#oneaday Day 23: Boxing Day Sales

I got a bit of money for Christmas as well as a rather generous bonus from work, so I've treated myself to a few things that are now on the way.

First up is the Atari Flashback Classics pack for Switch, which is a compilation of the three separate Atari Flashback Classics releases for PS4 and Xbox One. The third volume of these was released alongside the Switch version and, I was excited to see, incorporated some Atari 5200 games for the first time… including the good version of Star Raiders! At last! No longer do I have to suffer the indignity of the 2600 version. (Not that the 2600 version is bad, I should probably add, but the 5200/Atari 8-bit version is infinitely superior.)

This package proved to be a bit of an ordeal to get, because for some inexplicable reason Atari doesn't appear to have arranged any sort of distribution in Europe. PQube handled the first two volumes of Atari Flashback Classics on PS4 and Xbox One, which I already own, but they had nothing to do with either volume 3 or the Switch release, so my only option was to import.

Easy enough these days, you might think — just pop on Amazon or something and get an American copy shipped over. Uh-uh. Amazon was out of stock and most other big American retailers wouldn't ship to the UK. I was beginning to think I was never going to get my hands on this — and, of course, with the decline in likelihood came an enormous increase in the amount that I really wanted it.

Thankfully, I found a copy on eBay, and the seller even promised to ship to the UK for free, which was extraordinarily generous of him. I won the auction and ended up paying a little more than the standard retail price of the package, but probably less than shipping fees to the UK from a US retailer, so I haven't really lost out. I just have to wait for it to arrive now. Looking forward to it.

NIS Europe had a Boxing Day sale, too, where a number of their slightly older titles (or games that, you get the impression, they wanted to shift a few more copies of) had some generous discounts, so I grabbed Fallen Legion and God Wars for Switch, both of which are games I'm interested in writing about on MoeGamer at some point in the near future. NIS Europe's online store also tends to ship super-fast, too, so I should have those within a day or two.

I grabbed a couple more Philips G7000 Videopac games, too, as I intend to knuckle down and get properly stuck into my Videopac Games project in the new year. I forget the exact names offhand, but one is a bit like Star Raiders (i.e. a first-person perspective space sim) and the other is a side-on shoot 'em up that is very well regarded. Looking forward to giving those a go.

And finally, I snagged Diablo III for Switch, as I've been wanting to try the console versions of this for some time now, and having Diablo III on the go is just too appealing a prospect to pass up on. I tried it out this evening with my podcasting partner Chris, and we had a wonderfully smooth experience with it. Looking forward to exploring that further in the coming weeks and months — Diablo III is very much one of those "evergreen games" like I wrote about on MoeGamer earlier today, so I'm sure this will be a regular part of my rotation, particularly with how easy it is to get multiplayer up and running.

Anyway. Schedule and posting regularity will still be a bit wobbly for the next few days as I'm off to go and see my parents this coming weekend, but things should be back to normal by the new year at the latest.

I hope you've enjoyed your leftovers, and those of you who have to go back to work between now and the new year… you have my sympathies!

Merry Christmas, once again, everyone.