TheGreatBlackCat

I won't sell it because I guess I own a Duo now, but I find PC Engine to have an underwhelming library sans a handful of video games. I was hoping for a pleasant surprise like how I discovered my love for Sega Saturn, but besides Ys and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood I can see why PC Engine has remained a relatively obscure console to collect for (in The States). I feel like you're not missing out on much.

I think people are misconstruing what I said. It was a hypothetical, I'm not the type to brag nor would it mean anything. I was only trying to illustrate how in the grand scheme of things we should be collecting for ourselves and I hope that we all are.

NostalgicMachine, it's funny, I think it's simply a part of life. Things change (however begrudgingly I admit). I can tell that even Pat Contri and other more established retro personalities are tired of game collecting themselves. A part of retro game collecting for me was about getting older and a refusal to let things go. I suspect that may be the case for many of us in the hobby. When we get over that hump and accept change I don't think preserving our youth in such a way matters as much. Anymore, lately, I want to enjoy my collection and to not try to distill a time and place in my life when I was (sometimes) happier. Nearly completing my wish list has killed most of the desire to collect anymore. I have everything I ever wanted as a kid and now I don't know what to do with myself. I guess I'm being a bit pensive on the heels of a new year and I don't mean to bring in such a heavier vibe to the thread.

I'm with you, I used to want complete libraries, but the hobby isn't as fun as it once was. Besides, like I said, that's an enormous amount of space in one's home dedicated to a console. I don't know what happened or when it happened, but collecting stopped being fun for me a long time ago. Maybe I've been going through the motions? Maybe it's because I'm down to the final ten of the video games I wanted on the list that I created years ago? Once my list is complete I think I'm going to buy CIB-only Famicom games and make it fun again with no goal in mind. I feel like I've been a slave to my vintage game habits for too long and I'm admittedly relieved that my list is nearly finished.

This is exactly why I am not shooting for full libraries anymore. I can feasibly complete my PlayStation and Sega Saturn collections for a few thousand each at this point; I own mostly every game anybody would want to play for those systems. I do not have the space and, outside of a few pricier odds and ends, I mostly need shovelware to create a complete library. For Saturn, I basically need House of the Dead, Mega Man 8, X3, Resident Evil, Lunacy, Sonic R, and one more higher end game. Playstation: Koudelka, Klonoa, Team Buddies, and one or two more higher priced games. After those small lists it would all be sports, wrestling, and shovelware titles. I am not dedicating space for video games I have zero interest in ever playing. Even if I wanted to brag about it, no one cares about my collection and it's even less likely that one of my friends would be impressed with a complete library.

OP, I'm sorry to hear, but my advice is to move your collection up into that spare second story room and to store any excess that you can't display in waterproof tubs. Over my 20 years of collecting I've read too many stories of mold, leaks, and floods ruining tens of thousands of dollars worth of items because they were stored in basements. It's for that exact reason why I created a game room out of my second floor office. I hope that most of your collection is salvageable and intact. Floods are up there on a list of worst fears for collectors. It's good to know that your insurance will cover it (thank God).

Jeevan, my availability for matches is virtually all day tomorrow and on Saturday before 3 PM U.S. Eastern Time. Followed up from Discord.

Will follow up shortly when I get home, Jeevan. You'll see me in the Discord.

Screw it, I'll get smoked, but count me in for the tournament. I'd love one of those gold cartridges. Is there any way to let the devs know that the ROM is not compatible with the Analogue Nt's (silver) jailbreak? I'm assuming there's a mapper that it's unfamiliar with and that the cartridge should work; any cartridge I've thrown at it works, including homebrews.

There's no licensing issue, LRG works that out well before production. The issue is that publishers have caught on with the more polished indie games. They get swept up and have their licenses bought before LRG even has a chance to make a move. It's telling that PlayAsia orders coincide with LRG runs; there's virtually no point to LRG with its open pre-orders and otherwise wanting to have the cards and labeling on the cover of a game. This is a long time coming, any indie game worth having works out a physical release with any number of publishers anymore. Furthermore, the quality of Limited Run's games has become worse since the pandemic shut-down ended. LRG's place is slowly becoming less relevant to the hobby.

I have to ask you, I'm about 1,000 games into my collection and I have more or less run out of games that I would like to collect, it's curated so there's little to no shovelware. I could easily complete my Sega Saturn and PSX libraries cheaply now because of how I went about it. At 1,000 video games I already feel that it would take a lifetime to play my collection and I own almost every game imagineable for most systems that one would want, which brings me to my question: How do you justify a collection 10,000 video games deep? You own multiple lifetimes' worth of video games and it would be impossible to play that many games to completion. This is no criticism on my part, I think it's cool that you're that dedicated to your hobby, but I'm already at my personal maximum. I'm interested to read your response!

I'll say this: My wife was the on-call substitute for Hell's Kitchen two times if any cast member dropped out before production. It's pretty commonplace to have NDAs and subcontracted casting companies having to keep quiet due to contractual obligations. My ex-girlfriend works for Netflix as a producer; she is familiar with all of the casting and production companies in the Philadelphia area. I'm going to follow up with OP (and then my ex) and I will be able to quickly suss out if he's real or not. Will keep you all posted.

LOL, well, I'm serious. To be honest, I'd love to know what show this is for and what platform.

I have a small dedicated game room, a 700+ game collection, and live in West Philly. Interested to know what your aims are.

Ouch on those cartridges, but the boxes and front labels are glaringly counterfeit. Report these guys. I reported a seller on Mercari the other day selling a repro of Snatcher for almost $300. I don't care about repro sales, but there was a clear attempt at making it seem like partially a deal/authentic to those who aren't as knowledgeable. I can't believe the eBay seller still has an account.

Man, you hit the nail on the head on why I went on a desperate (and crazed) spending spree this past month. My intuition's telling me that games like Popful Mail, the Lunar games, Shining Force CD, etc., are going to eventually become generally unobtainable by the average collector. I don't like that likely possibilty.

Someone else said that you have the most insightful post about this topic and I tend to agree. You have to realize, RH, that any media needs new material by necessity to stay relevant, hence the pressure of newer social media providers to provide content. Once the content dies it's game over for that platform; that includes VGS. The sentiment that we're older and tend to keep these older style platforms alive saddens me. I'm feeling bummed after reading some of these comments just because there clearly is a huge divide between the new and old guard of internet media platforms. I agree that forums provide a much more structured environment for online discussions. I feel that notion is lost on the younger generation of Discord and even Reddit users. There's a more personal tone to the various vintage gaming forums that the likes of Discord can't capture. I don't know if anybody else feels this way, but I'm curious if anybody else out there has a strange sense as of late that retro gaming is dying. Is it just me? Despite the all-time highs in prices I just don't feel that there's a real wave out there. Game prices all around were on the downtick before the pandemic. It strikes me that people were down and they only turned to vintage games for temporary comfort. I mention this because there's nowhere near the level of activity in most forums that Nintendo Age ever had. I'd hate to see VGS ever go. This is one of the few places on the internet that has interesting vintage gaming content. There is no substitute for online forums. Even /r/retrogaming doesn't fill that void.

I'm the same. Sadly, $100 is nearing the average rate for a good-yet-obscure game. The most I've spent on a game must've been about $700 for a pristine copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga before the pandemic. Much of my most expensive titles were bought just before COVID-19 hit, for that matter, and I do not regret buying them one bit. Magic Knight Rayearth comes to mind when discussing this. I certainly don't feel good after buying the few that I have for $500+, but being a longtime collector and letting CIB Little Samson slip by at $300 because it was "too much for a video game" back in the day taught me a hard lesson. With that in mind I made several purchases over the pandemic that proved to shake out in my favor. Vintage video games are a bit inflated and the market is overheated. I hope that with things being the way that they are that it doesn't dissuade new collectors looking to enter the hobby.

I saw this comment last night and I had to reply. I share the same sentiment as you. Contemporary games don't do it for me: Play times are often inflated/padded for content and newer games are often stretched twenty hours beyond their core ten hour content. We really do only get a good ten hours of solid story anymore. Dark Souls, Skyrim, Fallout, and a handful of other games are the rare exceptions. I own over 700 games in my vintage game collection. With the exception of the Switch, I haven't bought more than 10 titles for each console generation post-PS2. It simply doesn't come down to preference or my age. Most games hand hold PS3-onward and I absolutely detest most FPS and sandbox games which have dominated the scene for at least the past 15 years. Sure, modern games are flashy, they appear more alive, but games like Cyberpunk 2077 always reveal themselves to be a shallow veneer covering linear game play with the illusion of freedom of choice. In other words: The same old same old. The PlayStation 4 was an underwhelming console and I'm convinced that it will go on to be looked on as only a footnote in video gaming. The PlayStation 5 looks to be the true follow up to the PS3, but even then, the technical leaps aren't all that impressive anymore. The explosion of successful indie titles attests to the want for tight, simpler, and high concept games. TDI, same deal with me. I'm trying to finally chip away at those 700+ games sitting on my shelves. Core game play and immediacy of play was better back in the day. Indie devs picked up on this, but these concepts are generally lost on AAA houses. I have zero plans to buy a PS5. I never thought that I'd become a PC convert, but it appears that is the direction that I'm going for my modern gaming needs. The current console generation consists of name brand PCs and I see no point in entertaining the idea that consoles are still relevant in today's modern gaming era. I just want to end on this point: There's a reason why retro games are in short supply whilst newer games have ample supply. It isn't just nostalgia; older games innovated because of technological limits. They are more compelling to play because of the creativity needed to work within those limits. As gamers age, who the hell has time to dump 90 hours into every sandbox game that comes out like Red Dead Redemption 2? We're not 15 anymore with only our school work to worry about.

If I'm going to be honest here, I'm feeling fatigue with collecting. I feel at odds with myself when I buy games because as much as I hate to admit, my passion for collecting is cooling. I don't know if it's that I'm getting older or if my priorities and wants out of life are changing, but I'm trying not to collect just to collect. Recently, I've bought a few rare games and I think it's because I want to buy them while I still care and simultaneously that they're the only games remaining that I care about. Gone are the days of wanting a complete official NTSC NES library. That goal's out of reach for many of us now, but more realistic full library goals would be for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. I have many of the most expensive games knocked out of the way for those two consoles so finishing off their libraries isn't entirely out of reach. Will I care a few years from now? I don't know and it makes me sad because these old games were such an integral part of my life and my coming of age, but I'm happier now. I feel I may not need them as much as I needed them before. I've been at odds with myself this entire pandemic over my collecting habits and if retro game collecting is as important to me as it once was. I don't have friends to share my collection with anymore who shared the same experiences that I had with them. But to answer OP's question: My game collecting stops with my one or two rooms. I don't want too much more that would take up an entire basement or anything and I'm realistically almost there.

It's an entirely different culture. I love historical Japanese culture, art, food, etc., and I went to Japan last year. You're kind of hitting at multiple points here, but I'll try to break them down: 1.) The Japanese have a much different worldview than The West. As far as retro game stores dying out or a large corporation moving in, it's highly unlikely for that to happen. Japan is relatively small and chains, while they exist, are nowhere near as large as their enormous American counterparts. The Tokyo area has something like 50% of Japan's population living in it much like Seoul in South Korea. The chains are relegated to cities and even then there aren't tens of thousands of locations. Somebody mentioned Super Potato and that's not as large as Americans would like to make out, store-wise or location-wise. Super Potato even closed a few locations recently. Prices are high as hell and the workers looked miserable there during cherry blossom season (therefore, not that great of a place to shop or to work at). Retro games could be had for substantially less in smaller shops than from Super Potato. There's a Super Potato tax of upwards of 25% on games just to shop there and a place like Super Potato likely over expanded with the few locations that they have. So, no, I doubt any chain would do well. I live in Philadelphia and by virtue of living in a city large corporate chains have difficulty maintaining traffic. There are many more alternatives to chains when one lives in a city. 2.) The Japanese have a much better secondhand market. They take much better care of their possessions and often use, reuse, and resell all the time. There's a huge difference between the American secondhand market and the Japanese used market. Americans take much worse care of their possessions than the Japanese. The sense of ownership and care that the Japanese generally have still persists to this day. The secondhand market there will always remain strong because of this. 3.) As much as I hate to admit it physical media is dying. We can all debate that fact here, that there will always be a market, but the amount of gamers who want physical media are eclipsed by those who don't care. The majors recently releasing essentially consolized PCs without optical drives says how present this fact is. GameStop will die one day within this next decade. I am confident when I say that GameStop will not be around in 2030 unless it can majorly reimagine its business model in some significant way. GameStop is in no way in a position to jump into a foreign business venture and to open new stores in a market that doesn't want or need them there.

Cali, you've had the most salient explanations of events, when and why retro gaming took off in recent years, and the steady decline before the pandemic. It's interesting because I took a look at some of the more expensive titles on PS1 back in December 2019 to January 2020. I was surprised to see that games had come down so much. I have a pretty pricy collection and I was watching over all game prices steadily decline for about a year or two. The decline was consistent and I was losing about $50-100 off of my collection month on month. The pandemic has certainly inflated prices and it has to be somewhat temporary. I just received my Price Charting yearly summary this week and my collection appreciated 142% because of the pandemic. I barely bought much over this past year so the needle shoudln't have moved much on it. There is no way that current vintage video game prices are tenable. I'm closely watching certain high-end titles and they have precipitously fallen just this past month. Some titles that are extremely rare like Burning Rangers and Magic Knight Rayearth are likely to fall and subsequently settle at a much higher cost than pre-pandemic levels. Magic Knight Rayearth isn't moving much and it's such an uncommon title that the price is finally reflecting its rarity. However, titles like Tales of Destiny are coming down by quite a bit. The all-time highs were last month and, given the current economic uncertainty, people look to not be buying. Game prices appear to move with Millennials as we age. Born in '84 and every retro game uptick corresponds to when my generation began having more disposable income. I'm still childless and only recently married, but the decline in the past year or two could definitely be attributed to more Millennials having children and needing the money and/or space. As more emphasis is focused on family I can see retro gaming seeing even more of a decline. Great for hardcore collectors, but kind of sad that it is a fad for many people and that retro gaming has already had its heyday in many ways. Because we're seeing what is likely the zenith of retro gaming's popularity, I always suggest to people on /r/retrogaming to buy their Analogue consoles, their Game Boy LCD replacements, and whatever replacement parts now. I have this deep sense that this is the second and last wave for the love of these old consoles. Gen Z is getting older and they don't put as much emphasis on physical media.

Just putting out feelers if anybody's willing to sell these for around the going rate on Price Charting. Can buy 1 or 2 of the titles depending on price. Thank you.

Are you selling off games? I'm looking for Herc's Adventures, Mega Man X3, and Mega Man 8. Message if you're interested.

No. These are presumably the cases that they use for the various Sega CD reissues and Saturn-like special editions like Panzer Dragoon for Switch. I just recently got my reprint of Monkey Island and the cases are nearly indistinguishable from the originals. However, the plastic is clearly softer than the originals and they are easier to scratch. Older plastics had environmentally worse chemicals in them, but they were generally more durable. Personally, I'm dropping money on two cases. My PlayStation long box and Saturn collections can use them. Thank God that this is an open order and there's no limit on them. The other run that was on Amazon has been sold out for a year. There will be a time when retro gaming wanes and that new retro products will no longer be manufactured so buy a case at least to have as back up.