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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
segaThe Sega Saturn Rewards Knowledge, Not Deep PocketsPick up a Japanese Saturn game in a second-hand shop and watch what the collector next to you checks first. Not the disc. Not the manual. The spine card — the slim paper strip hugging the left edge of the jewel case. If it's gone, the price conversation changes on the spot. No other console trains habits like that, because no other console's collecting culture runs so completely through Japan. The Saturn sold well at home and stumbled everywhere else, and three decades on, that split defines th
playstationWhy PS3 Collectors Check the Model Number FirstFlip a fat PS3 over and read the sticker before you even glance at the disc tray. Those five characters — CECHA, CECHB, CECHC — decide what your library even is, because the PS3 is the rare console where the hardware revision matters more than most of the games it plays. Why collectors read stickers, not spec sheets The Japanese and North American launch units — the 60GB CECHA and 20GB CECHB from November 2006 — carry actual PlayStation 2 silicon on the board: the Emotion Engine CPU and Graph