posted 2007/06/17 at 19:03
Although I still don't have much interest in the current generation of video games (and hardly any time at all to play them these days), I still hold a lot of interest in classic video games. I still have all of my old video game systems, and as much as I appreciate the classic game compilations that have been coming out lately, I still don't think that anything really compares to playing the original game on the original system. As much of a pain in the ass it is to go through all the old tricks to getting an old NES cartridge to play (blowing thoroughly on the connectors, inserting the cartridge so it just barely connects and the end of the cartridge opposite the connector rests against the inside wall of the system), I still think there's something, for lack of a better word, romantic about it. More than just a nostalgic trip back to my own childhood, I think these games manage to triumph over today's crop of video games in a lot of ways because the limited graphical abilities of the old systems forced developers to focus much more on gameplay than just wooing potential players with graphical geegaws.
One thing that's bothered me a lot, though, is that GameStop keeps pulling back on its used offerings. It wasn't all that long ago that I could still buy old NES games there, but these days they only stock games from the Playstation/Nintendo 64 era and beyond, and of course nothing for the Saturn or Dreamcast since the whole video game industry seems to be adamant on erasing Sega's consoles from our collective memory for some unknown reason. It's not that I don't understand that retailers have a limited amount of space to stock merchandise and that these older games just don't make as much money for these retailers as the newer crop of games does, but at the same time there is a definite market here, and it's just not being met by any major national retailer right now.
My options for buying older games keep getting diminished. There was a locally-owned video game store in Bowling Green called 2Play that used to stock all kinds of old games and systems (even for the Sega Master System), but they went out of business last year. Toledo's never been much of a garage sale market, and I don't know of any classic video game groups in the area that I might get a hold of. It's getting to the point where, once I have the money to do so, I may start hitting up eBay in a huge way here just to try to get some of those ultra-rare titles that I've been itching to own (and which I know won't be coming out on any of the retro services on the current generation of console systems).
Nothing romantic about old cartridges when you have one of these things to plug into your computer:
http://www.retrousb.com/index.php?productID=115
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon