Or he's trying to drive the price up for resell.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
132 points (96.5% liked)
RetroGaming
21953 readers
218 users here now
Vintage gaming community.
Rules:
- Be kind.
- No spam or soliciting for money.
- No racism or other bigotry allowed.
- Obviously nothing illegal.
If you see these please report them.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Had a buddy with an impressive vinyl collection and an audiophile setup. Awful taste in music, just dogshit.
To quote Jules Winfield: "Example?" I just wanna know what he was listening too 😆
Nah, music is subjective. I'm sure your music is dogshit to him as well.
Music is completely objective. If I like it than it's good, if you don't agree then you are wrong
But if it's medieval bee keepers then it is objectively great.
Agree
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.
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.
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.
People who emulate retro games are demonstrably SOLELY interested in playing the games
"Eehhhhhh..."
- Me, a data hoarder with severe executive dysfunction
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.
"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!
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.
Great point!
I think more general advise would be to understand the perspective you receiving and how it relates to yours.
Collectors are great for finding weird and evil things. Like "this cartridge had some special chip that makes it different from every other game on the system" and I think "oooh I kinda wanna try emulating that". Or "this developer made this weird bad game a few years before they found success with their breakout hit series" which can be interesting to check out.
Also a lot of "gamer" reviewers have their own issues. Fromsoft is a great example- they purposely neglect areas of their games that they don't want to focus on, and fans have interpreted their business priorities as genius design decisions that every game should copy. No more minimaps, no tutorials or onboarding systems, no explicit story. There are Nintendo fans who eat up every single thing they do and love to pay a premium for it- somewhat like Apple people.
Not to say those perspectives are "wrong" or shouldn't exist, but it's usually good to try to look at different perspectives.
He's creating a market that will boost the value of the assets he already owns...
My recommendation is snes drunk. While it has a lot of snes reviews, there are reviews for a lot of diferent systems.
No sponsors, no frills, just the game and a review of how fun it is without rose tinted glasses.
He does reviews of rom patches and fan translations of Japan only titles, too.
Hot take part 2: Form your own opinion and play a game without review!
grinds teeth remembering renting "Superman" on the NES
Superman 64 has entered the ~~chat~~ fog
If you want to save your friends, solve my maze!
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.
I like to watch Big Ole Words on YouTube. He's a collector, and a player. He plays every game like he's a kid and just got it for Christmas, and it's the only new game he has. So, he tries really hard to find the fun in it. He has way, way more patience than I do, but he won't tell you a game is good when it's not. At least not from what I've seen.
I especially like the "games no one played" series of videos. I get to see exactly why no one played those games. 😄
Cool! I have some watchin' to do.
most collectors do both. we collect the games and keep them in decent condition and then play the roms endlessly because we don't want to damage the physical copy.
collecting to me just means I love something so much that I wanted to make sure I have it to hold because I love it and have played hundreds of times.
some people do collect for the fun of the hunt or the thrill of owning something special. but many of us collect because we have loved the games for a very long time.
just because I have a new-in-box game under glass doesn't mean I haven't poured tons of hours into it.
Already do. I don't even use professional review sources. I just ask what people who already like the same shit I like what they think about thing I am interested in.
Also: The best game I ever played on the Jaguar was the Aliens game. And that game still sucked ass lol to be fair, I played it on an actual Jaguar and what made it suck the most were the controls. With emulation, that might not be the biggest problem.