Earthbound and Dune 03.11.15

After buying my third copy of Sega Soccer Slam I decided it was finally time to document my collection of games in the form of an excel document. I aided this with some cotton buds and alcohol to clean old cartridges and set out on a long journey through duplicate disks and tangles of wires. To save space I’ve condensed all my disk based games pre this generation to CD wallets which is a sad process, only made easier by the knowledge that they’re rendered almost unsellable after doing this, so BMXXX will always remain in my possession. While doing this I was struck by how short a lifespan a game will have, copies of NBA Live 2003 and Tour De France 2003 would have cost upward of £40 on of release and now can be found for under a pound in charity shops, its a weird balance looking at my collection, games that I bought on a whim because I wanted to see what they were about for a modest price like Gaelic Games Football 2 would have cost a much higher amount back when released and while I love that these oddities exist and in my possession its hard to make an argument for games like Americas 10 Most Wanted to be given a disk release in 2015. I listed my digital purchases as well, and theres an argument that this is a better place for the weirder titles to be released now, games like the aforementioned Sega Soccer Slam bears some similarity to the great Rocket League, my only concern as my digital library continues to expand is that it will all continue to be playable as the years go on. I know I can out my clunky first generation Playstation 2 knowing that its built like a tank and despite the amount of noise it makes usually a good clean of a disk will see all games work on it, due to licensing and other factors that safety net isn’t there with digital purchases and its something which will keep me buying disk based content where I can.

Cartridges take up even more space, but are much more rewarding to go through, I acquired a bunch of Gameboy games earlier in the month, including Pokemon Red, Silver and Gold and with a little bit of cleaning they are nice objects. Retro gaming being in fashion now means that I’ve not really picked up many cartridges in the past few years, I’ve got copies of Super Mario Kart, Super Mario World, Super Mario Allstars and Mario Kart 64 but the premium on older recognisable games is really high (especially if you put Mario in the title it seems) now with Virtual Console and ports coming to mobile devices and tablets its much more fun looking for the games which get less love, among my favourite cartridges I own are Dune 2, Body Harvest, MicroMachines, King Arthurs World, Super International Cricket and Rockmans Soccer, games which I imagine are less likely to be coming to a digital service any time soon (without emulating of course). The downside of having a bunch of Japanese titles I’ve found is that, especially in the SNES era, there is very little info on what the game is on the cartridge, so my list contains 5 records of Japanese RPG UNKNOWN, which will probably turn out to be fishing or horse racing simulators when I get round to firing them up. 

On a cleaning buzz I went through all my accessories and cables, a much less appealing task, the amount of untangling an untouched box of cables manages to do is amazing. 

I finished up by having a quick go on my new copy of Sega Soccer Slam (PS2) which looks a lot less colourful than the GameCube version, and the loading times a little longer (Nintendo where onto something with the small disk). Great game, and maybe worth owning three copies of!