What kind of game collection do I have?

I currently have a lot of games. I would definitely call myself a game collector. But what is my collection like?




I'm not the sort of collector who needs every item to be perfect, in mint-condition and never used.... my collection is for the purpose of me having access to cool games that I want to be able to play.

There are some collectors who feel the need to collect every single game for a particular console, or every single game made by a particular company. That's not quite what I collect, though - my goal is to collect every game that I personally have some kind of an interest in.

My interest could manifest in a variety of ways:

It could be a personal interest - I'd obviously want a game that is part of a beloved series that is near and dear to me, such as Zelda. Often I find myself wanting to collect every single game that is part of series I like, even if I know the series contains some bad ones. Castlevania is a good example of this.

Haunted Castle (for PlayStation 2) is not very good.

 But, it's a Castlevania game, so I needed to get it!

I could be interested for more cultural reasons - maybe I'd want a game that has some kind of widely-held opinion among the online gaming public, such as the infamously poorly-regarded Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, or a game that was the basis for an internet meme, such as Zero Wing.

 The infamously bad English translation of Zero Wing spawned countless Internet memes.

The game itself is pretty cool too.

It could have some kind of historical significance that grabs my interest - such as Final Fantasy VII, a game known for singlehandedly popularising the RPG genre outside of Japan.

It could have some kind of interesting technological quirk that I just find cool, like games that are compatible with the SNES Mouse, such as the SNES version of Lemmings Tribes, or even games that have totally unique features, like Space Invaders for the Game Boy, which contains a full SNES version in its data that will run if used with the Super Game Boy.

 There's a proper SNES game hiding in this Game Boy Cartridge! How peculiar!

It could be a game that will be gone soon - I have downloaded a few games from the 3DS eShop because there have been announcements that they would be removed from the service - the Virtual Console version of Tetris is one such example.

There's also times when other games make references to older games, and I want to see the original out of curiosity - Crossover games like Smash Bros are good examples of products that make references to smaller, obscure games all the time. I probably would not have heard of games like Kurukuru Kururin or Chibi-Robo if it were not for Super Smash Bros Brawl.

Brawl had many interesting trophies depicting other interesting games. Helirin here comes from a GBA game called Kuru Kuru Kururin!

And Chibi here is from a remarkably unique GameCube game, Chibi-Robo!

They looked unique and interesting, so I wanted to add these games to my collection.





 


I could  also want a game simply because I had seen somebody else play it, and it looked cool enough that I wanted to play it too. This happened with Ribbit King, a game I saw for the first time on the Game Grumps YouTube channel.

 Thanks, Grumps, for showing me a cool game!

Whatever the reason, the games I choose to get have SOME kind of property or value that makes me want to own it and play it myself. I don't really collect for the sake of having a pristine, complete set of items that can never be touched. ...I like to get my hands dirty with all of my games. :D


So what's my collection right as of today?

I've got a list of stuff on this page:
http://benjymlewis.blogspot.com/p/my-collection.html

I generally collect PAL games because I live in the United Kingdom, so the PAL ones are what's all around me. However, for older machines, anything pre-PlayStation 2, PAL games run at 50hz in order to fit the European standard of television signals. This is a problem since the majority of games were developed to run at 60hz, meaning that many old PAL games run slower than their NTSC counterpart. This is really annoying.

Some game designers were aware of this. Some games have the character movement speed increased for the PAL version in order to compensate, but it's still not the same thing as having the game run in its original state.
Sometimes I might collect the NTSC version of an old game I have a particular fondness for, just so I can finally play it at full speed for once.

There's also anothr reason to get the same games from multiple regions: different versions of games sometimes get significant localisation changes. Getting versions of a game from different regions can be worthwhile if I want to see what the original, unmodified versions were like.

Anyway. That's my philosophy behind my game collection.