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Condition & GradingBuying 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
xboxCollecting Xbox Series X|S Before the Discs DisappearThe Xbox Series S can't read a disc. There's no drive to attach, no workaround — the small white half of Microsoft's November 2020 launch pair simply assumes you'll never own a physical game. For collectors, that one design call splits this generation down the middle: hardware you can shelve and keep, and a software library quietly migrating to licences on a server you don't control. Which makes collecting the Series X|S while it's still on shelves an odd, slightly urgent hobby. The desirable s
segaWhy 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