! Again! Well, alright: Palpatine was enjoyably over the top at times, but the rest of it? No thanks. *sigh* Another €18 own the drain. :D

Probably the best of the trio, but something I doubt I'll ever rewatch is Dodgeball, which I impulse bought in a sort of panic after fruitlessly (and exhaustively) searching the ex rental section of a video place for (non-existent) bargains back in the mid aughts.



A few more CDs. 1977, I decided to part with after upgrading to the awesome 3-CD reissue from 2009. The other two were duplicates I'd ended up with. I'm pretty sure the copy of Thriller I hung onto was the superior version, but there are so may at this stage you'd need an extremely elaborate chart to properly access that.



Of all the stuff here, I'm pretty gutted I ended up having to give away the two Lost sets. You'd think they'd still be worth something even in 2011. I mean, they used to cost like, €60 at one point, but I just couldn't offload them. I suppose it didn't help that A. most people lost interest early on, B. the rest were still pissed at the ending, and C. why get it on DVD when the Blu-rays were already relatively cheap? Actually that's pretty much why I got rid of these. I hadn't picked up Seasons 3-6 yet and I didn't see the point of continuing with the DVD sets when I'd finally started getting into Blu-ray.

Blu-ray was also the reason I was doing away with the Back to the Future DVD set. Kind of. I'd been meaning to grab BTTF on DVD for years and the new set they announced in 2010 sounded great, even better on DVD because it was only £10, so I pre-ordered it, months in advance. Obviously at such a low price point, I should have guessed something fishy was up, but it wasn't until I started watching the movies (appropriately enough the night the clocks were going back that year) that I realised that not only did this set not feature match it's identically-packaged Blu-ray sibling, it didn't even have the special features from the previous DVD sets. It was a repackaging of the original DVD releases of the three movies from back in goodness knows when. While was certainly fun watching the movies themselves again, this wasn't the release I signed up for.



Having had access to just two channels growing up there's a lot of things I missed out on. Slowly but sureley I've been checking out a lot of that stuff over the last few year and these Beavis and Butt-head sets were the first things I picked up as part of that project; a good place to start I thought, as I'd already seen and enjoyed the movie quite a bit. The show was great too, but while I was able to secure Volumes 2 and 3 for the tidy sum of €7.50 each, it was a year or so before I spotted the first volume for a decent price. Somewhat unfortunately it was exactly the same price as the full collection was going for (about €22) , so I decided to go for that instead freeing up some precious shelf space in the process.

Something else I missed out on as a kid was Twin Peaks, though I think that may have been for the best; I think I'd have been pretty freaked out by it at the time. Unlike Beavis and Butt-head though, I'm pretty certain this was on RTÉ at the time; as soon as I heard the theme music I had a hazy memory of hearing it in the background when I would have been five or six maybe. I picked this up on sale after Christmas '09 with no idea of how I was going to get hold of Season 2; it's UK release was still in limbo at that point. When it finally did hit, much like Beavis and Butt-head, it was priced high enough that it made more sense to pick up the Gold Box set and grab the extra special features than to buy it individually. I'm even more glad I didn't pay for just Season 2 now given how dumb I now know it gets. :D

And so finally, in May 2012 (good grief, I've dragged this thing on forever :D), I carted this lot, all the books, all the cassettes, and all the videos I'd gathered up off to charity shop land. I was a bit worried going in though that they'd send me packing again with half the stuff I brought (They did seem to be only selling books and clothes out of this outlet), but they were quite happy to take the donation in it's entirety, no questions asked. All that clutter, all that stuff I thought I'd never see the back of was finally gone. The Clearoutageddon was complete.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

Groupees Collection Template

I've bought a fair few Groupees bundles over the last few years, but it's only in the last couple of months that I've gotten around to downloading most of them.

Now, one of the things that sets Groupee apart from some of the other bundle people is that they dabble heavily in music. Even in non music-focused bundles, you're sure to find at least a couple of EPs or albums tucked away somewhere. Those are fine, but a lot of their bundles also include "special collections" of tracks from a particular artist, which all seem to consist of tracks from the artist's other releases (original MP3 tags still in tact) and a random band-related image to act as the cover art.

As someone who (pathetically) takes pride in their digital music collection, there was no way I was going to add these ad hoc compilations to it, at least now without "fixing" them first. To get than done, I needed to make some cover art for these things. The simplest way of doing that, I decided, was to make a template I could throw over all those random images to turn them into something a bit more appropriate. :

Ta-dah! Yeah, kind of a quick and dirty effort (using a recently retired logo), but I think it served its purpose reasonably well:

Ah, magnetoperfection.gif

I'll pop the Paint Shop Pro files up on MediaFire in case anyone else has any use for them. [Link]

Clearoutageddon Part Three: Discpocalypse Now

I don't know if anyone remembers now, but ten years ago exactly we were now in the middle of an unrelenting free CD bombardment by every newspaper publisher in the UK and Ireland - the likes of probably hadn't been seen since AOL's heyday.

To begin with, this was actually pretty cool, especially for someone like me who had a very small collection of music, limited funds and a slow-ass internet connection. From the end of 2002 until around mid 2004, you could grab up to three random compilation CDs every weekend for the price of the (mostly) crappy newspapers they came bundled with, and have a new batch generally pretty decent 70's/80's/90's tracks to check out to for next to nothing.

A few relevant ads I found while digitising some VHS tapes. That 70's CD (from 2003) was pretty rad. A few years later though, the second and third ads were pretty much where things went.

By 2004 though, things were changing - the compilations became less frequent, the number of tracks decreased and increasingly they started being phased out in favour of shitty movies, single artist live CDs (for people with no taste), random CD-ROMs and the occasional BBC sitcom episode. Even though the frequency of these give-aways lessened over the next couple of years, for a family that bought a lot of newspapers and magazines anyway, this meant there was an ever-increasing pile of shitty free discs building up that no one could quite bring themselves to throw out.

After years of languishing in the cabinet under the TV, I finally decided the time had come to do something  about the sizeable disc pile in late 2011. Working under the assumption that, well, somebody has to want these, I decided I'd give them away (for just the cost of postage) on a local classifieds site. For my own convenience though, I decided not to offer them individually, but to pull a Best Buy and force bundles of them on people. Let's take a look at what was up for grabs:



In the movie bundle, and yes, the bundles were all themed, is a bunch of stuff I'd never watch, or use, including a hot new Vinnie Jones joint, a couple of DVD movie quizzes and promo discs for Spider Man 2 and Revenge of the Sith.



This lot I dubbed the Nature/Factual bundle. Up on top are a trio of BBC/National Geographic documentaries that I imagine are probably decent, but that kind of stuff just isn't my thing. The next four discs are all from the RTÉ Guide, Ireland's answer to the Radio Times or TV Guide (and a pretty poor excuse for a magazine overall). For wildlife enthusiasts we have not one, but two dawn chorus themed discs, as well as some kind of mammal-themed CD-ROM. And for lovers of terminally dull magazine shows is an episode of RTÉ's Nationwide on DVD, for some reason. In the bottom right are two audio "volumes" of Paul Williams Crime World - undoubtedly part of The Sunday World's ongoing effort to glorify, er, I mean expose Ireland's criminal underworld.



Also in the same bundle, but thrown in at the last minute, was this trio of even lamer, even less desirable stuff I found lying around - promo DVDs for eBay and the South East of Ireland and some kind of jewellery catalogue on CD-ROM from 2003. You know, factual stuff.



But wait, there's more! Even though I'd decided to keep this at one point, when the time came to dispatch this bundle (and I got a taker for it pretty much immediately. Goodness knows why.), I decided to bung it in there too. I barley even watched the last World Cup, when was I ever going to watch this?



The music bundle! I wouldn't go so far as to call this all dross (well, apart from the Westlife disc, obviously), because a. I never listened to most of it, and b. the two discs in the upper left are actually pretty decent, the Dave Fanning one especially; they were just duplicates of ones I already had. Notable also was the Anton Whatshisface dance DVD, not only for not being a DVD, but also for being the thinnest, most flimsy optical disc I've ever seen. If disc rot turns out to be a thing, I think I've found patient zero.

2012 Pick-up Round-up

Usually, I post all my ill-advised spending decisions in NeoGAF's monthly Pick-Up thread. Last year though, despite photographing a lot of the stuff I got, I ended up not getting around to posting most of it. Rather than flooding GAF with a sea of badly-taken pictures of 90's compilations and the like, I thought I'd move it over here instead in the first pick up post I've done in about four years. Lucky you.



To start off with we have the most awesomely-packaged component switch ever, the third volume of Retro Gamer eMags (The full magazine scans are still, much to my disappointment, in a super-low resolution.), and a free Bird's Eye bear that I bought several boxes of fish fingers just to get (he's currently on top of my DVD rack keeping guard).

Beneath all of those is my personal holy grail: Zig and Zag's 1992 album, Never Mind the Zogabongs. I've been searching for this quite exhaustively for the last four or five years. It's super-rare now, but a (really pristine) copy finally showed up on eBay in August for about €20. Needless to say, I grabbed it immediately, finally replacing the digital version I had that, er, fell off the back of a virtual lorry.



Possibly the only decent thing I made during my years of doing art in school, this Batik finally made out of my mouldy protfolio and onto my wall last Summer. It might have taken a lot of careful measuring and a pricey, custom-made frame, but I think it turned out great and I'm glad I finally got around to it.



Picked up a couple of new mice back in May. My old Dell mouse was looking pretty under the weather, so I gabbed a Gigabyte gaming mouse for general use - looks cool and really comfortable, but it has a nasty habit of not turning on when Windows boots, so I'm not sure I'd really recommend it.

The other one's a hand-held scanner combined with a (pretty uncomfortable) mouse. Although the the scans I've made with it don't stack up with ones from a flatbed scanner detail-wise, it's a fast, effective way of scanning in larger-than-A4 pages.

Also pictured: my first dance mat. I think my feet might be a bit too bit for this mat, but I've pretty much managed to adapt to it now. Having fun with Dancing Stage Max so far, but I wish I didn't have to trudge through so much shitty early 00's chart music to get to the good stuff. (Ugh, that fucking Natasha Bedingfield song. *shudder*)



A very shiny selection of DVDs and Blu-rays from back in July. Unusually for Disney products, the three cartoon collections above were actually quite cheap at about £6 a pop. Never really saw much Disney stuff growing up, but I've really enjoyed what I've watched so far; possibly more than the Looney Tunes shorts that I've also been revisiting recently.



A few more random DVDs box sets from around the same time. Me being me, of course, I haven't got around to watching any of this stuff yet. Well, aside from a few minutes of Ghostbusters, which, for a show I adored as a kid, I have to say really didn't leave a great impression.



More animated stuff. As someone who's only ever seen The Simpsons shuffled around on RTE years after the episodes originally aired, I've always wanted to watch it in order, catching up on the episodes I missed and seeing how it evolved over the years (though I'm planning to bail out once I get to the more modern stuff). I've watched most of Season 1 so far, which has its moments, but I doubt I'd have have kept watching beyond the first couple of episodes if it was a modern show. It's just not as funny or as well-written as later seasons, not to mention this season's fixation on Bart and the family in general. For me, and I'm sure a lot of other people, Homer and the supporting cast were always where it was at.



More DVDs and couple of other bits and pieces. Picked up The Animatrix around the same time as the trilogy set, as well as a used copy of the Matrix Reloaded soundtrack - always kind of a guilty pleasure, now I can finally listen to that hot P.O.D. cut whenever I please.

In the top right is Dustin's second album, Unplucked. Although it would have came out as I was rapidly loosing interest in The Den, and I can't say I ever really cared for the character, I saw it for cheap on Amazon and I couldn't resist. To my surprise, I quite enjoyed it.

Between those two is 6 Underground, the Sneaker Pimps single, part of my 2012 quest to get hold of all the early Sneaker Pimps B-sides. Currently working on getting all the early Garbage B-Sides. Damn it, bands, why isn't this type of stuff available online? The last thing I need is a pile of CD singles taking up precious space.



Already posted this on GAF, but that pic didn't have the set in all its retail-packaged glory. :D Really enjoying going through these so far. The recently-restored Connery movies look extremely impressive in hi-def.



In anticipation of The Hobbit, I went and bought the Lord of the Rings trilogy on Blu-Ray. With the extended edition set still pretty pricey, I opted for the theatrical releases for now. For those keeping count this would be the fourth time I've bought The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers (VHS, DVD, Extended DVD, Blu-ray) and the third time I've bought The Return of the King (went straight to DVD for that one), and it won't be the last.



I love Amazon's Marketplace. You can buy so much weird, random-ass music for next to nothing used. Above, for instance is a MTV endorsed nu-metal compilation from 2000, one of the excellent, but out-of-print Disky greatest hits box sets, the soundtrack from the Mortal Kombat movie, a trio of Now compilations, the 2 Live Crew masterpiece, As Nasty as They Wanna Be and a couple of releases from The Revs, a short-lived Donegal band that I was quite into for a few months in 2002. Marvellous.



Moving on to more "credible" material, I would have bought most of these around June or so, all used again, apart from The Cake Sale album, which I thought I'd finally check out. I kind of remember it being a big deal back in 2006, but I've haven't really paid attention to the Irish music scene in about a decade. Not that there isn't good stuff to be found there; I've just never discovered a way of getting to it without wading through a pile of over-rated dreck first.



I'm not sure how I missed these, but in 2006, a trio of licensed, PEGI-rated Spectrum compilations apparently hit retail shelves from a British publisher/developer called Alten8. I do love me some retro compilations, so I grabbed these as soon as I discovered them on Amazon. Content-wise, there aren't too many big name titles on these, and the bundled emulator isn't great, but grab yourself a more competent one (I'm using ZXSpin) and you've got a wealth of old, obscure Speccy games to explore here. Might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I've been enjoying my time with them so far. Super Kid ftw!

On the bottom row, I finally got hold of a copy of Grim Fandango for nice reasonable price. Despite Lucasart's best efforts, the only adventure game of note I'm missing from them now is Zak McKracken. Judging by the prices it's going for, I doubt I'll be picking that any time soon though, barring a digital re-release.

Over on the left we have two Blu-ray PC game compilations I also came across while poking around on Amazon. The first one had 12 games from TopWare Interactive and the second has 30 (including a few expansion packs though) from JoWood. Just what I needed for my backlog. Well, at least they were cheap.



Some current gen console stuff. Looking forward to finally experiencing the epic that is Disaster: Day of Crisis. :D



So, back in July, I was browsing on Amazon, decided to check what PSPs were selling for now, and as nothing good ever came from me doing that, of course I ended up buying one. While the current model wouldn't have been a bad deal for about £90, I ultimately decided to go for a used PSP 3000 from a reputable-looking Marketplace seller, mostly for the TV-out function (which actually looks kind of bad on a HDTV).

Around the same time I picked up a (really overpriced) used copy of EA Replay and a new dual pack of Mega Man Powered-Up and Maverick Hunter X (and some candy!). Out of the three games, Powered-Up is the only one I've put serious time into so far, and it's pretty damn great. Really glad I didn't get a PSP Go; I'd have missed out on it entirely.



And here we have a bunch of used PS2 stuff. And, yes, that is indeed a copy of the official 2004 Olympic Games game. Even though you'd need to pay me, probably a lot, to summon up any enthusiasm for the real Olympics, I've always been weirdly fascinated with the line of button mashing games based on them. Mind you, it's more of a 99p fascination than a £37.99 one.

I mean, holy shit, £37.99! Who in their right mind would fork out that much for a shitty, licensed sports game.



Since they cleared out their PS2 stuff, I've barley been in our local GameStop I'm afraid. Even at rock bottom prices I wouldn't dream of picking up any of the so-so current gen stuff now chiefly lining their shelves, but back in June, I found myself with a voucher, so I guess I had to go and find something to get with it.

Having only picked up my first Rock Band instrument in late 2011, Rock Band at €5.99 was a pretty good buy, and not having played a Soul Calibur game since 2, I thought I'd give IV a bash (insert boob joke here). Finally, resisting the temptation to pick a movie out of the incredible line-up of UMD videos littering the PSP section, I ran the voucher out with a copy of Gunpey.

Below those we have more Olympic nonsense, and the PC version of V-Rally 1, a game on the N64 I basically forced myself to like after getting it one Christmas. Having finally conquered World Rally Fever (also in June) I decided it was time to revisit another notorious racing game in my backlog, the PC version giving me the chance to retry Championship rounds if I screwed them up (thanks to a little save game manipulation). And of course it had the added bonus of running at a much higher resolution and frame rate.



It's kind of become my thing during October to watch as many horror movies as I can and to work my way through some candy while doing so. Before I came up with the idea of ordering in some US reinforcements, I had these two standing by for the occasion. And by standing by, I mean half-eaten.

 The verdict: don't waste your time with Chew Crew, Monster Mix has all your chemical-filled British candy needs taken care of, even if it does only include one pack of Double Dip - a crushing let-down if ever there was one. :D



Thirteen more digital games, and that's just from GOG. Though to be fair, I have already finished Tomb Raider 1 and put a good deal of time into Sim City 2000 Network Edition back in 1998. I was kind disappointed to discover that this version is missing the much smoother Windows interface of Network Edition though. I'm starting to suspect that I'll end up seeking out a copy of that now, rather than adapting to this one. Ah, another $5.99 well-spent. :D



But, holy shit, if grabbing Sim City 2000 without a little research first was an ill-advised move, my GamersGates purchases for the year were a fucking atrocity. Not only did I pick up an 85 game strong collection of 1C games back in April (including such bangers as: Hard Truck: Apocalypse, El Matador, Konung 2; and everyone's favourite, The Stalin Subway ), I also grabbed the widely-derided Sonic the Hedgehog 4, a demolition company simulator, and even Daika-fucking-tana.

Being the type of person who has to at least playing something for a few hours after paying for it, it's safe to say that I've got some interesting gaming experiences ahead of me.



Some Steam stuff from outside the big Summer and Holiday sales. And I know DNF is terrible but (a) I was able to get it for free and (b) I had to know.




When I'm not busy buying used music on Amazon, I do sometimes pay for a couple of digital releases. Usually not on iTunes, but I find it's the most convenient player to take screencaps from. :D Most of the stuff above is actually from various €5 album promotions on 7digital - something I wish they'd do more of. Goodness knows, decent promotions by digital music stores are few and far between over here.




You might have to squint to see them, but above is a fuck-ton of virtual console purchases from the previous year. Why the sudden resurgence of spending? Well, I really wanted to grab a copy of the Super Mario Galaxy soundtrack from Club Nintendo and with no more point-bearing Wii games I wanted to buy (never really got into the DS), I decided I'd run down my VC/WiiWare wishlist a little instead. And yes, World, you were right, Ice Climber isn't actually very good at all.



Still refusing to pay for Microsoft's ridiculous Gold service, sales on XBLA are somewhat of a rare occurrence for a Silver pleb such as myself, but there are still some decent deals to be had if you keep an eye out for them. Now if I could only get around to playing any of them...