DefaultGen

If we're only considering good games I need to consider my score. I think Saturn is average because it has a bunch of good games. My real complaint is that it lacks variety in great and excellent games, but I didn't know I'm not supposed to take that into account.

Ha, some of the few, few games considered top stuff is still a bit overblown IMO. Some Working Designs and Sega games get an automatic admission to the hidden gemz hall of fame. Man... Albert Odyssey?? Who the hell cares about Albert Odyssey? It's a generic ass, too-many-encounters RPG that just has the shiny pink collector logo. Nowhere near what other consoles have in top spots like the Final Fantasies, Chrono Triggers, and Personas of the world. Great consoles don't need to try to sneak C-listers into their beloved top game lists

Oh you mean the end of the game.

Good time to buy any games that haven’t been as affected by COVID and Wata, bad time to buy Pokemans and sealed Nintendo games. If I find a game I want and the price hasn’t budged since 2018 (basically impossible for US console games) I just instabuy it now. I tend to see the imbalance in prices now as “so and so games are too expensive” but the other part of my brain can say “so and so game is so cheap compared to these dumbass Pokemon GBA sales!”

People must think these games are burned and assembled by hand in boutique batches of a dozen at a time.

The falling blocks in CV3 are so dumb, but also like the part I immediately think about when I think of playing the game, so I don't know that I can say I hate it.

Dire Dire Docks and Jolly Roger Bay. They're the worst Mario 64 levels, but more egregiously they're basically the same exact level. They both have: A watery cave and an emerging/disappearing ship with a star as the main features A jet stream star you need the metal cap to collect A star with chests you have to open in order through trial and error (Jolly Roger Bay already had this gimmick twice!!) A sea monster you have to follow for a star For whatever reason, both levels have by far the least coins in the game for the 100 coin star, requiring you to get all the red coins (potentially again). The same music Least of all, they're both friggin' water levels I don't know how a game with levels as creative as Tick Tock Clock or Wet Dry World could have a duplicate level that's just a boring watery cave.

I would literally rather have you buy Pokemon cards, so go ahead and double down on Dogecoin.

Love Saturn, but it’s a 4/10 no-Sonic-having console. It’s basically N64. A bunch of top end Sega games, 90% of a library everyone pretends doesn’t exist, and 3D everyone universally agrees looks like garbage. N64’s elite top few are all 10/10 generation defining bangers and Saturn’s just aren’t, so in fairness to N64 (for @OptOut’s sake) I can’t rate Saturn higher. I’m not mega deep on imports but basically every import I have is a shooter arcade port. While it’s awesome it has lots of good shooter arcade ports, I have trouble considering ports cornerstones of a library. PC-Engine is a great shooter console because it has tons of PC-Engine shooters. I wouldn’t give Xbox props for having 100 good versions of the Namco Museum games. Because the precession of ports always marches on, I think Saturn might technically be the worst way to play games like Radiant Silvergun, Battle Garegga, and DoDonPachi as awesome as those games are. I mean it’s not a BAD thing to have mostly good ports of amazing games in a couple genres but it isn’t lifting the console to a 9/10 for me.

I hate slip covers in general because all they do is make a game easier to damage (AND unable to fit in box protectors). Same with steelbooks... a case named for a strong metal that's actually easier to damage than a normal plastic case. What a rip off. I wouldn't grade a game without the slip cover personally though, I like complete stuff.

The first time I played Donkey Kong was in DK64, so obviously my childhood experience was with the greatest version on the greatest console. None of the 90s arcades I went to growing up ever had one weirdly enough. Even Dave and Busters has some modern version of Donkey Kong and they don't cater to vintage stuff at all. Like many above, I can't give DK a 10 because I'll never play it for an hour straight at an arcade like a faster game like OutRun or Robotron. But it's still awesome and basically invented my favorite genre, not some 40 year old garbage like Pac-Man. 9/10

And have nerds camping the store all day??

Mail you physical cards? $2.99 a pack? Digital NBA card packs start at $9, go to $100s, and still sell out quickly. The magic of NFTs! https://nbatopshot.com/packs

What a crazy thing that has no parallels to anything in history

The fancy modern stuff AFAIK are a couple shiny Charizard and Pikachu cards that sell for a couple hundred. Everything else is normal TCG prices, some $10s for the best stuff because it's all so mass produced. And of course anything less than a perfect 10 is garbage because so many people are putting modern cards straight from the pack to the grading pipeline. These are the cards I constantly see infecting my video game-focused social media feed:

I never really believed in the game "bubble" when a copy of Contra went from $15 to $30 over a number of years. But in the era of... this... I don't know what else to think. Crypto graphs to the moon. If you paid last month's comic prices you potentially got a $1,000s bargain. Daily queues at Target to buy out their entire stock of Pokemon and sports cards to immediately flip online... Just... lol

I've played 3 Game.com games and I could tell you that every single thing Game.com is, stands for, and purports to be sucks balls. I can also tell you PS2 is the best console ever made in part because every genre is represented so well and it's easy to find exactly the kinds of games I like to play, even if I never personally want to play a boring JRPG or old ass sports game, which are enormous parts of the PS2 library. I don't think people are giving journalistic, wholistic reviews in an internet poll. Also if there's an AVGN video about it, automatic 1.

Everything is on fire and we don't know what to do anymore. Little Samson and Flintstones 2 are old man games. We only collect Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros 3 variants now because they're keys.

The white ESRB logo is later (IIRC ~1 year after TLOU was released). CIB copies are largely the earlier version. New late-print versions were/are available very cheap for years. This is one of those games I've seen people "invest in" sealed because they can buy a stack of them for $15/ea not realizing they're buying a newly printed version. Not that the original print is at all rare sealed either though. All the VGA late print copies selling for a grand on Ebay are either uninformed buyers or fake sales. Those are garbage, lol. (Although checking Ebay it looks like early prints are nearly as cheap so I don't understand why anyone would pay $1000 for any copy of TLOU)

I don't know about anyone else over the past day... Also iOS Safari bugs: The 4 images get super squished on an iPad screen when you scroll down and the submenus don't work (e.g. I can't go to Browse > Forum, the submenu just disappears). Everywhere else on the site it works. I know I'm not supposed to use the site horizontally on mobile, but me and ZF are peas in a pod.

My wife buys stuff like this on Aliexpress, outrageously cheap. Like $3 shipped for small ones. Crafts and models are such a better value hobby than collecting video games. Some of the big expensive (relatively) ones look amazing https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002193612927.html?spm=2114.12010612.8148356.1.1f75284bXI5IbG

Here in the states that’s just a saying now!

There’s a bunch of weird games with little or no physical release. I couldn’t find the lovely “Saturn Smash Bootleg Edition” (which is actually made with permission), but did find @JamesRobot’s one of a kind work of art version of the game. Stuff like that is very cool and very legal.

On the topic of unobtainable things, anyone feel like collecting one thing now means probably shutting yourself off to other things in the future? My old plans would be like, oh after I get my Saturn wants, I'll do SNES, then 32X sometime in the future. Now my thoughts are more along the lines of, OK it will probably take my the rest of the year to get my Saturn wants, how many SNES wants does that mean I give up and does that mean I'm realistically never buying the 32X games? Prioritizing feels real important in this era.

Don't even joke with me