circuitface wrote:I'm with kernow.
And it belongs in a museum!
That's still my custom title at the Retrogaming Roundtable.
I get what Kernow is saying, and I really need to modernize / sort out my collection. I have something like 50 (discounting the cheap visual novel crap that I didn't want, but still got) X68000 games, and I have
still never ever played a single one. So that's bad, obviously. I've had (or had claims to) four separate X68000 series systems, too. (The only one proven working was the one I sold, well below my cost, too). After I let that passion cool off a bit I was more aware than ever that collecting can be bad.
Ideally I see myself as just something like a temporary caretaker for the stuff I have. I haven't been feeling that way so much in recent years; now I just buy stuff I'd like to play. One thing that's great about Shmups Forum is that there is an incentive to sell it back here, not for outrageous prices, and I don't have to worry so much about making a profit on eBay which will take a huge cut of any purchase price (as I recently rediscovered to great sorrow).
I certainly don't want to be the guy "taking care of" tons of random N64 games I don't like. To be sure, I can enjoy the random bad N64 or Game Boy Color game, and lots of others...but emulation scratches the itch plenty well enough. Emulation doesn't replace the experience of actually holding the box for Legacy of Darkness, plugging in that cartridge, and playing with a loose old N64 analog stick, but it will convince me right quick that I don't actually need to buy the BattleTanx games, or Road Rash 64.
I've tried to be careful with my PCB and other game purchases, recently, although I know that I still let myself get carried away a bit with "oh boy, I need X!" where I get X and promptly just put it back in a box. Still, I've been doing better on that front. Could be doing better.
The absolute bottom of collecting is either having the shelves on shelves (creepy, although it would be cool if somebody actually had a place that looked exactly like the interior of a contemporary 90s game outlet, if only in a historical or nostalgic way) or having some kind of collection where you just go "oh, duh, now I have to sell this." One DP regular got into console collecting as a way of dealing with his dad's death...he eventually pared back that collection (after being featured in his local paper, though). It would be interesting to have that kind of knowledge. On the other hand, I got pretty pissed that I was seeing, again and again, people mindlessly working towards that "complete collection" goal and being congratulated for their milestones. I was pretty young, but there were stories of young teenagers (born after c. 1990) trying to get in the swim by buying rare Atari VCS cartridge! The potential for waste and the poor investments staggered me most clearly with the complete system collectors, when time after time again I saw people who had been posting for years about getting games X, Y, and Z, and then later finding out they needed to pay their water bill, send their kids to college, go to college themselves, pay for their brain cancer, etc. I don't see how anybody could rationalize buying something that sounds awesome - every last Nintendo Entertainment System - as being a good investment, when they later find out that they only can reasonably sell it as a unit, but nobody else wants to pay anywhere near what they invested. Some of those people were essentially paying up to (or possibly over) $10K for bragging rights for less than ten years. What the hell - buy a parking space at your job instead!
Anyway, I would completely agree that I have a kind of schizophrenic approach to collecting versus playing. I just play crap on MAME most of the time, but I've got a large number of console games. Hell, I even have a new copy of Taromaru that I need to play sometime, not to mention I did something I wasn't expecting and got Twin Cobra II and Hyper Duel for that same system. Nope, Touchmaster 8000 is funner.
