Snes Full Set Review

You are no longer buying games to play them. You are buying plastic obligations . You find yourself bidding $40 on a loose cartridge of Captain Novolin (a diabetes education game starring a super-powered diabetic). You drive 45 minutes to a pawn shop to buy Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon (a game about a microscopic surgeon killing cholesterol).

You hit 500 games. Your shelf starts to groan. You have all the "Greatest Hits." You start buying the weird stuff: Bassin’s Black Bass , Super Bowling , Rocky Rodent .

So why spend $15,000–$25,000 (and rising) to own them all?

Financially? Yes. SNES cartridges have outpaced the stock market for a decade. snes full set

Spiritually? If you complete it... you get to stand in a room, look at 721 rectangles of plastic and silicon, and whisper:

You will stare at the cover art for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and ask yourself, "Why did this get a license?" The answer doesn't matter. You need it. To finish a full SNES set, you must conquer three legendary "price walls." These are the games that separate the wealthy from the merely enthusiastic. 1. Hagane: The Final Conflict A sidescrolling ninja action game released exclusively to Blockbuster Video in the US. It is incredibly good, incredibly rare, and incredibly expensive. A loose cartridge will cost you more than a used car. A boxed copy costs a down payment on a house. 2. EarthBound Everyone knows this one. The massive box with the strategy guide is the holy grail of cardboard. But even the loose cartridge—with its distinctive yellow/grey plastic—hovers around $300-$400. It’s not the rarest, but it is the gatekeeper . 3. Aero Fighters This is the true monster. A top-down shooter by a defunct developer. Nobody knows exactly how many copies were sold, but estimates hover around 4,000–6,000. It is boring to look at (a generic plane shooter) but fetches $1,500+ for the cartridge alone. It is the final lock on the door. The "Almost" Impossible Variants Just when you think you have 721 carts, the variant hunter whispers in your ear: "But do you have the 'Player's Choice' version? Do you have the 'Mario Paint' with the mouse? Do you have the competition cartridges?"

Logistically? No. You will run out of shelf space. You are no longer buying games to play them

You will own Shaq Fu . Not because you want to, but because you have to .

This is the honeymoon phase. This is where the quest gets dark.

You ignore the variant hunter. The variant hunter is a demon. Let’s be honest: Nobody is playing Wayne’s World (SNES) for fun. Nobody is beating Rise of the Robots because they enjoy it. You drive 45 minutes to a pawn shop

Then you sit down, turn on the SNES, and play Super Mario World for the 1,000th time. Because that’s the only one you really needed in the first place.

In the world of retro game collecting, there are casual fans with a dusty console and a copy of Super Mario World . Then, there are the obsessed—those who stare into the abyss of eBay, tracking numbers, and plastic shelf organizers. At the very peak of that obsession sits a mythical beast: The Full Set.