I have a lot of collections, and I thought it would be easier to go through them for a proper review if I made a list. Now the Transformers and other action figures aren’t my concern. The Transformers especially have too many to bother with, a problem also faced by my comics. The video games and movie videos, however, I want a proper listing of.

My thought is that I could keep track of what I’ve reviewed for the Video Game Clutter show and the DVD/VHS report articles. (Although the videos I’ll be going through alphabetically.) Luckily I found an old Steno Book that I had originally purchased all those years ago to keep track of high scores. Since the games didn’t keep track of the top score once the game was shut off (except for some computer games), I could track my progress.

Years later I found it during my game organizing, and it was mostly empty. The spaces were marked off, but no scores were recorded. And since there was plenty of extra pages left (most of the book), this week’s plan was to list every game I own to keep track of which ones I’ve gone through.

A sneak preview of what's to come on Video Game Clutter

Here you see my Atari 800 page. For this one and the PC page (since the Atari 800 is a computer) there is more than one format. In the Atari’s case it’s primarily the game cartridge, but I do have a few games on cassette (not counting a few I made myself in BASIC and save to cassette–remember, we didn’t have a disk drive). For the PC there are a few floppies but it’s mostly CD and DVD-Roms. For that one I also marked old games (DOS and Windows 95) since they may not actually run on a modern PC. There are a few games and resource disks I’m going to miss if they don’t make some kind of Windows 95 emulator or I can’t get an older version of Quicktime to run–or get the current version to play old version files. Therefore, they have to be marked.

With the other platforms it was pretty easy. The NES and Game Boy Advanced both use cartridge-based game storage, while the CD-I uses CD-Roms with their own programming language. I only had to list the game, whether or not I’ve reviewed it, and what my decision was if I did.

Once I was done with the video games, I decided that my videos should be listed as well. This is unfinished, and I plan to work on this some more over the week. These come in three formats (although there are plenty of other storage formats for videos over the years, some even rather obscure if you’re not an enthusiast, like the guys in that link). Those formats are VHS (the majority of my collection), DVD (which I could only start playing a few years ago), Video CD (the format killed by the DVD but I can play on my computer or the CD-I), and one movie that’s designed for the computer.

So far I’m only up to the letter “F”. You notice a couple of the VHS ones are listed as “replaced by DVD”. DVDs take up less space, and the VHS is a dead format. Someday they may stop making players for it, and they’re hard to find as it is. Now you can burn video to a reusable DVD and they last longer. Play a VHS enough times and it could break, costing you that footage. Digital copies take longer to degrade, and isn’t messed up by copying the way a VHS is. (Hope you can handle a bad Rocky impersonation and the same dude getting hit over and over until the video decays horribly.)

The Video CD’s have a weaker compression than DVDs, which is why DVDs won. I need two VCDs to get the same movie as a DVD, plus you can put bonuses on. However, while I want the DVD version (I only have two Star Trek movies on VCD), I may keep the VCDs for historical purposes.) The digital copy of the anime Iria: Zeram the Animation is in quick time and only has two of the four episode miniseries on it, so I want to get the DVD of that. (Also, I prefer dubbed to subtitled when it comes to animation. Live-action, like Godzilla movies, I prefer subtitled because dubbing live-action doesn’t always work as well.) I don’t currently have a way to play Blu-Ray, the current format, and I don’t know of a Blu-Ray burner, much less one that has reusable disks so DVD is fine with me. (Besides, I don’t have an HD set.)

This list is going to need a few more days work to get it all done. I’m hoping to do that because I saw another area that needs organizing, and I’m hoping that I can do that for next week’s assignment. The fun continues.

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