Once More into the Droid

Okay, maybe that's not as clever as Parish's "Farewell, My Conker Buyin'," but hey, you'll have to work with what I give you. Anyway, after months of slumming with the Playstation TV to get my retro gaming fix, I've decided to take another chance with an Android device. I'm not taking chances this time, though... instead of some cheapie cheap stick from and made with parts unknown, I'm getting the favorably rated, extensively tested Xiaomi Mi Box. The videos I've seen suggest that it's powerful enough to handle both emulation and Android exclusives, which is pretty much all I demand from it. The wealth of television apps on the Mi Box is the icing on an already tasty cake.

I'm glad Jeremy mentioning the rising price of classic game collecting, because it's a subject I wanted to tackle here on the blog. I wanted to plot out a line graph detailing the price of software for a typical system over a twenty-five year period, but I would need concrete data to validate it, and that information isn't easy to come by. Prices vary wildly depending on the seller, and there's not a common consensus about how much a particular game should cost. You might be able to get a ballpark figure from talking to a dozen retailers, but it'd be a pretty wide ballpark. Now try getting that same figure from five years ago, or ten, or twenty. It's a little slice of impossible!

One thing I can confidently say is that the time to purchase games for a system you enjoy is a few years after its successor is launched, or (in the case of non-starters like the Saturn or Vita) a year after its manufacturer abandons it. In other words, if you like the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, the time to start your collection for those systems is NOW NOW NOW. Don't wait. Scour your local pawn shops, thrift shops, yard sales, and Craigslistings for the games you want, because they're going to dry up in a few more years. 

Take it from someone who's been collecting since the 1990s... you want to grab this stuff while everyone else is eager to move on to the next big thing. When they get nostalgic for the games they left behind- and they always do- you'll already have them.