Lmao the original price sticker on the box for insult to injury.
5 years ago this would have been like $30. The jump in price has been insane.
Fuck playing this on original hardware then I guess. Even if I was rich I couldn't justify spending that much on a hunk of plastic. Thank god for emulation.
It just kind of sucks because retro gaming on original hardware used to be something even poor people could do. It used to be if you couldn't afford the new stuff, you'd buy the old stuff. Seems like during COVID people realized they could charge more for nostalgia and then capitalism went brrrrr
Cartridges mean nothing to me. If I want to play something old I pirate it, and phone hardware has advanced to the point where you can get used phones from a generation or two ago for not much, slap a phone controller to it, and now you have a handheld that can play anything retro, but also 3ds/wii/GameCube/some PS2 titles even/I guess Dreamcast too. It probably won't be long until phones are capable of switch emulation either.
I know that doesn't mean much to people who like physical disks and whatnot, but personally I don't see the value in collecting stuff in some kind of funko-pop gamer consumer aesthetic. Also, emulation gives you the opportunity to upscale the games you play. I just did radiant historia at 4x upscale with a ai-upscaled texture pack on my phone and it was a huge improvement.
I love emulation, but sometimes the games don't look or sound as intended (Segas stupid robot fart sound chip took them ages to figure out how to emulate properly haha). Shouldn't be too long before all emulation is flawless though, hopefully.
It does take some work fiddling with the sound or display outputs to get it more 1:1 with original, sometimes. These days they even have things like crt filters to give it the classic look (I know snes era emulation sometimes looks better with a bit of a blur to emulate tube tvs)
It's true. Bless the people who make emulators, all without profit motive. You love to see it.
The true heroes, really.