When I look at this catalog I'm reminded of the thousands, yes literally, of calls asking when Mortal Kombat would be released. Despite that, this is a fun catalog to review. The Sega CD was starting to get a few decent games, unfortunately at the expense of the TurboGrafx-16 CD which only gets half a page. The Genesis and Super Nintendo are of course going strong here as well as their portable little siblings.
This catalog is really weird because it is split into separate video game and PC sections that are upside-down from each other. Sorry for not describing that well. Electronics Boutique had an identity crisis in 1993. They started as a software store that happened to also sell a few video games. By 1993 shoppers saw them as a video game store that happened to also sell software. Electronics Boutique wanted to make it clear they were a store that was equally committed to both. Spoiler alert: in 3-4 years they fully converted to a video game store.
The front cover of the catalog is technically the cover for the PC section and the game section is relegated to the back cover. Whatever. We'll start with the game section first because that's probably what you're here for anyway.
Here's one of the 1,000,000 places where the Mortal Kombat release date is in print yet that phone never stopping ringing. The infernal ringing of the phone. I still have nightmares about it.
One weird thing about this era was the competing 4-player adapters for the Genesis. You'd think they were compatible but of course not. The EA variety worked with EA Sports games and an assortment of other games. Sega's version (Team Player) was supposedly the "standard" one but didn't support EA Sports games so it was pointless to many.
The Power Clutch was a good controller but had the misfortune of being out when people only wanted 6-button controllers.
Wireless controllers were pretty terrible back then. So far they are the worst rip-off in this catalog.
This page is so great, one of my favorites in the catalog. Besides generally being geeked to see Sega CD stuff, I get a weird kick out of all the wrong box art. Some of it was pre-release box art - like Joe Montana and Dracula. Robo Aleste and Sewer Shark were out for ~10 months at this point though.
I forgot about the promotion where the Super Nintendo, and probably core Genesis, was $88.88 with the purchase of any cartridge. The idea being that the markup on the cartridge more than covered the $11.11 loss on the system (hardware was sold at cost). Naturally some people gamed it by purchasing something out of the clearance bin.
The Super Advantage was another joystick that was slightly wrong for the time. The button layout was bad for fighting games. There was a later ascii controller that fixed this problem.
I tried that Vampire game not too long ago and it was alright. Sure, it's an obvious Castlevania knock-off but it's still one of the better platformers for the system.
This page sums up why the Game Boy was so great. $50 for the base system, $30 more gets you Tetris and some accessories. New Zelda and Mario games, and really good ones at that. This is why the Game Gear and Lynx never stood a chance.
The Turbo Duo, possibly my favorite system of all time, only gets a measly half page. It was a $300 system with a quirky library competing against two $99 systems with amazing libraries so I get why.
Some of these late NES releases were pretty good. Maybe not Die Hard but the other stuff. Metroid at $30 wasn't a terrible deal then either. I know 25 years later that seems crazy but it was a different time and all that.
I tried to figure out what happened to Spinnaker Software and it seems after a confusing chain of mergers they ended-up part of Mattel.
Have I complained about how incredibly huge those Corel Draw boxes were? It took two of us to get them on the shelf.
Pro tip - the "Wordperfect 6.0 Competitive Trade-Up" was the full version of the program. The "Trade-Up" part was 100% honor system.
I like the $500 CD upgrade kit just casually placed alongside a bunch of total shovelware. The Indiana Jones game is the only thing on here you'd want to own.
I have no recollection of Blue Force so I just watched a video of it... weird sort of interactive fiction / adventure game. It might be something I'd like.
"Villa Crespo" sounds like a suburban neighborhood started in 2007 where all the houses have some minimal amount of southwest architecture on the outside. The neighborhood was 1/3 complete before the 2008 crash and the few owners are now in massive debt while surrounded by vacant coyote-infested lots.
Those generic brand disk boxes were actually well made. I might even have a couple storing old disks with nothing important on them that I can't bring myself to part with.
A few random items that eventually ended-up in a dumpster behind the Electronics Boutique warehouse.
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