Game Collecting Sucks in 2022

That's the title. No cute puns or references, I'm just dropping a truth bomb on your head right from the start. 

I went down to Tucson for my birthday last Sunday, and was aghast by the prices at the two Bookmans I visited. Three hundred and forty dollars for an Atari Lynx? Really? Can I have some of what you're smoking when you're done with it, or is there anything left? Hell, the stupid Analogue Pocket only ("only") costs $219, and that has the potential to play games for a half-dozen systems, with a crisp LCD screen that doesn't turn you into Hans Moleman when you try to make out the finer details. Three hundred and forty dollars for a damn Atari Lynx. What the absolute hell?

Worth its weight in gold, apparently.
(image from Wikipedia)

It's not just semi-obscure handhelds that are getting their prices raised through the roof and beyond the Earth's gravitational pull. The Playstation Portable, long a safe haven for penny-pinching collectors, has seen its game prices creep upward over the last two years. Before COVID, you used to be able to fish through a big 'ol container of loose PSP games, and while many of those were commons and sports titles, there were some gems hiding amongst the Maddens and Daxters and whatever the hell Beaterator is, often for five dollars or less. These days, though? Good luck, because brother are you gonna need it! I found loose copies of Gradius Collection for fifteen dollars and Puzzle Quest for five, and felt exceedingly grateful for this thin gruel. This would not have been a good haul in 2019! I'm a little disgusted with myself for calling that a haul now!

On the plus side, I also scrounged up a copy of Bust-A-Move DS, which only cost five dollars and remains one of the high points in the long-running series. Pulling back an onscreen rubber band to fire bubbles gives the game a more tactile feel than Bust-A-Move Pocket on the PSP, and the general ambiance strikes me as more faithful to early entries in the series than BAM Pocket's head-scratching Halloween motif. 

Slightly more expensive at ten dollars was the Xbox One Kinect, and while I didn't really need one of these, it's nevertheless something I wanted to try for myself. I was a fan of the original Xbox 360 Kinect, and this version is supposed to be a lot more cutting edge, recognizing players as more developed forms with a sense of depth and mass, rather than stick figures. Unfortunately, Microsoft was so desperate to ditch the Kinect after its initial failure that later Xbox One systems, including my own Xbox One S, require an adapter to work with it. So until I get that adapter and a couple of games, I won't be flailing my arms around like a Muppet who just smoked whatever the Bookmans people were enjoying before they priced that Atari Lynx.