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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 Mega Drive Is the Smartest Way to Start a Sega CollectionPick up a PAL copy of Streets of Rage 2 and the case still snaps shut the way it did in 1992. That one detail — Sega shipping games in hard plastic clamshells while Nintendo was still using cardboard — is half the argument for the Mega Drive as your first serious Sega collection. The other half: this was Europe's 16-bit machine, and today's PAL supply reflects it. Sega won Europe with the Mega Drive in a way it never managed in Japan. For a collector, that dominance means abundance: consoles, l
playstationWhy 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