I was watching some YouTube, trying to find some forgotten gems from retro systems. I ran into one about the Jaguar and decided to watch it.
Well, the fellow said a lot of the games were great, and I was kind of curious about that because I don't think it's controversial to say there's only a handful of decent games on the Jag, but this fellow was rating everything highly.
Later on I sat down to think about it and I realized something... after every game the fellow would say "Oh, and you can get it for about $XX.XX."
At that point the light-bulb went off and I realized this fellow is probably deriving enjoyment from collecting the Jaguar games, not playing them. To him, if he buys a game, plays it for a few minutes to make sure it works, it's probably a winner for him.
For me, who is getting Jaguar games from uhhhh a friend, I don't care about collecting them, I just want some fun stuff to play.
Anyway, I learned my lesson: I'll believe non-collectors' opinions more than collectors because they are mostly concerned with gameplay instead of how it looks on the shelf, or how rare and difficult it was to acquire.
P.S. I don't know how "hot" of a take this is, but I figure it'll probably hurt the feelings of collectors, so that's why I prefixed it.
I'd go even further - get them from people who emulatecthe games rather than people who play them on (or merely buy them for) the original hardware.
People who emulate retro games are demonstrably SOLELY interested in playing the games, without any of the collector cachet getting in the way.
Hmm, in my experience there are lots of people in the emulation community who just enjoy to get things to work. So the fun comes from building up the romsets, setup the hardware, setup the emulator, test if the games are working, dial in the config for edge cases, maybe layer on a crt-shader, package everything behind a frontend, etc.
They rarely play through an entire game and instead just test out one of the thousands of roms they showed on to their handheld for a few minutes.
Yes, i'm talking also about myself. But after 10 years in the 'hobby' this seems to be pretty common.
It took me too long to realize that was an errant "c"
I was like "dam this dude is fancy. must be French"
"Eehhhhhh..."
- Me, a data hoarder with severe executive dysfunction
"My Steam backlog wasn't enough, let's add a couple thousand more to the pile with a few romsets."
Oh shit, I've been cloned!
Well... yeah. True.
I guess, by some standards, I could be qualified as a collector - I buy games for OG hardware before playing them.
However, and I don't believe I'm the only "collector" doing this, if a game is bad, didn't age well, etc, I will definitely say so and likely would sell said game if I've no interest in playing it again.
Sure, there are collectors who don't play games at all and review based on price, if that, but I know there are also people who do it like I do.
Great point!