DeChief

Sorry for the necrobump, but I just moved house recently and completely forgot about this whole thing until I found my Cornball cart hidden behind some stuff on a shelf. It was a real blast from the past seeing my own post on page 2 of that thread, I was only 17 at the time glad to see this forum at least is still around.

Back in 2013 - 2017 when I lived in Tokyo, I used to hit up all of the retro game stores in Akihabara once or twice a month. Trader 3 was usually the best place to find deals as their staff didn't seem to understand the unreliability of a cartridge connector and would routinely place perfectly working games in the 100 yen bargain bin (basically $1 USD). One day I was in the store, looking at their overpriced Neo Geo AES stuff in a glass case, when I saw some curious boxed games on the adjacent shelf. It turned out to be a whole bundle of games for the Commodore MAX Machine, an ill-fated Commodore computer that was released exclusively in Japan in 1982 just before the C64, selling in very low numbers (estimated between 10,000 - 15,000). The games were 500 yen each and worth about $100 USD at the time, now worth much more. I also once found an orange original Xbox Live Beta memory card with its cap at that same store for 900 yen, that was pretty cool! It doesn't count as being "in the wild", but I found a great condition CIB USA copy of Super Mario World on Yahoo Auctions for about $5 once, it's one of the few CIB SNES games I've held onto. Why on earth is it so expensive now by the way?

Back in the early 2010's I was pretty active on the Bungie.net forums. It was pretty terrible forum software with far too many restrictions, you weren't even allowed to have your own avatar! So some users created this browser extension/add-on type thing for Firefox called Coup D Bungie which let you have custom avatars and stuff. This was my avatar there and has been my avatar in most forums online since then. It's a reaction image people used to use sometimes, me included, which is the "rustled jimmies" monkey from the front of the old Gorilla Munch cereal box, on the head of Halo 3's Master Chief.

As others have said, if you don't have anything tying you down (kids and such) then now is the time to do it! I'm 21 and am about to move to Tokyo for the 3rd time in my life, the last time I was 14 and finished high school there, so I guess it's a second hometown for me and less of a big change. Personally I think you should do it, but no pressure. PS. I love your city's fried chicken.

I have a similar relationship with my childhood PAL N64! The only games I really like playing are Starfox, Doom, Banjo, and Goldeneye, yet I always keep it setup and ready to play on my desk.

Yes! I have a similar problem where I look at my collection and notice some games, consoles, computers, and other things that I really enjoy owning but don't use often, and I proceed to sell them... only to regret it not even a month later. I've come up with a system of identifying what I actually care about: Look at your collection and identify the games, consoles, etc. that you find yourself not using very often. Take them out of your collection room, off your shelf, whatever; the idea is to separate them from the rest of your collection. Continue to play your games as normal for about a month. If you notice yourself wanting to use those things enough to go and dig out of wherever you put them, chances are you're going to regret selling it. If not, sell that stuff. This usually works pretty well, but since I mostly collect vintage computers and their games, there are often machines that I don't use all that often but are extremely convenient to have when I do need them. Eg. I have an Apple Macintosh SE/30 and Macintosh Plus, and I mainly only use the SE/30 for its ability to read 1.4MB floppies. I can write a Mac 1.4MB floppy using an old Windows XP PC and use the SE/30 to read it, then write those files to an 800K disk that the Plus can read. The SE/30 can read and write 400K, 800K, and 1.4MB disks, but the Plus can only handle 400/800K, and you can't write those from a PC. It would be pretty much impossible for me to transfer data via floppy to the Plus without the SE/30 unless I buy a KryoFlux, which is significantly less fun to use. So I'm stuck in a situation of owning something that I could easily get a few hundred bucks for just because I need it once a month.