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Pricing & ValueWhat Your Nintendo 64 Is Actually Worth in 2024Pull that grey brick out of the loft and the first question is always the same: box or no box? With the Nintendo 64 it matters more than almost any other cartridge-era console, because Nintendo's cardboard boxes were flimsy, the styrofoam inserts got binned by every kid in 1997, and the little instruction booklets vanished into landfill. A loose cart of a common game is pocket change. The same title CIB — complete in box, inserts and all — can be a different animal entirely. Why boxed CIB copi
playstationHow to Collect PlayStation 2 Without Drowning in ShovelwareTake a blue-bottomed disc with you to the next retro fair. A worn PS2 laser will keep reading silver DVD games for months after it starts failing on the blue CD pressings, so a console that boots the seller's copy of a big DVD-era title can still be quietly dying. Thirty seconds with a blue disc tells you more than any "tested and working" sticker ever will. That test matters because the PlayStation 2 is still the most open door in collecting. It's the best-selling home console ever made, with
playstationHow Sony's CD Gamble Made the PS1 a Collector's ConsoleAsk anyone who owned a launch-era PlayStation why it ended up sitting upside down on the carpet, and you'll get the same sheepish grin. The optical drive in early units wore with age, and flipping the console over was the folk remedy that kept your cutscenes from stuttering. That ritual tells you a lot about this machine: mass-market hardware, pushed hard, loved to death — which is exactly why genuinely clean examples are harder to find than the PlayStation's enormous install base suggests. Th