Amusingly enough, I recently requested a review copy of the retail version The Walking Dead from Telltale, but was told they were out of them for the moment and instead I got PSN codes for all five episodes. Which is fine, except for the fact that I can’t use PSN on my PS3 here. So, I simply decided to support the company a few days back by buying a copy of the game from Best Buy.  Telltale gets my thirty bucks and I get to play the game everyone is raving about.  Done and done. A few hours later I get an email from Best Buy telling me the game has shipped out and I can expect it between the 27th and January 2nd. Whee.  But guess what? The mailman pops up today with a bunch of packages and supriiiiiiise! I get a package from Telltale with the retail copy of game you see in the photo. Which means with the PSN codes and the Best Buy Limited Edition I have on the way, I’ll end up with THREE copies of the Walking Dead. Damn zombies are multiplyin’ like rabbits around here, I tells ya…

As for Crystal Mines, it’s a tiny bit of a grail game for me and as I forgot to poke around on it over at Amazon, I ended up impulsively buying what looked like a brand new and complete sealed UK version off an Hong Kong game site. I’ve been looking for this for a while, missed out on it when Songbird Games had a few at a (slightly) reduced price and have bought legitimate games from other HK retailers with no issues whatsoever. Anyway, I was hoping I wouldn’t get a bootleg, but oh boy, did I ever (boo!). Yeah, the game works just fine and so far, seems to be complete, but I don’t like buying copied games at all. Even more (not so) amusing was that the game was sealed, but had a save on the game card as if someone tested it out to make sure it worked. Bleh.

Actually, there’s a saving grace here thanks to the hilarious manual inside the case that looks normal until you read it and see it’s been rewritten to cover a brief history of Crystal Mines from the NES to Lynx and also has a few goofy lines about stuff like reformatting R4 cards and actual crystals for sale. I’ll keep this around, as the game is one of my all time favorites and with over 300 levels, I’ll be buried in it for some time. That said, next time I’ll be a LOT more careful where I buy stuff from, grrr….