Category: No Moshing’s E-Peen

So, I play the tabletop miniature wargame (imagine me saying that with a lisp for best results) Warhammer 40,000. When I’m not busy fawning over waifus, rolling around in my various collections, or occasionally, y’know, working, you can usually find me assembling or painting a new mini, or getting in nerd fights with the basement troll over this rule or that. Recently, a new edition of Warhammer 40k released, overhauling most of the existing mechanics, and this Sunday I’m heading off to a Warhammer 40k tournament for the first time ever. I’m pretty excited! It’s gotten to the point that the basement troll and myself have been fanboying over various Warhammer things for about a month and a half now and Nekochan is getting annoyed every time it comes up.

While I am busy getting things ready for next week’s backer-only mini-update, Warhammer occasionally intrudes. I’ve had strategies and tactics on the brain for awhile- what if I take x unit out of my army and replace it with y? What am I going to do about z type of opponent? That sort of thing. I think my army is pretty good. I’ve got these guys called Pathfinders who have really long range things called markerlights which can supply targeting data to the rest of my army, I’m going to screen them with a couple Strike Teams who have some pretty powerful guns and will hopefully keep the Pathfinders nice and safe. Then I have some kickass mecha, a bomber, and a Breaching Team to track down the enemy and actually deal damage and secure objectives.

I don’t know why I’m telling you guys all of this- maybe in hopes that if I clear all this shit out of my brain I can work a little better? I don’t know. Thanks for putting up with it, I guess, and comment if you’re interested in hearing what happens at the tournament!

Note: Sorry for the late post, but yesterday I couldn’t find the camera!

Getting back on the horse has been a little rocky this week. It took me a whole day to catch up on emails and messages! But I think I’ll still be able to meet my own expectations for the next update. The big thing I want is to have the quest I started in June ready for the backer mini-update next week, and that’s more or less on track. I still have to clean up the new generic paladin faces, though- maybe I’ll stream that tomorrow?

Anyway, on the thing that you guys have no doubt been on the edge of your seat for. /sarcasm

There they all are. Yuuki will be along sometime in November, so I suppose I owe it to the collection to pick up an Asuna at some point. It’s not that I hate Asuna, I just thought that up until Mother’s Rosario she had some really bad characterization decay. Fortunately, my local comic shop has a fairy-type Asuna collecting dust on a shelf, so it’s just a matter of heading down there. It’ll have to wait though- now that I have Fire Emblem Conquest all my spending money is going towards buying the relevant amiibo next month.

Here’s the newest member of the harem, Kuroneko from Oreimo, that some of you might have seen from my Twitter. I was so surprised to see she had come down in price on Amazon, the older figmas tend to be at least three digits.

You may recall me talking about Tsuruya from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya a few months back, well, here she is. I kind of feel bad for her- a third of her accessories and options are for facilitating a head swap with one of the Mikuru Figmas so you can have Mikuru in a waitress/maid outfit.

I don’t remember if she was in the last update for not, but here’s Rin from Fate/Stay Night. There’s not a lot I can do with her pose, though. Her, Shinon and Kenshin are in the same boat where they have all action-oriented accessories, so if you want to do cute poses you’re limited in your options.

At this point, I’ve collected most of the Figmas I want from the back uncatalogued. I do want to get the rest of the Suzumiya cast, but they’re all in the three digit range it seems (or at least the ones I want…). Ayase Aragaki, who will round out my Oreimo figma trifecta, will probably stay fairly cheap and maybe I can look at getting her in the new year. She’s a side character, after all. The Lucina reissue should be hitting the secondary market by September, so I might pick one up depending how the FE amiibo situation is. Labyrs from Persona 4: Arena remains as the holy grail… she was a limited release and goes for upwards of $200 on the secondary market.

Thanks for letting me fanwank about all my toys! I hope that if you care about the Figma harem, this was a good update, and if you don’t care, I hope reading through wasn’t too painful for you!

I didn’t expect to be doing this so soon. When some people expressed interest in me doing a blog post about my rare game collection, I figured it’d be happening a few months down the line when I have nothing to say. But, other than new art assets I’ve been working on, I really don’t have anything to write about today… so here we are. Apologies if this is the sort of self-indulgent thing that makes you roll your eyes, but I’m actually pretty proud of my game collection so far.

So, with that in mind please indulge me.

Sorry for the blurriness, for some reason I can’t find my digicam anywhere and had to take all of these using my cell…. Anyway, this is our primary game cabinet. We currently own 475 games and our collection is valued at over $5000 USD. I like going to flea markets, pawn shops, and conventions looking for treasures, and we’re fortunate to live within easy travel distance of seven game resellers, a couple of which are really good.

This is our entertainment center, where all our currently “on deck” games sit, including our entire collection of handheld games. You can also see some of the consoles we’re currently using.

I know that 475 isn’t a massive collection by many standards, but we try to keep things focused on games we would actually play. This leads to weird situations like us treasuring bargain bin games like Alpha Protocol and Shadow Madness, but I don’t have a lot of interest in a game like Hagane or Intelligent Qube.

In our living room there’s a glass case that contains the “crown jewels” of our collection, plus a few other odds and ends (in this pic you can see a reproduction “shield key” from RE1, some very not valuable collector’s editions, some RWBY statuettes and Nekochan’s ammonite fossils- the bottom two shelves hold my Amiibo collection). This is why I (ironically) don’t play a lot of PC games, by the way. PC games don’t hold a lot of the same value (hell, digital games are effectively valueless), and besides I just like the feeling of being able to survey and obsess over my collection, holding them in my hands, organizing them, etc.

Front and center are these beauties that I bought just last January. I haven’t played any of Eternal Blue yet, and I was about halfway through Silver Star Story when my memory card got corrupted. 🙁

The FF3 here is actually Nekochan’s original from childhood. The CIB FF2 was a lucky find I bought for her birthday ages ago.

Terra and Celes still have got to be two of my favourite game protagonists.

Chrono Trigger, as you may recall, is our agreed-on greatest game of all time, so of course we’ve got to have it CIB. This copy is also Nekochan’s from the ancient past. My mom was kind of a bitch about video games and forced me to sell my previous consoles and games whenever I upgraded. When I bought an N64 (with my own paper route money, may I add) I was forced to sell my entire collection to my little sister for $50, which included not only my own copies of FF3 and CT, but also gems like Donkey Kong Country and Mario Paint that I have yet to replace.

CIB Star Fox isn’t particularly valuable, but it gets pride of place for personal reasons. Ask Nekochan about it sometime if you’re interested.

Rounding out our SNES gems are Lufia II and Earthbound, which are both really valuable as carts alone. They’re both relatively recent purchases, too- I picked up Lufia II after seeing it had jumped in price a few months back, and we picked up Earthbound at a convention just last year.

I used to love StarTropics as a kid, and finding it CIB (yes, including that fucking letter) at a flea market last fall was a really nice surprise. It was a real trip opening it up and finding the ad insert for Nintendo Power!

The Ghostbusters Video Game is a great example of trash that I love. It’s worth around $25, probably closer to $40 with the signature, but I love the experience of playing it- total nostalgia crack and I don’t even care. The autograph, in case you can’t make it out, is from Winston Zeddemore actor Ernie Hudson. I wanted to try and get the entire team, but unfortunately that’s impossible now (as if Bill Murray’s general weirdness didn’t make it nigh-impossible before Harold Ramis’ death, but I digress).

This is currently our greatest treasure, which was a huge shock to me. After RPGs, Survival Horror is my next-favourite genre, and I had picked up Rule of Rose ages ago because it was a seriously creepy game, but after awhile it seemed that I was the only person who knew anything about it. When I first began cataloging our game collection and taking it seriously, I was pleasantly surprised that RoR was valued at around $90- a respectable number, considering that many “rare” games don’t even resell for what they cost new at release. I figured that me and a handful other collectors knew about RoR, and that was it.

I was literally sitting at home the day Nekochan and I were leaving on vacation a few weeks ago, waiting for Nekochan to get back from a mani-pedi appointment so we could depart, and a video about the most valuable PS2 games happened to be in my feed. I gave it a watch, happily noting the Nekochan and I owned over half the list, but seeing RoR at number one made my jaw drop. Since the last time I valued it, there has been a massive FNAF-fuelled resurgence in the Survival Horror genre, Cryaotic and Best Friends Play have done LPs, and the increased demand drove the price to around $300. It’s been in the cabinet ever since.

Anyway, that’s it for my games collection for now. If you want to know more, drop me a comment, but please understand that my collection is not for sale. I’d be interested in hearing if there are any other collectors in the HC fanbase!

Okay, so the October release is almost done. I’ve been writing sex scenes all day, so hopefully they won’t be as terrible as I fear, but the nice thing is that most of them have CGs and it’s pretty easy to just ignore the text in favour of looking at the pretty pictures.

I’ve also had the Nostalgia Chick playing the background all day (that’s what I do- instead of playing music while I work, I listen to really long internet videos) and happened upon the “Sexual Awakening of the Human Nerd” things, which made me laugh. But it did inspire me to write this brief post.

Back in the day had a massive crush on Princess Daphne from Dragon’s Lair. She was my first “nerd crush” and pretty much started me on the path that brought me to hentai and h-games. I played Dragon’s Lair for the first time on a home laserdisc machine of all things, which dates me terribly.

Unfortunately, my mom caught me playing the opening movie over and over again while engaged in “other recreation activity” and trashed the disc. Tragic. I wouldn’t experience that level of moe again until many years later when Sailor Moon got translated. Unlike a lot of guys my age, I pretty much skipped over the whole Jessica Rabbit/Disney Princess thing.

If you also want to share your first nerd fantasy/provide free market research, please share in the comments. I’ve got maybe a couple hours of work left on the October release, so backers check your in-boxes a little bit later.

One of the privileges of making Harem Collector has been the sheer amount of new stuff I’ve been exposed to. I mean, I know this is the internet, everything ever is on the internet for our collective enjoyment, but you’d be amazed at the stuff I A) never thought about trying, or B) would never have tried without prodding.

Firmly in category A is the whole mind control fetish thing. I value Harem Collector’s fans from the mind control community, and it has been really awesome to sample the games put out by MC fans that are in that sweet spot where their fetish rubs up against my dominance/slavery fetish.

…That ended up sounding really unintentionally sexual.

Anyway, if that sounds like your boat, Hypnopics has a sizable RAGS community, RAGS being an engine for making point and click puzzle games.

Relatedly is the Overlord series of games. I started Harem Collector partly because I thought Cypress_Z wasn’t making Overwhored anymore, and since his game is pretty awesome I recently picked up Overlord II on a lark. It’s a very enjoyable game, although it feels really rushed and cut short. Still, I got a foursome with all potential dark mistresses. And after trying to play a domination Overlord, well, with the female victim’s voice clips it’s no wonder that game is popular in the MC community.

Another unexpected joy that’s come my way has been Oreimo. Although Meline started out as a joke character, writing for her has put siscon and incest on mine and my wife’s collective radar, which eventually lead us to an anime called Ore no Imouto ga Konna ni Kawaii Wake ga Nai, or Oreimo for short. It’s a very cute romcom anime series about a guy finding out his little sister is into dating sims and eroge, and is currently on our watch list.

But, yeah, in general making Harem Collector has been an exciting, weird trip. If you want to share anything you’ve discovered because you caught a reference to it in Harem Collector or any other h-game, don’t be shy to share it below or in the forum threads.

Edit: Speaking of which, I just got Magic DotP 2013 for free off Xbox Gold, and if any of you guys wants to play a game or two and meet me and generally hang out and have good feels, drop me an email.

(Note: This is not the controversial post that I postponed last week. I don’t know if I want to post something that comments on certain issues in the gamer mediaverse, or even if anyone would particularly care to hear my thoughts. The completed document sits on my desktop, unpublished, for now.)

I can’t believe it because I sent this story to the Trenches like a year ago but they finally got around to publishing it. Just wanted to share it with you all.