2024 HAUL - DECEMBER CHAPTER: BATCH #1
The holiday season is upon us and I have a few more packages over the past 8 days (from 1st, 5th & 6th Dec). There's a lot more incoming.
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The first arrival of the month comes from Limited Run Games which is actually earlier than expected. From Edia we have
Valis: The Fantasm Soldier Collection III, which is the third instalment in a collection of classic games from the Valis franchise. This collection includes five games/versions; both the Famicom and PC-88 versions for
Valis: The Fantasm Soldier, the MSX2 version for
Valis: The Fantasm Soldier II, the SEGA Mega Drive version for
Valis III, and the Super Famicom version for
Super Valis IV.
Pretty much this is now every Valis family-friendly game now released on modern platforms and translated in English for the first time. There is one more game in the franchise called
Valis X but they jumped from consoles into eroge visual novel territory which is a somewhat unfortunate end for the main lead.
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So here's a random one. I've been working for just over 3 years now and the company decided to provide baskets of snacks and stuff for those who've been working that long, since a majority of the staff in our department are newcomers from the past year (due to changes in the direction of the business). A lot of interesting snacks and such, no complaints since it was free.
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Next I decided to order two more video games from Amazon.
The first one came from Amazon's Black Friday deal which was coming to a close and that was for
Persona 3 Reload, the remake of Atlus' classic
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 from the PlayStation 2. I played the FES version available on PlayStation 3 (via PS2 Classics line-up) and really enjoyed my time with it. The remake does include the FES storyline as a DLC expansion which I may check out given that I never bothered to play that portion considering it was mostly dungeon focused content.
The other game that I picked up is a return to the Nep Nep universe with
Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution, the latest Neptunia game in the series until they release their new one in a few months time. This is also an Action RPG spin-off and presented by Idea Factory in their Day One Edition package which comes with a standee and poster. I reversed the artwork because I'm not a fan of having the German age rating on the packaging. It's more tolerable on PlayStation compared to Switch at least.
I haven't played any Neptunia games in a long while ever since I finished the PlayStation Vita line-up (minus one of them which I skipped owning), but I will eventually jump onto the PlayStation 4 line-up at some point in the coming months.
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Friday was my annual leave from work, because I needed to use them up before the year was over. Great to take time off but also means I'll need to work extra hours in the evening to make sure everything works out or is done ahead of time to avoid any issues.
Anyway I went to York as it's been a while but skipping the cinema trip because there aren't any films to my interest at this point. The first store that I always check out is HMV because of their Blu-ray and 4K titles. The 4K selection was actually pretty decent this time and since payday came recently there was an opportunity to spend more than usual.
One of the films that I picked up just got released very recently and that was for Fede Álvarez's
Alien: Romulus, the sci-fi horror film that recently releases back in August of this year. I watched the film in IMAX and loved it, one of the better films in the franchise and a great return to form (with the director being inspired by Alien: Isolation as well). So it was a no-brainer to pick up the 4K release as soon as possible.
The rest came from HMV's 2 for £30 deal which I don't make much use of in all honestly, but here they were a special case. Pretty much each of these came with slipcases given the age of when they first came out so I figured why not make use of them. We have Ridley Scott's 1979 film
Alien, Robert Rodriguez's 2019 film
Alita: Battle Angel, John McTiernan's 1988 film
Die Hard, and Jan de Bont's 1994 film
Speed.
The
Alien franchise is one of my all-time favourite sci-fi franchises out there, and while I own the original on DVD I hadn't yet upgraded to Blu-ray or 4K up to this point. I rewatched the original
Alien on Disney+ which was in 4K and the transfer looked really good so I made sure to pick up the 4K disc.
Alita: Battle Angel I watched when it was first in the cinema and it was a surprisingly good film that was based on the classic manga series
Battle Angel Alita, and in case you didn't know James Cameron wanted to direct the film but got occupied by his
Avatar franchise.
Die Hard is the best Christmas film and the last time that I watched this was also in the cinema back in 2018 when they re-ran the film for its anniversary. I can't remember if that screening was based on a 4K restoration or not but now is a great time to rewatch this action classic. And then that leaves us with the only film that I have not seen in this haul which is
Speed, and I heard it was really good plus it has Keanu Reeves who is one of my favourite actors in film.
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Also picked up in town is another game for the PlayStation 3 collection. I finally visited the Sore Thumbs Retro store which I struggled to enter because its hard to tell if the store was open or not. While they didn't have any PlayStation 2 games worth buying I did find a copy of
Tekken Tag Tournament 2 for the PlayStation 3 so I picked it up. I did notice a scratch on the disc but it should play fine.
In the coming days expect to see packages from Anime Limited, Crunchyroll UK Store, Limited Run Games, Sentai Filmworks, Terracotta Store and VideoGamesPlus retailers. A lot of stuff, but blame the timing.
