Year: 2021

I had kind of forgotten I even pre-ordered this many months ago, but a few days ago an Amazon parcel arrived containing the new Game & Watch from Nintendo. This time it’s Zelda that gets the game and watch treatment. The small device contains: The Legend of Zelda, The Adventure of Link and Links Awakening. Along with a bonus game and watch game and the clock functionality.

I was a bit surprised/disappointed to find that Links awakening was the original Gameboy version and not the Gameboy Color DX version. Seems a bit of an odd choice since the other two games are NES versions and are therefore both in colour. Still, it’s a nice little device and I guess people who buy it and more interested in collecting things like this rather than actually playing them. There are many easier ways to play these games and more without buying a new handheld each time you want to play a different game 🙂

Another new one for the collection arrived today in the form of a top-loading Neo Geo CD. Unboxed, but it’s in great condition. The console has a Sega Saturn sort of aesthetic to it, but the controllers are really nice. I am loving the micro-switched joypads!

I decided to go for the CD version as the game cartridges for the Neo Geo AES were expensive when they came out, and haven’t gotten much cheaper! Looking around, the cartridge games seem to be in the £100’s of pounds each. At least with the CD version, I can play CD Backups relatively easily. My initial experimentation shows my Verbatim discs seem to work pretty well but I do get some errors occasionally, even after burning them at 4x on my Sony IDE CD-Writer. Maybe a replacement laser assembly is on the cards for this one in the future. The original games work though, and the lasers in these older consoles can be very picky at the best of times (I’m looking at you 3DO!)

I have been looking at these machines for a while now and monitoring what prices they go for. Then just before the weekend, I saw this one come up on eBay for a reasonable price. I then noticed that it was actually located in Bristol which is only a day trip away from me. With a bit more digging around I found he had also listed it on Facebook marketplace without the price to cover eBay fees. A few messages later and a deal was done.

The next bonus to my newly planned day trip was the fact that the guy runs the Retro Arcade in Bristol that I posted about earlier. All of that combined with a trip to Za Za Bazaar for lunch, made this look like a promising day out!

The day was a great success but what I brought home with me was this gorgeous piece of history. The Vectrex has its own display built into the console but instead of displaying pixels, this console drew its graphics using vectors and is the only console ever released of its kind.

The display itself is monochrome but colour was added to the games by sliding a coloured film in front of the display. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the original games yet (apart from the built in game) but I do have some modern Neon UV filters on their way which look really great when combined with a UV light source. I will do a post about this once I have it all set up.

For now though here is the console in all its glory, along with an acrylic light that I made to sit alongside it to add to the whole vector effect.