Ah, the Playstation.  It’s one of the many consoles I missed almost entirely between the Sega Genesis and the PS2.  Conveniently for me its library is rife with RPGs!  I have to say that the things we got from Joe for the Playstation were some of my favourites from the whole shebang.  There are truly some excellent things to show here, but we’ll start with the console as usual.

I never owned a PS1 console until we bought this game lot – it was one of the only major release consoles we were missing.  Because I always played my PS1 games on my PS2, I didn’t see much of a use for one, but I obviously don’t mind having one!  The console came to us in decent shape and working order with one controller.  I was surprised to see an actual Playstation memory card.  I’ve only ever seen the Mad Catz ones and that’s all I ever used to date.

For games in this bunch, we got all types and kinds from several different genres.  As usual, I haven’t had a tremendous amount of time to look into many of these mostly unfamiliar titles, but Sim City 2000 is something I’ve always wanted to play.  I’ve heard wonderful things about the Front Mission games, and in my humble opinion, most things Square touches turns to gold.  You will have to let me know if you’ve enjoyed any of these other titles in the three photos below.

I’m probably one of the only people on this earth that has not played any of the Crash Bandicoot games, but I am now the proud owner of the collector’s edition for the console.  For those of you that have played these, are they as good as everyone says?  I’ve seen a little bit of Crash Team Racing on a stream at some point in the recent past, but that’s about it!  I always get this and Banjo Kazooie confused for some reason.  Please don’t throw rotten tomatoes at me.  I’ve never played either series!

Onto the stuff I’m a bit more well-versed in: Final Fantasy games!  My goodness were there ever a lot of Final Fantasy games included.  There were really two sets, and the first I’ll show you here are the mostly beaten up greatest hits versions of the games.  You can see that the jewel cases have seen better days, and in a lot of the cases, the discs showed wear and tear from a little bit of rougher use.  Many of the things in this entire collection have been immaculate, so it was interesting to see these ones in mid-shape.  What’s great is that there’s an almost complete set of the games for the console here, with the exceptions being Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy Origins (I and II compilation).

Thankfully for me, there was a second, complete set of these games, all black-label.  I’m not usually too picky about green vs. black labels, but when it comes to my RPGs, I like to have the more attractive black stripe on my cases peeking out at me.  There are other nice differences between the originals and the greatest hits versions like different disc art and some small changes to manuals (i.e. black and white vs. colour in some places).  My personal copies I played growing up were not in the best shape since I had ordered most of them off of eBay in my late teens or picked them up second hand.  I was certainly not as diligent about disc quality back then as I am now, but these are an excellent upgrade for my Final Fantasy PS1 collection.

And holy smokes, did the RPGs ever keep coming.  Way back when I started this blog at one of the first swaps I wrote about, I talked about finding a complete copy of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete.  Joe’s collection yielded a second copy, but a different disc variant.  Sadly, there was no soundtrack included in this box set, but most of the other stuff was there including the cloth map and the hardcover manual.

There were still more RPGs to be had in this lot, and they were definitely some heavy hitters I’ve been looking for for some time.  All of these games are excellent (and expensive!!).  The only double for me here was Chrono Cross, though this version was an earlier print compared to the one I already owned from Square Enix.  There isn’t much different other than the name on the front of the case and the discs being a uniform white versus a reflective surface.  But Star Ocean, Ogre Battle, Dragon Warrior VII, Tales of Destiny and Vandal Hearts II are all great, great titles that I plan to eventually put a bajillion hours into.  Guardian’s Crusade isn’t a game I’ve heard much of anything about, but I hope it’s good too!  Yay!  And boo.  I need more shelves.

Last but not least, I have a small set of games that I’m hoping Cheap Boss Attack will be a bit excited for: horror games!  A few of these were recommended to me by folks from the blog world and also on Twitter, so I was quite happy to see these come through my door.  I’m not the best at playing scary games because I get too freaked out and need to walk away from them for a while (literally) but maybe I’ll be able to put on a stiff upper lip and play with all the lights on in the daytime.  There has to be some compromise, because I’ve heard these games are some of the finest horrors to be had in console gaming!

This portion of the collection acquisition was a total slam dunk as far as I’m concerned.  There are a few other Playstation games I’m looking for (Legend of Mana, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, etc.!) but this checked off a huge portion of my list of things to smoke out of the woodwork.  I’m extremely pleased to say the least!

I hope you’re all enjoying this post series.  Thanks as always for reading!

-GG