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'm gonna say there are a whole bunch of valid ways to engage with games, new and old. Go build your sources from whoever fits your use case best, if that's what you need.
I have about as many gripes with the emulation-driven modern zeitgeist as I do with the "it belongs in a museum" artifact collectors, but I don't begrudge eiter. At most I will forcefully but respectfully remind both and everybody else that neither of those assessments map in any way to how the games were perceived at the time, that nobody knew what Final Fantasy V was, the N64 bombed horribly and most of the games you think are popular now weren't then.