My most recent clearout of the ‘games cupboard’ followed the usual pattern of taking everything out, putting it on the floor and gazing at the mess I’d created while periodically puffing out my cheeks and scratching my head, before returning it all whence it came (albeit in a slightly different configuration) and telling myself that such an exercise represented a great use of an afternoon.

At some point, when there was more of a premium on space, I’d evidently decided that there should be a hierarchy of sorts, with barebones budget releases relegated to a CD wallet, and only ‘proper’ boxed games with manuals worthy of a place on the shelf.

But then I got to the point where I’d filled up quite a large wallet and started to wonder whether I wanted to be the kind of person who owned multiple leather cases full of discs and decided to just leave any new purchases in their boxes on the shelves with the others. Where there had once been a two-tier system, there was now just a random assortment of games from the 90s and 00s, stored in different places.

The only new thought that occurred to me this time was: I haven’t actually added any boxed games to the collection for a while, and I’m not sure if I will again. My current circumstances are such that I no longer pass any charity shops or branches of CeX on a regular basis, and based on recent experiences, stocks of boxed PC oldies seem to be thinning out a little bit anyway.

In an effort to salvage something useful from the whole exercise, however, I did think it might be worth building on our previous series looking at old games boxes, which started as a vain effort to track down those titles lost in previous (genuine) clearouts and ended as a weird deep dive into the UK budget market and my enthusiastic patronage of it.

We recently reviewed Gun, my copy of which was re-released as part of Activision’s Best Of range. It caught my attention because it came with a printed manual and, apart from the slightly different front cover and spine, otherwise resembles the standard DVD release.

Which also makes it a little hard to determine the exact vintage of this budget line, although I’d guess 2006-2007 or so, given that the other ‘Best Of’ title in my collection, Quake 4 (never played it!) is also from 2005, as is the only other one I can find evidence of, Call of Duty: Deluxe Edition. (MobyGames gives a German release date for this edition of Quake 4 in June 2006, which sounds about right).

If printed manuals themselves weren’t quite dying out in the mid-00s, then it certainly seemed against the general direction of travel to include them in budget re-releases. In my memory, the minimalist approach of the likes of Sold Out and Xplosiv were starting to dominate by this point, squeezing out the mid-range ‘premium economy’ £12-15 editions like this particular (apparently short-lived) range.

Anyway, the two games I own stood out in my collection amongst a predominance of disc-only releases, and in whatever system I’d instituted back in the day, they’d managed to earn a hallowed place on the shelf rather than being ruthlessly stripped down, with the boxes jettisoned and the disc/cover art filed in one of three or four random places.

I joke, of course: after my latest endeavours, I know exactly where everything is – in a totally logical place that totally makes sense (totally). Join us next time, when I definitely won’t be tearing the house apart looking for a plastic folder containing a piece of artwork for a game I bought for £3 in 2009, before giving up and nicking a picture from MobyGames.

(Although I should point out that, for once, the pics in this piece are my own scans, rather than ones purloined from the great gaming database…)