idk man ive been shown the horrors of other "collectable" secondhand markets to know that used video games aren't at the absolute bottom of the barrel but its still plenty sad to see how much the artificial grifter taint has seeped through between hobbies

but then it creates this catch-22 of like if you lower the price then ur underselling the game, especially if ur a game store that probably gave the mfer that sold it initially a pretty decent deal

so the game is stuck on shelves, too expensive for both normies and interested players. Nobody wins!

but for shit like bullet witch? RAD? that shits hyper niche. the people aware of or even remotely interested in playing those games already know how to dodge the scalp price. You don't fool anyone by jacking the price up, all you do is accumulate unsellable copies over time

and for shit like cubivore or rule of rose or virtually any sega saturn game its like not TOO many people talk about em but yeah they only made like 4 copies so again shit makes at least some level of logical sense

for shit like pokemon or silent hill or whatever its like yeah sure theres a reasonable possibility for some uninformed mfer to hear about it from someone online gassing it up and then go drop a few bands without thinking much about it

i also see RAD for the PS2 significantly more often than any other "expensive" PS2 game so that probably falls under the same umbrella

like a lot of expensive games i can see some genuine reason that someone could convince themselves its worth the scalper price but for others its so mfin artificial

fair

have ya played super star? that ones the big fan favorite

i am very much aware that those all have projects in development! when sakura wars 3 gets finished, 4 is almost certain to follow given how similar and smaller that game is

wait, duh. the english fan translation scene will never be truly realized if they never do tengai makyo the apocalypse IV

honestly im trying to even think of what remaining popular older titles haven't been TL'd by now

what immediately comes to mind are tokimemo 2, sakura wars 3-4, and lad kenzan. maybe idolmaster 1 and 2?

theres probably still a zillion VNs that im unaware about tho

on one hand knowing japanese is still immensely useful for playing import games and it also allows people to straight up dodge the dumpster fire that is the english used games market

on the other hand it's becoming more and more optional these days as everything just gets TL'd

way back when i started learning japanese in like 2015 i made a big list of non-TL'd games that I could finally play when i get good enough to read them

Segagaga remains the very last title on that list to not have been TL'd by now, we live in a truly golden era of fanslations tbh

no fucking way

All they gotta do is reach 1999 and 2000 so i can finally play midtown madness 1 and 2 easily

Though honestly the further you go in time the more likely something is already preconfigured to work on modern hardware through steam/gog/magipack

like even trying to do some of that shit on period appropriate hardware can be a crapshoot, having everything on a simple, portable, preconfigured space where you can just pick and run whatever is cool as fuck

retro PC gaming is getting all the more accessible

im honestly floored by how everything just works. No legion go fullscreen issues. Sonic schoolhouse runs and has sound. Sonic & knuckles doesn't sound like doofy midi. fucking TOY STORY works perfectly, and if youve tried to play the PC port of that you'd know how tempermental that shit is