Handheld guides
Buying a Game Gear or Lynx? Check These Failure Points FirstPop the battery covers off a Sega Game Gear and sniff. That faint fishy smell is leaked electrolyte from failing capacitors — an amine odour every Game Gear tech knows — and it means the console in your hands is running on borrowed time, if it runs at all. Cartridge collecting is mostly about cosmetics. Classic handheld collecting is about the hardware itself, because on a Game Gear, an Atari Lynx or an early PSP, the shell can be showroom-clean while the inside is quietly dying. Here's how to
Why Every Unserviced Game Gear Is on Borrowed TimeThe listing says "tested — powers on." The photo shows Sonic frozen on the title screen, and the description never once mentions sound. Experienced Game Gear collectors read that silence the same way: the capacitors are going, and the seller either doesn't know or doesn't want to say. Sega's 1990 handheld is a strange collectable. It's essentially a Master System you can hold — a Z80 heart pushing a 4,096-colour palette onto a backlit 3.2-inch screen while the Game Boy made do with four shades
Why PS Vita Collecting Starts With the Memory CardEvery Vita collector has the same origin story: the console arrives, a copy of Persona 4 Golden clicks into the card slot — and the screen asks for a memory card you don't own, that hasn't been manufactured in years, and that costs silly money for the storage it offers. Welcome aboard. The PlayStation Vita is the strangest collecting proposition Sony ever shipped: a commercial disappointment with a fanbase that treats it like a first love. The western physical library is small enough to feel fi
Why the PSP Is the Import Collector's Perfect HandheldPop the battery cover before you pay for any secondhand PSP. If the door sits proud of the shell, or the cell inside has puffed up like a tiny pillow, you're looking at a swollen lithium battery — and no amount of "tested, works great" in a listing makes that okay. The PSP is one of the most rewarding handhelds a collector can chase, but it pays back the people who check the right things. Let's get you there. UMD, the format everyone laughed at, is now the point The Universal Media Disc was p
Buying a Game Boy Advance Without Getting a Fake CartTwo cobalt-blue Game Boy Advance SPs on the same shelf: same clamshell, same honest scuffs, same price. Flip them over and read the sticker on the bottom — one says AGS-001, the other AGS-101. That middle digit is the whole ballgame, and if the seller hasn't mentioned it, you should be the one who checks. The GBA is the rare platform where the hardware revision routinely matters more than the game in the box. It's also — less charmingly — home to some of the most counterfeited cartridges in all
How to buy an original Game Boy without getting a re-shellSlide the battery cover off before you talk price. On an original Game Boy — the grey DMG-01 brick Nintendo shipped in 1989 — those four AA terminals will tell you more about the machine's last few decades than any glamour shot in the listing. By spec-sheet logic, the brick should have lost. Its Sharp LR35902 ran at roughly 4.19 MHz and drove a 160×144 screen in four shades of pea-soup green, while Sega's Game Gear and the Atari Lynx offered full-colour, backlit displays. But those rivals devou
Collecting the Nintendo 3DS After the eShop Went DarkWhen Nintendo ended new purchases on the 3DS eShop in March 2023, it didn't just retire a storefront — it turned every cartridge into the only remaining door into the library. Pushmo, Intelligent Systems' brilliant block-pulling puzzler, was digital-only. So was Game Freak's oddball golf-poker hybrid Pocket Card Jockey. Neither ever got a cartridge, so on 3DS there's simply nothing left to buy. Why the closure made cartridges the whole story Even physical releases lost something. Fire Emblem:
The Nintendo DS Is the Sleeper Library Hiding in Plain SightEvery flea market has a shoebox of loose Nintendo DS carts priced like chewing gum, and somewhere in that box there's usually one cart worth more than everything else on the table. That's the DS in miniature: one of the biggest handheld libraries ever assembled, with genuinely scarce games sitting shoulder to shoulder with landfill — and almost nothing on the label to tell you which is which. Why the biggest library of its era is also the least sorted The DS was one of the best-selling system