Great post that pretty much sums my state of mind of the moment.
Thanks Arkhan.
But I'd like to add : remember what I said when Turbokon first sold his Magical Chase repros ?
Edit : Remember this ?
http://www.pcenginefx.com/forums/index.php?topic=20841.msg457196#msg457196
Ok Turbokon. So you just steal someone else's work and then you sell fake games 45$. Do you have the licence for that or are you just gonna be one of those "PCE memories" scumbags ?
Yeah I mean, we've sure as hell come full circle on that and it is extremely disappointing to see greed overtake common sense.
I never really enjoyed the 45$ price tag, in all honesty. It's too high. I know the cost of the parts is nowhere near that.
The idea was to get cheap copies of rare games into the hands of humans so they could have physical copies to play.
At the time, it made sense. Everdrives were harder to come by and always out of stock. The other flash carts were pieces of shit.
GameOfYou stopped making his sweet little 30$ one (which by the way, for f*cks sake, GameOfYou's reprogrammable via USB flashcartridge is cheaper than a bootleg of ONE game. What.)
but, they're fake. They will always be fake. They don't hold any inherent value/story/meaning that makes them worth stacking on a shelf.
Their value is whatever the parts cost. There's nothing special about them. Buy an everdrive. It's the same.
Everdrive availability for around 80$ has rendered these things utterly pointless for anything other than some moronic desire to have shit on a shelf.
Like Zeta said, gamers collect really stupid shit that is so stupid it makes collectors in other hobbies go "what. the. f*ck.?"
My grandparents taped movies on HBO in the 80s. They have a whole mess of VHS on a shelf, labeled with what movies are on the VHS.
I can assure you, nobody is going to walk in there one day and go HOLY SHIT.
STEEL MAGNOLIAS ON A KODAK VHS!? SWEET.
I have a bin of cassette tapes. My early 90s mixtapes with scribbly labels mean literally nothing. My copies of CDs that I put onto a cassette? Worthless.
This crap is pretty much the same
It's meaningless copies made because we can't afford real ones.
Except now, the f*cking meaningless copies are approaching the same level of "what the f*ck, I am not paying that for a game".
If it's not an original, it's not special. It's crap.
Everything is crap.
We're all crap.