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GamesHow to Tell a Genuinely Rare Retro Game From a Merely Expensive One"Rare" is the most abused word in a game listing. Here's how to tell genuine scarcity from a common game wearing an expensive word — before you pay the premium.
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
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