From left to right, we have a bootleg copy of Mega Turrican for the Genesis, the original Die Hard Trilogy, The Great Mouse Detective, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Super Mario Bros., The Last Starfighter, Galaxy Quest...
(draws a deep breath)
...the Sergeant Bilko TV series, two seasons of Adventure Time, five seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a pair of Turtle Beach headphones, which can be used with an Xbox 360 if you've got the engineering degree to figure out the connection schematic. Not shown is an air fryer, procured for ten dollars. It's how all the cool kids are cooking these days. (Just don't use it around your pet birds if you happen to have them.)
You'll probably notice a distinct lack of video games in this haul. It wasn't necessarily by design, but it's probably for the best, because I think I've got way too much crap already, and what I wanted to buy was going to add a lot of bulk to that manure pile.
Take for instance the Arcade1Up cabinets currently sold at Wal-Mart. The price of these kits has been sharply reduced from a "no way in hell" three hundred dollars to a "I don't need it, but..." seventy five. The id of my collector's brain would love to have one of these. The superego is sticking with "no way in hell," and the ego concurs. They're not well made- the spinner on the Asteroids unit is atrocious, judging from the demo unit I tried- and beyond that, I just don't have the room in this trailer for it. I'm not even sure I have room for what crap I already have, so clearance priced or not, the cabinet remains on the shelf.
I gave more serious consideration to the Playstation Classic, which had its price slashed to a little over twenty five dollars in a sale at Target. Again, it's not a great product, but this lackluster mini console gets a whole lot better when you put RetroArch on a flash drive and stick it into the system's USB port. Again, I don't need this, considering that I already own a Raspberry Pi, a Super Retro-Cade, and that AtGames Sega Genesis from a couple years back. Nevertheless, my id would have won this battle if it hadn't been for the fact that the Sierra Vista Target had already run out of stock days before I got there. I was mildly disappointed, but just as relieved that I didn't waste my space and money on a system I already bought three times before with a different shell.
There's an internet celebrity named Marie Kondo... I haven't done much research on her, but from what I can tell, she's kind of an interior decorator, and kind of a life coach. She advocates paring down your physical possessions to lighten your emotional burden, and while I'm usually suspicious of people who claim that giving away what you own is a path to spiritual enlightenment, I'm starting to wonder if I may be toeing the line between collecting and hoarding. I'm reluctant to get rid of what I already own- even the stuff I don't really need- but I certainly don't need more of it.
I have a friend who had to sell most of his own sizable collection fifteen years ago to move to California. He's now a successful game journalist, so that decision, as painful as it must have been at the time, clearly worked out for him. Nevertheless, I have to wonder if there was a fringe benefit in throwing all that ballast overboard. Now it's someone else's problem.
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