April 27th, 2018:

	I went on a bit of a bender this morning at work... not booze, 
mind you.  I went ape and bought a bunch of Sega Genesis/MegaDrive games 
on eBay.

I've been listening to Pop Will Eat Itself lately, and had their song 
"RSVP" stuck in my head for the last few days.  I'd first heard the song 
(in instrumental form) in the game "Loaded" for the Sega Saturn, and 
rather enjoyed it.  It's been a favourite of mine since the mid-90s!

So, because of this, I was feeling nostalgic for the game, and ran off to 
eBay to find a copy.  Like most of my game consoles, my Saturn is a 
Japanese model, so I had to look for the game under its Japanese title, 
Blood Factory.  Lots of copies around, so I watched a couple and kept 
browsing.  As I searched, I happened upon a seller's other auctions.  One 
thing led to another, and I am now the proud purchaser of several Japanese 
Sega Mega Drive games instead.

I managed a bit of a haul, price-wise.  Added no fewer than six games, 
four of which are quite rare and (normally) quite expensive:

Alien Soldier
Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon
Verytex
Viewpoint
Shining Force II
Battle Golfer Yui

Of the six, I'm most excited about Battle Golfer Yui, a *really* obscure 
adventure game built around a golf game (or is it the other way around?).

I bought Verytex and Viewpoint more for collection completion purposes 
than out of a desire to play them.  I'd always had a passing, if a bit 
tepid, interest in the games, and truth told they'll probably end up 
sitting with the rest of the collection on the shelf.  Might give them the 
odd play-through every now and then.

Alien Soldier and Sailormoon are both decent games, and I don't anticipate 
either game will gather much dust on the shelf...

I'd been looking for a North American copy of Shining Force II for a 
couple of years now, and while not uncommon, it does tend to go for more 
money than I'm willing to pay.  So, I did what I normally do when a 
domestic game is going for stupid amounts of money: bought the Japanese 
version.  I know enough Japanese to be functionally illiterate, but I can 
usually mundle my way through Japanese games even with my limited 
knowledge.  I'll probably play this game the most, having already burned 
through Shining Force and Shining Force CD.

As a postscript, I didn't end up buying Blood Factory/Loaded.  Will save 
it for another day.