What systems are practical to collect for in 2021?

[CapitanClassic]

I have never wanted to own a complete collection of any game system. Even with roms, I have been tending toward limiting them to the ones I actually used to play, are highly regarded, or are from a genre I like.

 

I find that with access to too many games, i dont actually get around to playing any of them. When I do play them, with access to to many, I will quit the game too soon to move on to some other game I haven't tried yet.

[Keatah]

Take a cue from CPUs. Look at their levels of cache. Collect each and every rom possible and save'em in main memory. Then move your favorite ones into L1 & L2 cache where you play them more often.

[Keatah]

I've managed to be a "completionist" for the TRS-80 Pocket Computer 1. It's a small system to collect for and there was something like 20-25 titles. And more type-ins. So easily doable. Not much hardware either beyond a cassette interface and printer, some overlays, and a few doodads. Same thing with books - less than about 10 were published.

 

Well.. Easy to "believe" it's a complete collection. Though I reserve the possibility something might popup that I don't have.. like more type-ins that I overlooked. It's complete and open-ended at the same time.

 

So when I tried to be a completionist for mainstream cartridge systems I spent a lot of time and money looking for the games at a price I could afford. If that isn't at odds with itself! There had to be a better way. And Emulation was it.

Edited October 19, 2021 by Keatah

[Steven Pendleton]

Complete collections are mostly pointless. Like are you really going to play all of those six trillion sports titles that are completely identical in every single way aside from the title screen? lol no, of course not. So what do those six trillion identical sports titles do? Nothing but sit there and take up space that you can use for games that you actually want to play, so you just... have them. That's it. Now I can see maybe having a complete collection for something with a super tiny library like the SuperGrafx, which has 5 games, or the Telstar Arcade, which has 4 cartridges, but other than that...

[Keatah]

I also think its rewarding to collect a certain genre or sub-genre for a chosen system or two. Believe this was mentioned earlier. And I think that's about as far as I will ever go.

 

Say if it were flight simulators or space simulators.. You may find 40 or 50 total for the PC. And once you get into actually playing them, you'll find you gravitate toward the ones that are open-ended. The ones with user-created content. User-created content is always made for games long after the core program has been abandoned by the developer. Think Doom or FlightSimulator 2010. Though Doom just got Sigil the other day.. And then there are fan-spinoffs like ZDoom and GZDoom - which all add to the experience by offering buttery smooth rendering on today's and tomorrow's hardware. If that isn't enough these spinoffs offer new ways to customize both the core program with tons of new options or lend a little extra to level creation.

 

All of it is highly collectable and practical. Especially compared to NFT. With that all you can do is sit there and say I'm rich look what I can waste money on! Whereas with your own curated collection of videogames, add-ons, tools, and levels - you can actually do something.

 

And fun because you can get a jumpstart on levels by mirroring the major repositories locally. Then pick your favs and grow it organically. All you need to do is play the stuff enough and browse the libraries. You'll soon have a set of favorites. And when tired of Doom, you move into Hexen, Heretic, Quake, and all the add-ons for those.

 

This way of virtual collecting is more than practical. It works! Easy to play things you hadn't played in years. Decades even. And perfect for that once-in-long-long-while session. Like I was just messing with Velocity's Jet Fighter II and doing a comparo against EA's F/A-18 Interceptor, noting tons of similarities between the two and seeing how one evolved into the other. Once I'm off this kick, I likely won't play them again for years. But when I come calling, they'll be there. Won't have to fight against recalcitrant hardware either!

 

So.. yes.. genre collecting and old-school content collecting can be fun! Best of all is it fits on an HDD or SSD. Go ahead and make a special enclosure and gussy it to high heaven. It's what you display. Make it look nice. Make a Sapphire housing with Diamond-tipped screwheads and machined Quartz fittings. It's the equivalent of a wall of cartridges while being about a billion times more manageable. And it's classy.

Edited October 19, 2021 by Keatah

[CapitanClassic]

The expandable games were the best. Sunk hours into DZone!, trying out the user created levels, and attempting to create a few levels myself. Doom Aliens Total Conversion being among the best mods.

 

Then there was stuff like XComUtilities that improved the UFO Defense/Xcom game, allowing you to customize loadouts for soldiers, order the SkyRanger with high value soldiers at the back, correct bugs, modify UFO designs and weapons, or even play 2-player head-to-head.

 

DLC and user generated content makes it difficult to be a certain kind of completionist.

[+jgkspsx]

9 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Complete collections are mostly pointless. Like are you really going to play all of those six trillion sports titles that are completely identical in every single way aside from the title screen? lol no, of course not.

I have played every sports game on the Game Gear and the Lynx, and as somebody not super into sports but conversant in them, I can say that more than half of them were tons of fun. Also I pretty much only play sports games on them.

The Game Gear is super heavy on baseball, which I love, and there isn’t a total stinker among the dozen or so NA and JP titles. (With one exception that I’ll get to.) There was a lot of experimentation to see what would work on the limited resolution.

 

Tennis and hockey, my other favorite sports, do not fare so well. Pete Sampras might be the best tennis game, but it isn’t perfect. With the tiny screen the angle of the court is hard to get right. The three full games try different angles and nothing works quite right. None of them are as good as regular Tennis on the Game Boy, much less Mario Tennis. The minigame on 4 in 1 is the most fun pick up and play version since it’s the only one not trying to crush your spirit.

 

Hockey only has three games, of which only NHL Hockey is good. Championship Hockey is one of the rare European exclusives and a conversion of an earlier EA NHL game. It has popped up from time to time but not at a price I was willing to pay, as it’s not great, but it’s not terrible. The Sega effort is terrible.

 

There are a lot of solid soccer games on the Game Gear but in particular Sensible Soccer and Tengen World Cup Soccer are good. The Japanese J League games are good too. With soccer there was all kinds of experimentation with perspective that makes it fun to see what a given game will be.

 

American football represents some of the system’s best sports games, between Joe Montana, NFL 95, and Madden 95. Madden 96 is buggy and had the NFL and NFLPA license stripped, so that’s one to avoid. But at the time the great football games were a huge system seller.

 

There are one each winter and summer Olympics games, and I enjoy them. Three or four boxing games; none is awful and none is exceptional.

 

For whatever reason basketball got short shrift. Maybe the resolution was just too cramped. The one sim game, NBA Action, is solid, though. And of course it has both NBA Jam games, which were one of the system’s killer apps back in the day and still among the best games on the system. And then there’s the Japanese exclusive…

 

 

There’s also a single solid anime-based sumo game:

 

 

Golf represents probably the single largest sports genre on the game gear with lots of excellent games that do all kinds of different things. A lot of Game Gears were bought by doctors and dentists for the golf simulations, I have gathered. Only one of the PGA tour games is unplayable, and that’s because it takes so long to painstakingly draw a raycasted (?) 3d scene. Ernie Els from Codemasters does it faster and better, but they have some custom chips in their giant cart. Plus there are two weird games that are wonderful: Putt and Putter, basically a minigolf puzzle game; and Vic Tokai’s Scratch Golf, which is indescribable:

 

 

There is one hybrid cart: Sports Illustrated Championship Football and Baseball. Each half is the worst representation of the game on the Game Gear. It is supposedly one of the rarest US releases but the loose cart is inexpensive and easy to come by, presumably because it is terrible.

 

Also a decent future sports game, Buster Ball. Then there are two good sports trivia games, the Sega one and Jeopardy Sports Edition. Perfect for jogging your mid-90s sports memories.

 

Almost all of these have been dirt cheap. Popeye Beach Volleyball from Technōs is the Game Gear’s most expensive sports game and one of the most expensive games, but it’s pretty fun. Pretty much just a rebranded Kunio-kun volleyball.

 

The Lynx and the Jaguar are lucky to have one sports game for each sport, though there aren’t many real duds.

The Lynx has one real golf game, one baseball game, one football game, one hockey game, one basketball (sort of) game, one tennis game, one volleyball game, one future sports game, and California Games. And TWO, count them, TWO soccer games. One of which is good. Also a great winter sports homebrew.
 

Bizarrely, the Jaguar got many (3) basketball games (including one playable prototype). Well, then again, basketball briefly became America’s favorite sport in the mid-90s. One football game and one playable prototype. Two soccer games. One future sports game. One solid hockey prototype. And that’s it.

 

So, would I collect all the sports games for the Genesis or SNES or Game Boy? No. But I do enjoy the games I have for all the systems I have them for, and even the bad ones serve a purpose of reminding you how much better the good ones are.

 

Counterpoint: almost all the Turbografx sports games are terrible and not worth owning. PC Engine had some better ones, particularly baseball.

[Zap1982]

Systems that are "practical" to collect for? My wife would say none...

 

But as you mentioned sports, I am someone too who isn't really into them. Anyway, I found on the Mega Everdrive a game called "Minnesota Fats, Pool Legend" I do like Pool and Snooker so gave it a go. Thought it was rubbish but weirdly addictive. I kept going back to it and then learnt of the Saturn version. Well....  I just had to get on eBay and buy it.. it arrived here in UK just ten days later. It's so cheesy but I just keep playing it, I have a lot of fun with it even though I think it's better than the Genesis version yet still awkward. It can't hold a candle to Virtual Pool 64 but yea, very addictive!