Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

 Introduction

Rejoice fellow gamers! For Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (MGS4) will be released from its PlayStation 3 prison! Yes, with the announcement of the Metal Gear Solid Legacy Collection Vol. 2 bringing MGS4 to current consoles, the game will no longer be exclusive to the PS3. Now everyone will get a chance to play it and realize it's just not that good. Yeah, sorry. I mean, don’t get me wrong, preserving old games regardless of their original quality is always a good thing, and I will buy the collection myself as a huge fan of the Metal Gear Solid Series, but MGS4 is just not a great game. At least, that was how I remembered MGS4 being the first time I played it before the pandemic, and I wanted to know if I would still hold that opinion if I revisited it. So, I picked it off my shelf and played through it again, and I would like to share my thoughts. 

What’s the Game About?

“War has changed.” These are the lines that open MGS4 as told by our main character, Solid Snake, as arrives in the “Middle East.” He goes on to explain that in the years since the last game in the timeline, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, much of the world has done away with their standing armies. Instead, they pay private military corporations (PMCs), armies for hire, to do their fighting for them. They fight in developing nations across Asia, Africa, and South America as a battleground, and are used by everyone employing anyone and everyone. Rebelling ethnic minorities have hired smaller PMCs while bigger ones are being hired by the brutal dictatorships they seek to overthrow. In these armies are people from across the globe who are fighting in these conflicts that only care about getting a paycheck.

The destruction of the developing world through cyclical battles from corporations and large monetary interests has become so prolific that the world economy has now become based on war. In the same way that AI is now what props up a decent chunk of the economy, so too do these PMCs. Also like AI, the war economy seems to have invaded every other sector of life. In the opening of MGS4, we see live action TV shows in this world; Cooking shows, exercise programs, talk shows, movies, advertising, and yes, video games, are all constructed around the military with the goal of trying to funnel people into jobs that create weapons for war or join these corporate armies. 

The cyclical nature of this war for profit is that there are more refugees and orphans that will be funnelled back into the war economy. If an American PMC orphaned a child in Iraq, then he will resent that company and may take up arms with another PMC to avenge his family. A child in Germany purchases a video game or watches Top Gun Maverick about killing “the enemy”? He will be convinced that war is fun and exciting enough to join a PMC in the developing world for the money, healthcare benefits, and coolness factor. The irony is that all these Private Military Corporations are all owned by 5 major parent companies, which themselves are owned by one single corporation. A monopoly has been made on death and destruction. 

Snake actor, David Hayter, in an in-universe Interview

The sci-fi element of this world is that each soldier’s blood is artificially replaced with nanomachines. These ID mark soldiers so their weapons can only be used by those who have had their PMC specifically purchase their weapons for them. Again, this is a way of fueling the war economy through proprietary equipment. These nanomachines regulate a soldier’s emotions to prevent PTSD, panic, depression, and repress any and all sexual urges to prevent sex crimes. These also track the soldier’s movements, register all combatants, etc. The point is that war has become increasingly efficient. Time is money. But again, the irony is that these machines and AI that keep track of the soldiers fighting each other are all controlled by the exact same AI system. 

In gameplay, we see this play out well in the first two chapters. you must sneak across the battlezone while two sides try to kill each other in this conflict without getting killed yourself. Bullets and bombs are going off right next to you with great sound design making it feel visceral and scary. NPCs are fighting each other with their own scripts, making it feel like an active battle that can kill you for being caught in it. And in chapter 2, you see innocent civilians running away from automated drones. Homes have well-detailed interiors to give you the sense of the people displaced from these areas when those homes collapse under the weight of bombing and drone warfare. And when enemies are killed, they drop their locked weapons that, while you can’t use them, you can collect and sell them for cash to buy your own ammo and weapons. So, even death in the war economy is monetized, and it's done so in gameplay. When I was playing, trying to avoid bullets whizzing past me, hearing a tank advertise the PMC that owned it with a chipper corporate female voice, before entering a camp of people injured and wailing in pain, I was sold on the themes of the early chapters of MGS4. It sucks and is miserable in all the right ways. The war economy is told partially through gameplay and your own experience of it, so the horrors of capitalism’s ties to war as profit gone to the extreme come through. And many people will say that it’s not even that far off. In the fervor of the Iraq war, American television was in full support of the war, many sitcoms had terrorist plotlines, the U.S. military made deals with movies to promote the military, American paramilitary corporation Black Water made a video game for the Xbox 360, and we’ve all agreed that those wars were for oil and profit rather than whatever the U.S. said it was supposed to be. 

During the gameplay of the first two chapters, I do feel MGS4 is untouchable. The anxieties and horrors of the 2000s American aggression and war for profit gone to the extreme are convincing, heavy, and connect with me through the gameplay. It’s good satire that makes the interesting depiction of the capitalist systems gone to their endpoint as much as RoboCop or Judge Dredd. However, notice how I said earlier that this is true for the first two chapters. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t keep up the war economy theme and gameplay motifs for the entire game,  because MGS4 is the final episode in the Metal Gear Solid Saga. It’s the thrilling conclusion to the entire series and the last one in the chronology. It’s the Star Wars Episode 9 of video games, and I mean that derogatorily.

So what is Metal Gear Solid?

Because MGS4 is a conclusion to the entire video game franchise, I’ll briefly explain what the franchise actually is. This will help me talk about why the game fails not just as a conclusion but also disappoints me as a fan of the series. 

Metal Gear Solid starts with its auteur game director Hideo Kojima. Hideo Kojima was born in the 1960s to a WW2 veteran father who passed away when he was young, but during his youth he also got a good dose of U.S. soft imperial power so he got a lot of exposure to Hollywood action movies while he was growing up. By the 1980s, Hideo Kojima began working on Metal Gear, a video game that broke new ground by focusing on avoiding enemies in stealth rather than attacking them. This pretty much created the entire stealth genre and made a huge impact in the west with Metal Gear Solid in 1998. 

Part of that huge impact was a late 90’s Japanese culture boom in America, but Metal Gear Solid broke new grounds in other ways. Firstly, it was one of the first games to have lengthy voice acting, so much so that all the games voice actors are credited under pseudonyms as it was unclear if the SAG would cover video games. But more importantly, the Metal Gear Solid games were some of the first games that were about something. 

Post-war nationalism, the pointlessness of armed conflict, the fallacy of nuclear deterrence theory, social media scandals 15 years before they started happening, post-modern twistings of hype and audience expectations, passivity vs activity, the question of free will, the use of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, war for profit, projecting shame onto your fetishes, etc. All of these are topics discussed in Metal Gear Solid and combined with the superhero/comic book antics of scenes that play like action figures hitting each other, the dumbest character names and quirks, and a little too much cleavage. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, has a genuinely fascinating point to make about the farce of nuclear deterrence, but the villain who wants to turn the cold war into a hot one is named Hot Coldman. Scientists still can’t decide whether Metal Gear Solid is really smart or really stupid, and jumping between those readings is part of the fun. But MGS4 decides the answer is stupid after the midpoint of the game. 

Wait, so Why is Snake in the “Middle East”?

As we learned in MGS2, back in the 1970s, a secret society called The Patriots began to create a global conspiracy to control politics and economics, but by the late 1990s the main members began to die out. So, they had created an AI system to carry out their schemes and plans. This grew from controlling economics and politics to controlling the internet and censoring information. Now, it has expanded further to the AI system that controls the soldiers of the world and their weapons. 

Snake is in the “Middle East” to kill a guy named Liquid Ocelot. Don’t worry about it. Anyways, Liquid plans to take control over the AI system that regulates the soldiers of the world and their weapons. Despite it being deemed impossible, he has discovered a hole in the AI system. Concerned for what can be done with one psycho controlling the AI that controls the world’s armed forces, the United Nations asks Snake to travel to Liquid’s last known location and assassinate him. What Liquid actually plans to do once he has control of the world’s armed forces will depend on who’s speaking. Which brings us to the first major problem of MGS4. The story is told so poorly. 

How is the Story Told?

The Metal Gear Solid games have always had lengthy cutscenes, and MGS4 is the most extreme of this. The cutscene(s) between defeating the final boss and when the credits roll are around an hour and fifteen minutes. That’s insane. And truthfully, you spend a lot of time without your hand on the controller overall. Cutscenes can last up to twenty-five minutes apiece throughout the game. What’s worse is that if you choose to play multiple chapters a day, which I wouldn’t recommend, you get the ending cutscene of that chapter back-to-back with the briefing of the next chapter. This means you get 45-50 minutes of cutscenes. But once you get into a chapter, you’re not exactly spending a lot of time playing the video game. The first 2 chapters have lengthy gameplay sections, especially on harder difficulties, which I recommend, but by the end of the game, there’s maybe 40 minutes of gameplay compared to the hour-plus of cutscenes. This crosses the line.

Because look, the Metal Gear Solid series has always had lengthy cutscenes and frankly. I’ve never minded them generally. Usually, because the characters are talking about something interesting or the scenes are choreographed to be fun, interesting, or just fucking cool. I mean, who could forget the scene in MGS2 where Solidus Snake stands on top of a jet to aura farm, or Gray Fox’s violent introduction in MGS1? The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has a 17-minute cutscene where she explains how she got disillusioned by the U.S. government enough to betray them, and I don’t care about the cutscene length because the cutscene content is interesting. Plus, you get a great amount of time playing the game in those games. 

But MGS4 spends large amounts of time doing slideshows to attempt to explain plot points, like what Liquid wants to do once he gets control of the world’s armies. And it’s boring! Having your story told in a brown and black slide show is the most flat way you could tell a story. Plus the game repeats the explanation through multiple different characters saying it differently with that character’s level of information. It makes the actual plot of the game muddled if it repeats itself so much. That is to say, the game reiterates itself. I mean, the game’s explanations have multiple recurrences. Meaning that there are echoes of the plot points. And so on to infinity. It just makes me confused about what it is we’re talking about when multiple characters repeat similar things in different ways. Especially because I don’t think stuff like the war economy or the AI systems that control it are that hard to explain, they may not even be that far off from real life. And through samey brown slide shows of characters flatly monologuing, it's hard to get invested.  

A screenshot of one of the many slide show cutscenes

When there’s not slideshows confusing what should be easy explanations, we spend some time with some characters that suck so bad. I’m not sure why Naomi Hunter is really in the plot at all, but to die so a man can cry over her like he did to female characters in previous games, but without the lengthy development needed to make those moments work before. We also spend an agonizing amount of time with the returning gag character, Johnny, a guy whose deal is that he has diarrhea. We spend so much time with Johnny, seeing him have a romantic subplot that is so fucking brutal in how awkward and unbelievable it is. And all to make a reference to something that happened in a previous game. 

Wait, What Did You Mean When You Said This Game was Like Star Wars IX?

MGS4 was billed as the conclusion to the Metal Gear Solid franchise. However, instead of concluding the themes of Metal Gear Solid, the game chooses to conclude its characters. Just like how Star Wars started as an allegory for the Vietnam War, and the prequels, for however bad they are, were about democracy backsliding into authoritarianism. Then the series had a concluding trilogy about guys building bigger death stars with a returning villain, bringing back elderly characters, and the entire commentary track of the final film is littered with the director saying “we wanted to reference something from the original films” or “we wanted to take this back to what people remember.” That’s what Metal Gear Solid 4 is. Not trying to make a conclusion on the statements that the entire franchise was getting at, but reminding you of old shit. 

The setting of MGS1 revisited in MGS4

The bosses are named emotions, like the bosses of MGS3, combined with the same animals used for the bosses of MGS1. For example, Crying Wolf is a combination of the Sorrow from 3 and Sniper Wolf from 1 and she uses the weapon from a boss in 2. Most characters from previous games show up or are referenced, and in fact there’s only 1 new character with speaking lines. Characters repeat old lines and catchphrases ad nauseum. One character gets injured in the exact same way and manner as she did in a previous game. Another dies in the same spot where an old character died because it's a reference. A character returns as a ghost and does his entire schtick about reading the players memory by reading the console’s memory card and commenting on the games they’ve played. But because this game is on a console without a memory card he goes “Argh! I can’t read your memory! Your skills have improved… or rather your hardware has” in such a smug fashion you just kind of want to shut the game off. The entire fourth chapter of the game takes place in the setting of the first game. The last area of the game has a Mount Rushmore of the franchise’s main characters. There’s even a fucking dedicated flashback button to show you images of scenes from old games when they get referenced. It makes for a thoroughly uncompelling story and one that takes up most of the run time of the game. Plots that are just references and repeating old shit are so thoroughly hollow. Why should I give a shit that Petrovitch Madnar is name dropped when the actual plot and characters that take up the screen time is so fucking brutal in both how its told and the actual content of it. 

An enlarged example of the Flashback button prompt, of which will appear 400 times

Even if the war economy theme is genuinely good, it is lost by the midpoint of chapter 3. Because in Chapter 3, the game answers the question of “Who are the Patriots? Who are the original members of the illuminati that enslaved the planet through AI?” with a reference to an old game. 

So Who Are the Patriots?

A returning character from an old game tells us in Chapter 3 that the Patriots are the surviving cast and comic relief of Metal Gear Solid 3. That’s right. The amateurish doctor who loves Godzilla, the Russian cowboy who meows like a cat, the offensively British guy who says shit like “James Bond is the biggest thing to come out of England since the Mayflower,” the world’s greatest soldier who will try to eat one of every animal, and a normal technician somehow discovered human cloning, AI powered thought control, the ability to enact global conspiracies, and enslaved the human race. It’s an stupid answer to a stupid question. The question of who are the Patriots is a mystery you weren’t really supposed to know the answer to because it was such a big question. You’re supposed to enjoy the reveal that there's a secret Illuminati in its relation to MGS2’s theme. Enjoying the subtext rather than the text. Answering the question is just meant to satiate people who took the game too literally. Although, I’m not sure who actually enjoys such a lazy twist.

You can tell the twist is poorly thought out because MGS4 is the thrilling finale of Metal Gear Solid, but we in the future know, that Hideo Kojima directed two more Metal Gear games after it. Those two games, Peace Walker and The Phantom Pain, spend a fair bit of time trying to explain how those fun and likeable characters from MGS3 became the Illuminati and practically the series villains. In fairness, I do think I appreciate that further explanation and can enjoy it, but as for the twist as it stands by the end of MGS4, it’s nonsense. You need to play two more games to come to terms with and even enjoy the twist.  Hard not to call a thrilling conclusion an abject failure if you need to make two more games to explain said thrilling conclusion. But that’s what happens when fan service overtakes good writing. 

The original tease of the Patriots in MGS2

Aren’t You A Fan? Are You Serviced?

I’ve already mentioned that the game is filled with references and “remember this?” which I am not a particular fan of. What I’m also not a fan of is the way the game treats women. The women of MGS4 are pretty objectified, rarely do they ever get anything good to do, and their plots/arcs often revolve around men in some terribly awkward way. The biggest offenders are the bosses, the Beauty and the Beast Unit. So-called because they’re killers but women. After each fight (Most of them not great), you get to see the women outside of their armor in tight latex suits covered in some kind of goo as they try to hug the main character. I’m sure this gets explained somewhere, but I could not for the life of me remember why they do this. And then you get a five-minute talk about how fucked up their backstory is once you kill them. It’s really bizarre, and I spent most of the time cringing as I recalled the tweet that went “[character] after an MGS4 Boss gives Snake a lapdance and dies: ‘Snake, that was Angry Armadillo! She was forced to eat cement as a child.’” It’s just such a bizarre juxtaposition to have this clearly weird and horny fan service going on and trying to be like “well her family was killed as a kid so don’t you feel bad?” Like, no, not really. I just feel bewildered. It’s a shame because I like a lot of the female characters of the franchise, but all except maybe Mei Ling are just not good here. 

Not that anyone gets a lot of good stuff to do, really, but there is stuff in MGS4 I like as a fan. I like Snake and his best friend’s interactions, I like the stuff with Snake and Raiden, and pretty much every time the main villain, Liquid, is on screen, I’m hooting and hollering. In every Metal Gear game, you fight a giant mech, and you finally get to pilot one here. Which is a lot of fun in a sort of action figures hitting each other sort of way. And the speech in the epilogue between Big Boss and Solid Snake genuinely makes me emotional. Seeing the setting of MGS1 fall into disrepair did manage to convince me on a theme of growing old in a changing world that some of the game is going for. When Snake meets his long-lost mother, and she gets on her motorcycle and says her line from the MGS3, “I only fall off my bike when I fall in love, or I fall dead,” I am eating that fucking shit up. It’s just that those moments aren’t the majority of the game. The majority is explanation after explanation of the same thing, and ole Johnny Diarrhea.

You Sure Haven’t Talked a Whole Lot About the Gameplay, Huh?

Wow, look who’s Mr. Observant, it’s almost like there isn’t a whole lot of gameplay here. Like I said earlier, most of the game’s run time is spent doing uninteresting explanations in slide show cutscenes, but when your hands are on the controller, the game is fun in the first two chapters. The problem is that the control scheme for MGS4 is more in line with the 3rd person cover shooters of the day, like Gears of War or Uncharted. So I guess they’re easier to play than the previous awkward controls of Metal Gear Solid 1, 2, and 3, but the controls make it easier to just shoot your way through a set piece rather than use stealth. Moreover, half of chapter 3 and all of chapters 4 and 5 are designed for you to just shoot evil soldiers and drones rather than be engaged with the high-tension gameplay of sneaking past them that the series is known for. 

Look, I get it. People would rather be shooting a guy than waiting for him to scratch his ass so you can crawl awkwardly behind him, but the action gameplay of MGS4 is so boring. Because you’ve played it before, man. If you’ve played Gears of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, hell, even Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, or Resident Evil 4, you’ve played 3rd person action games with more interesting stuff going on than MGS4. There’s not a single set piece in it, besides the giant robot fight, that’s fun or interesting outside of the first two chapters. It's fun and terrifying to sneak around war zones as horrible crimes of war and capitalism surround you, but that ends as war zones are not the setting for chapters 3 and beyond. You then get a sequence where you tail someone in Europe, shoot at drones, walk through an area filled with drones to shoot at, and rinse and repeat till the game ends.

Conclusion

I don’t know if I can recommend Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It has some stuff in it I like as a fan of the series, and some stuff that I genuinely think is great outside of that reverence I have for the franchise. You just need to wade through a whole lot of bullshit to get there. From a lackluster second half gameplay-wise, lengthy cutscenes with characters giving boring explanations to simple concepts, an overindulgence in references, the worst kind of fan service, and a real dumb twist, it’s hard to call MGS4 anything other than a failure and a trainwreck. An indulgent train wreck, sure. I don’t know if we’ll ever see a game billed as the finale to a long-running franchise with this much fan service quite like MGS4 again. Which makes it worth experiencing to some extent, I guess. But I just don’t know how much enjoyment you’d get after all is said and done. Besides, Liquid saying “Brother!” that rocks every time. 

On Game Collecting

 Introduction

Have you ever looked at the paper in your wallet and thought to yourself, god what if this was plastic on a shelf? Well, wonder no longer! You can achieve this dream yourself by becoming a video game collector. I know, I know. You’re thinking to yourself,  “I don’t need to collect video games, I’m not mentally ill,” but trust me, there is a lot of fun and purpose in collecting video games. Even though I’ve written for this blog quite a bit, I’ve never actually talked about the collection, how I collect, my collection goals, and the crap that’s in it. So why not do some of that now? After all, it's not like the cashier at the local Stop and Shop will want to hear me talk about how they built the Xbox 360 wrong for that much longer. This is my hobby, and I would like to put into words how my game collection journey has been not only throughout my life but especially in the past few years. Additionally, I’d like to give some tricks of the trade for collecting games. Maybe it’ll even help you too if you want to become a game collector. 

From Humble Beginnings

I started liking video games, good video games, and old video games, pretty young. It probably started around the fourth grade with Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. It was my first “old” game that I played all the way to the end on the Wii virtual console and I loved it. Over the few years that followed I asked my parents to get me a Nintendo 64 and a Nintendo Gamecube. The reason being is that I watched a lot of YouTubers back in the day, who have since all been cancelled for being perverts, but they talked a lot about their love for older games and it inspired me. Soon enough I got a Nintendo 64 and a Gamecube and got games I couldn’t play anywhere else like Banjo-Kazooie, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door, Luigi’s Mansion, etc. I also went rummaging around the homes of my grandparents and was able to find a yellowed but still completely working Super Nintendo, some games, and a Gameboy Advance. 

The idea of selling the games I owned for some cash to get more games was never really a thing I did. For a lot of kids and adults it was and is a way of life, but I was a stupid kid. All of what I've heard online is that any money you would have gotten from GameStop would be pennies and even if that wasn’t true, I didn’t finish a lot of games as a kid so I would feel like I would want to go back to these games. Hence why I never sold them. (I’ve gone back and finished most of my childhood games by the way). That said, I never really kept the games in anything but a bin, because I didn’t have the space. All my cartridge games were put in an old lunch box and the disc games in a disc binder. Now, if I could go back and kill younger me for throwing out all the manuals and game cases knowing what I have now become, I would. But I really did not have the space to hold tons of game cases unless I put them in a big bin in my basement. 

Speaking of basement, my basement was unfinished until 2020. During the COVID pandemic, I hated that there was an unfinished part of my house with old carpet so I decided to clean it and redo a lot of it. While I hadn’t intended it for it to be anything but clean, my family gave me money to finish the space and one of the things I put in there was a shelf for the game collection. Now, 5 years later, I have spent some of my money from working on these games and have a pretty decent collection. But how did I get all these games?

On Finding Games

I spent money. But there are good ways to go about game collecting to fill out your collection in three general categories, besides the simple having them as a kid or buying them when they come out. These categories are dumpster diving, the dedicated game store, and Ebay.

The first is dumpster diving. Thrift stores, flea markets, yard sales, even the GameStop retro shelf may have some good games at below market value prices. These places can be both extremely pleasing and extremely frustrating. Whether or not a thrift store has any video game at all is a complete crap shoot. And even if they do, you probably won’t find anything other than Madden/NHL Blitz/NBA 2K on Xbox 360. But you hear the stories where people find the illustrious working copy of Earthbound at a yard sale so you keep checking. And in truth I have found some alright stuff at thrift stores, flea markets, and yard sales. I even recently went to an estate sale from a game collector. I’ve never found anything exciting or crazy but stuff I wanted nonetheless and usually for cheap. The downside, of course, is that if you do eventually find a yard sale or flea market or thrift store with retro games, them working is up in the air. In my collection there are a few games that don’t work, and I can say they all came from flea markets or thrift stores. Not that they can’t be fixed but getting something from dumpster diving means you might just be buying trash. 

The GameStop shelf is the middle ground between the dumpster diving section and the game store section. Whether or not a GameStop has a retro game shelf is up in the air, and what it has is also up in the air. I recently went to all the GameStops across the southern shore of Long Island, New York and found only two of the five stores had places for retro games instead of FunkoPops. But those shelves had games you could give a shit about. Mario Party 2 on Nintendo 64, Resident Evil 0 on Gamecube, We Love Katamari on Playstation 2 were just some of the games I saw. So, something you would certainly want in your collection, and the prices were a little below market value to boot. Not majorly though. Maybe 5-10 bucks across the board, but hey every little bit counts. But again the size of this is limited. I’m also not 100% trusting that the things I buy at GameStop work. I don’t know if I have ever bought something from a GameStop that flat out didn’t work, but I’m not comfortable that there is a guarantee. 

The next subject is the dedicated retro game store. On Long Island, this so happens to be the multiple location Video Game Trading Post, but there are other options as well. These stores will usually, in my experience, have a decent selection. Maybe not every game you could ever want but if I wanted something from these stores I could probably find it. Plus, at five locations for the VGTP there is a lot of that inventory spread out. And the prices for a lot of stuff is about market value or a little above. Some game stores can really fucking gouge you, so make sure if you do go to a game store, you have something to keep track of the game’s prices. I use the app GameEye but PriceCharting.com also works really well. The VGTP, I have found, to be pretty fair considering its a brick and mortar store. 

But to me, the big benefit of going to a game store you can trust like the VGTP is that everything I buy fucking works. They give you a free 2 month warranty without having to be a member or pay a premium, they can test it there, and they have machines to sand down discs and resurface them so they are good as new. Plus most games I’ve bought there that originally come in plastic cases inexplicably have all their inserts and the box is in good condition. So if you want something and you’re willing to pay a little extra for the inserts, and to make sure they work, game stores are your best bet. 

I have been to odder retro game stores. Recently I went to a place in a guy’s house which was claustrophobic but had a good selection, even if it was a little expensive. Some stores are more toy stores than video game stores but have them on a shelf. So, the quality of these can vary. Sometimes the prices won’t be as good, or the selection not great, or the weirdest guy from behind the counter wants to start a conversation with you. But still, it's the guarantee that the thing you’re buying works and is in good condition is the qualifier for me.

The final place to get retro games is of course Ebay. The best of all worlds but also the worst. There’s variety in everything on buying off of ebay. There’s probably the least amount of work in finding something off of Ebay because you can just search for the game you want. You can get the lowest prices on some stuff if you look and wait long enough. But you may not get the game with the case and inserts unless you pay a lot more, and there’s still no guarantee really that the thing you’ll buy works. Though, that said, buying a game on Ebay that’s just the loose disc can be nice if you just are going to put them in a binder, print the case yourself, or buy a reproduction case. It’ll even be cheaper. For example, a copy of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, is about 200 dollars if it comes with the original case and manual. But buy the game loose in a spare CD case then it's 80 bucks, and you can buy a reproduction case off of Etsy for 15 dollars. So you can be smart with your money if you know how to be. 

On Collecting Games on Different Consoles and Reproductions

The last thing I want to say on buying games off Ebay is that it should depend on the games you collect. In my collection are original Xbox and Atari 2600 games. These games, when I've found them in person, are dirt cheap. I once went to a retro game store and picked up five Atari games for a dollar each. Come to think of it, I've never paid more than 3 dollars for an Atari game. But on Ebay that price is usually higher both just because of shipping and also Ebay gets a cut and at some point it's not worth the effort listing something for a dollar. I bought Pitfall! for the Atari for a dollar at the VGTP, and you can find it on Ebay for 15 bucks. Original Xbox games follow the same format. Tons of games are dirt cheap and will be cheaper in retro game stores looking to move inventory. Not that there aren’t expensive games for the original Xbox but multi-platform titles like GTA3, Silent Hill 4, etc. are cheaper on Xbox. Reason being is that while the Original Xbox was popular, there has never really been a large wave of people nostalgic for that era with a desire to collect. 

It’s important when you want to collect games to follow the trends of what people are nostalgic for. A lot of old Atari games, NES and even Super Nintendo nostalgia waves have died down because they had their wave and now tons of companies cater to them. Every game on my NES wishlist is on the Switch in some form or other, so it’s not difficult to just play those games somewhere else without having to finick with a machine from the 80’s. But Gamecube games have skyrocketed because I know people in real life who are in their mid to late 20’s like I am and have a wave of nostalgia for the consoles they grew up on. 

I would also like to add that reproduction cartridges are an option. A reproduction cartridge is a cartridge for a console that was made by a fan using a DIY motherboard and a 3D printed case. In most cases, I’ve had good experiences with them. If you’re not a stickler for the games you own being the official real deal Nintendo cartridge then you can pay 15-30 dollars for a copy of Chrono Trigger on Super Nintendo instead of its current value on price charting sights of around 270 dollars. Seems like a good deal, especially when the cartridge works in your old Super Nintendo just the same as a real one. Only you would know the difference. Though, the label may not look as high quality as the original but you can always buy a replacement off of Etsy if it pisses you off.

Some people might also be intrigued by fake consoles, like the stuff Analogue makes. I can’t vouch for them since I’ve never owned them but they promise the ability to play real cartridges from your old systems in 4K, in a sleek new design, supporting wireless controls, and I've never heard a bad thing from them. Problem is these consoles are fucking expensive if you wanna find a good one. The Analogue version of a Super Nintendo, the Super NT, is on Ebay from anywhere from 750 to a thousand dollars. Considering you can find the orighinal consoles that work in a gamestore for under 200 you’re better off saving your cash and repairing the console when you need. Though, the Hyperkin consoles might do you some good for cheap. They play NES, Super NES, Genesis games in one console for like 80 bucks. I might even pick up the 40 dollar variant for the NES at some point and may leave a review for it here. 

Why Collect?
But all this assumes you want to collect any of the games for the consoles I’ve mentioned above. Of course, there is no right console to collect for. You want to collect Gamecube games because they’re what you remember? Go for it. You want to collect for the Xbox 360 because its dirt cheap? You’re still collecting the right way. Because there really is no wrong way to collect and enjoy video games. You shouldn’t just collect things because they’re valuable or because they’re important but because you enjoy those things. 

My advice for collecting video games is that it should be like collecting records for the most part. You wouldn’t purchase Beatles albums just because The Beatles are a historically significant group when you don’t like their music. No. You buy the albums you’ll listen to. And you’ll be rewarded because there is a vibe to listening to music on vinyl. The sound is richer, the vibe is better, and most importantly you’ll own what you buy. The same can be said for video games, at least in my experience. I’ve never been crazy about some games when I’ve played them on modern platforms but there is a new found appreciation for those games when you play them on old hardware. I kinda like some of the old Atari games when playing them on that wooden piece of shit, but I wouldn’t feel that way if I just played a collection of them on the Switch. Point is, you get a newfound perspective for the limits of the hardware, and the moment in gaming history those experiences took place in. And it’s not just nostalgia, by the time I was playing video games, the Atari 2600 was already 30 years old. Furthermore, you buy what you own physically. Not only does that look freaking sick on a shelf, but video games are more volatile than most other artforms. 

Want to watch an old movie from 1950’s Japan? It’s on streaming. Want to listen to an album from the 60’s? It’s on Spotify. Obviously, I know not every movie or every album is on streaming, but video games often do not get ported to modern consoles. The first four Silent Hill games can’t be played on PS4, PS5, Switch 2 (switch to what?), or Xbox. New Super Mario Bros. on the DS? Not on the Switch. What about the games from my childhood? Like Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots or MySims Agents? Fuck you, still only on the Wii. Keeping these games running and in good condition is genuine preservation work and the only way to enjoy some of these games. I try my best to share these experiences with friends by playing with them or loaning games out to friends and family because everybody should get a chance to enjoy an artform I have a lot of affinity for. 

What games do I collect? 

For the stated reason of loaning games out, as well as my own personal special interest in video game history, my collecting is very purposeful. Back in 2016, Nintendo released the NES Classic. It was a plug and play console with 30 games pre-loaded on it. For Nintendo, these were the 30 essential games you remember and loved from the NES. And their selection wasn’t bad, it had a wide variety of titles that sold well, spawned franchises, and people remembered. So my collection aims to collect that 30 game list from every console I’m interested in. This allows me to get a comprehensive view of a console’s lifetime and its place in history, and play some pretty good games to boot. Makes me feel like an experienced video game player in the same way some people go back and watch the Oscar nominees from previous years. Now of course this means a lot of ingenuity on my part. Nintendo may have listed 30 games I find mostly agreeable, but figuring out what are the 30 essential games for every other console is no small feat. I’ll describe more of how I came to my current list in a future blog post, but for now, I am doing pretty well with my collection. 

I’m happy with what I have, though I am always looking for more stuff to round out the collection and I am not strictly bound by the list. I do purchase other games I’m just flat out interested in. Finally, I do intend to play everything on this shelf, despite how impossible of a task that might seem. So, in the interest of playing more games that will inspire more blog posts, I’m going to end this post here and get back to it.