I was watching some YouTube, trying to find some forgotten gems from retro systems. I ran into one about the Jaguar and decided to watch it.
Well, the fellow said a lot of the games were great, and I was kind of curious about that because I don't think it's controversial to say there's only a handful of decent games on the Jag, but this fellow was rating everything highly.
Later on I sat down to think about it and I realized something... after every game the fellow would say "Oh, and you can get it for about $XX.XX."
At that point the light-bulb went off and I realized this fellow is probably deriving enjoyment from collecting the Jaguar games, not playing them. To him, if he buys a game, plays it for a few minutes to make sure it works, it's probably a winner for him.
For me, who is getting Jaguar games from uhhhh a friend, I don't care about collecting them, I just want some fun stuff to play.
Anyway, I learned my lesson: I'll believe non-collectors' opinions more than collectors because they are mostly concerned with gameplay instead of how it looks on the shelf, or how rare and difficult it was to acquire.
P.S. I don't know how "hot" of a take this is, but I figure it'll probably hurt the feelings of collectors, so that's why I prefixed it.
I'd go even further - get them from people who emulatecthe games rather than people who play them on (or merely buy them for) the original hardware.
People who emulate retro games are demonstrably SOLELY interested in playing the games, without any of the collector cachet getting in the way.
Hmm, in my experience there are lots of people in the emulation community who just enjoy to get things to work. So the fun comes from building up the romsets, setup the hardware, setup the emulator, test if the games are working, dial in the config for edge cases, maybe layer on a crt-shader, package everything behind a frontend, etc.
They rarely play through an entire game and instead just test out one of the thousands of roms they showed on to their handheld for a few minutes.
Yes, i'm talking also about myself. But after 10 years in the 'hobby' this seems to be pretty common.
"Eehhhhhh..."
- Me, a data hoarder with severe executive dysfunction
"My Steam backlog wasn't enough, let's add a couple thousand more to the pile with a few romsets."
Oh shit, I've been cloned!
I'm just waiting for a nice breakdown of society that somehow happens with working electricity and no danger or difficulty obtaining food, and then I'm set.
Well... yeah. True.
It took me too long to realize that was an errant "c"
I was like "dam this dude is fancy. must be French"
I guess, by some standards, I could be qualified as a collector - I buy games for OG hardware before playing them.
However, and I don't believe I'm the only "collector" doing this, if a game is bad, didn't age well, etc, I will definitely say so and likely would sell said game if I've no interest in playing it again.
Sure, there are collectors who don't play games at all and review based on price, if that, but I know there are also people who do it like I do.
It sucks, really. I prefer playing on original hardware but the collectors market has made that nearly impossible. I'd love to own all my favorite SNES games from my childhood but that is going to cost me around $1200 just for a few titles. That's almost my mortgage payment for video games.
This is why emulation is such a godsend. It gives enthusiasts access to the game without having to navigate around shitbirds asking $400 for a trash repro copy of Chrono Trigger.
I'm just the opposite.
I still own my SNES and all of its games from back in the day (and an NES, an original XBox and a PSX with their games), and they're all in boxes in my garage. Pretty much as soon as emulation became viable, that became my preferred way to play, since I don't have screw with wires and connections and consoles and cartridges or discs and all the rest of that clutter. I just click on an icon, select a game from a list, and away I go.
I use Flashcards wherever I can. Maybe that's something for you to look into.
Great point!