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Thursday, October 26, 2006

A turn into memory highway

The long Deepavali and Raya weekend was a good time for me to catch up with a few friends from Singapore and also to continue cleaning up my room.

Since the new bedroom set will only come early November (second delay which I am glad), I still had ample time to s-l-o-w-l-y go through my stuffs. It is always nice to look back at stuffs from long, long time ago. So from Memory Avenue, we move onto Memory Highway. And one of the stuffs I found happens to be the grand-daddy to Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering card games.

Some of you might recall having played these cards long, long time ago. I still have mine. In mint condition! Think these are too macho? What about...

"Hello. Is son of Dr. Dose in the house? May I have the son of Dr. Dose? Thank you"
Before card games became complicated, expensive but highly collectible (with re-sale value), all we had were these rm1 card games (55 sen, if you bought them from outside Selangor - I got mine in Penang). You do NOT need to customise the deck. Just deal one deck equally among the players.

Next out of my treasure chest were cards again. This time, they are the 20 sen cards that honestly, I don't really know what they are for. Anyone?


For me, I used to play these with a few guys. We would wager cards, put them on a stack and then using quick hand motion to generate 'wind' that will overturn the cards. You get to keep cards that you overturned. There are variations to this game. But the idea is that you keep the overturned cards. At least that's how I play it.

My wife says she used to play with these cards as well. She and her siblings used the back of the cards as your normal playing cards. But I wonder... 1 'set' is usually made up of 21 cards (three rows of seven cards. I wonder how many sets she needed or had. :)

But sometimes, I keep the sets 'intact' just to keep them in a set. One set usually consist of pictures from a movie or cartoon. Any of the movie scenes and cartoons look familiar? Hmmm... I see... Automan. Thundercats. M.A.S.K. Conan. A-Team. V (the TV series about mice-eating aliens). Transformers. Star Trek. Rambo.

Besides cards, I also found some really interesting books.

One of Ian Livingstone's gamebook together with a book from the "Be An Interplanetary Spy" series
These are what I call grand-daddys to Computer Role Playing Games (CRPG). Back in those days, Role Playing Games (RPG) were quite hard to find. Even if you managed to get the books, starting a campaign may not be easy. So these gamebooks were simply heaven-sent!

The more complicated ones required the roll of dice. The simpler ones just resorted to optical illusions and puzzle solving. There were even a few of these adventure books based on The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries (anyone remember them?).

As we become more advanced and computers become more affordable, these books, unfortunately, have become 'extinct'. I don't think I can find these books in bookshops anymore. So sad... Then again, who wants to read these black & white books when they can have everything 'told' in full motion and coloured animation?

Oh well... It's back to cleaning my room again. I still have lots of things to clear and this weekend seems like it's going to be another weekend where I travel back in time...

I wonder how much all these are worth on eBay?

Labels: flashback, me

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