A Tour of the Game Shelves

Hi everyone!

The wife and I are planning a significant revamp of our living room at some point in the near future, so the way I display my games will be changing (hopefully for the better!) — as such I thought now would be a good time to share the current state of my collection for those who were interested in such things!

At present, the physical video games are stored across two Ikea Billy bookcases, one of which is shared with some board games. (There's also a third Billy just for boardgames, but that's probably a story for another day!) Our plan is to replace these with some wall-mounted shelves that will hopefully be a bit more flexible as well as providing a better way of displaying stuff like limited editions and suchlike.

But that's for the future! We're all about the now, uh, now, so here we go.

We begin in the top left with ol' faithful, the PS1. My collection here actually isn't as big as I'd like, because over the years I've traded a bunch of stuff in only to discover to my dismay some twenty years later that the stuff I traded is now incredibly valuable. Oh well.

I still held on to things that were important to me at the time, though, and as such my copies of Alundra, Smash Court Tennis and the Final Fantasy series are all my originals from first time around. I've also re-acquired US copies of Brave Fencer Musashi, Parasite Eve and Lunar Silver Star Story Complete, since these were all defining influences on my gaming tastes.

The meat of my collection today consists of my rapidly expanding PS2 library. This is because PS2 games are hella cheap right now — particularly if they're obscure, weird Japanese games, with the exception of some RPGs — and as such it's a great time to build up a collection. So I'm doing that.

And doing that a bit more. (The fluffy thing is Cat, a toy that our dearly departed pet rats Lara, Lucy, Clover and Socks used to play with; we keep it around in their memory, along with its companion Elephant.)

And, uh… a few more for good measure, plus some chibi Senrans that I won from Marvelous on Twitter in the first ever instance in my life of winning something in an entirely luck-based competition.

I love my PS2 collection. I've got a few of the games everyone "has to have", of course, such as Final Fantasy X, X-2 and XII, but the majority of my collection is interesting, weird stuff that very few people have heard of.  You can expect to hear a lot more about it on MoeGamer over the next few months.

Under that we have some big-box PC releases of visual novels, including Clannad, School Days HQ, Shiny Days and the Grisaia trilogy, which currently only has a physical version of The Fruit of Grisaia in it owing to Sekai Project being slow. (I've also got a Grisaia Complete Box on the way at some point, so that may take its place.)

Then it's on to PS3. At this point I own nearly every JRPG released for the system, with the exception of stuff that perhaps got an enhanced (physical) release on other platforms, such as the Disgaea series. My pre-release unlabelled copy of The Witch and the Hundred Knight bugs me a bit, too, so I might nab the PS4 edition of that at some point.

Under PS3 is PS4, ably guarded by Blanc from the limited edition of Megatagmension Blanc + Neptune vs. Zombies. I'll always buy physical releases of PS4 games where they exist, since I'm paranoid about digital copies going poof one day. (Also, physical is actually the only way to get Puyo Puyo Tetris on PS4, which pleases me somewhat.)

Under that we've got my beloved Vita games, another library I'd like to expand considerably in the coming months and years, since it's a system that just… mmm, tickles every part of my pleasure centres. The two unmarked boxes are pre-release copies of Danganronpa and Demon Gaze, both of which I reviewed when I was still at USgamer. Again, I'll always buy physical versions of Vita games where possible.

Next to Vita is my modest 3DS collection. I quite like the 3DS, but it isn't my favourite system, so consequently I haven't really prioritised collecting for it. If you're wondering where Senran Kagura 2 is, it's in its limited edition box.

Under that we have the temporarily messy storage of my limited editions. I don't buy LEs for every game, but I'll generally grab ones from Idea Factory and the Senran Kagura series, since they tend to be affordable and provide some nice goodies therein. Plus they remind me of old-school big-box PC game releases, which makes me happy. There's an article in that somewhere…

Oh, yeah, also, this is the only copy in existence of the only MoeGamer book, which republishes my Senran Kagura Estival Versus Cover Game articles in dead-tree form. I'm not sure of the legalities of selling these with all the artwork inside, so I haven't pursued producing these en masse, but as an experimental production, I was very happy with this glossy little number.

Under the LEs we have Wii games, which I always find I have more of than I think. The Wii actually had some really cool games on it, particularly from Japanese devs, so it's well worth exploring that back catalogue if you haven't already.

I've also got a modest Gamecube collection, as my Wii is the original model that will read Gamecube discs. That copy of Fire Emblem cost a fortune and I still haven't gotten around to playing it. I just like having it.

Then we have Wii U. Ahh, Wii U, dear old Wii U. Truly, you were the Dreamcast of your age. I have an almost-complete library of what I consider to be "essential" Wii U games here; I think I'm only lacking Pokken, Yoshi's Wooly World, Kirby's Epic Yarn and Paper Mario.

My DS library is small, like my 3DS library, but again there are some great games in there, including all the Ace Attorneys.

Then we've got 360 games, a libary which I consider almost complete from a JRPG and shmup perspective — I think I'm just missing Magna Carta 2 for a complete set of JRPGs on the platform, and I have a goodly selection of region-free shoot 'em ups from Cave and other developers.

And finally the bottom shelf is the few physical PC games and visual novels I have, along with a few anime DVDs. A couple of my visual novel cases are backups of digital versions with custom boxart I assembled because I liked them enough to want them on my shelf.

And that's it! Apart from the retro room I'm putting together upstairs, but we'll save that for another day. Hope you enjoyed this little guided tour, and thank you once again for supporting MoeGamer.