Messages

1

General / Re: When will your backlog actually be completed?

« on: January 20, 2026, 04:32:44 pm »

I just look at my back log like my retirement reward. When we get to a certain age, we won't want to leave the house as much, and god damn those video games will be delightful 

With all do respect, why not start playing them now? Obviously everyone's situation is going to be different (work, kids, and other responsibilities obviously play a factor), but there there is no guarantee of tomorrow or that you'll ever reach retirement, either due to death or other unforeseen life circumstances. Why not just jump into the backlog now? At least that's how I look at it. I definitely don't want to wait until I'm old and possible unable to play games for one reason or another to really tackle my backlog. I want to do it now while I'm still able to.

Yep. That's why I'm starting to delve in now, because I'm done collecting at this point which frees up a lot of mental-bandwidth and the games on my shelf are looking more appealing to me than ever before, now that I'm not preoccupied with thinking about getting more all of the time.... I spent a lot of time building this thing up, and like you said, tomorrow is not a guarantee. You have to take the opportunity that today gives you to enjoy your time on Earth. Always forget what the saying is... life is what happens, while we're busy making other plans?

It's time to bust those games out.

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General / Re: Nostolgia for the collecting era

« on: January 20, 2026, 04:03:26 pm »

But yeah, sorry for the massive tangent there.


tl,dr: I have a ton of nostalgia for my collecting era between 2008 and 2022, and especially between 2010 and 2014. Those were such fun, special years for me. I acquired literally thousands of games during that 4 year period, most of which I bought for a bargain. Deals were everywhere, some of the best places I've ever looked for video games were still around, and I also met a ton of great collectors too during this time. Also, the online zeitgeist around gaming felt so alive and vibrant around this time. Hell, it's during this time I joined VGcollect and my most wonderful memories of using this site were during the first 5 or so years I was here. I do miss that time and even though most of the places I used to buy games at are gone, the world has changed heavily since then, and so have I, I still remember that era maybe just as fondly as I do being a young kid and experiencing some of those older games for the very first time when they were brand new.

No apologies necessary, the tangents are the reason for the thread. I like the stories. Sounds as though we had a similar trajectory in game collecting.

Although, when I started out I had very limited amount of money I could spend on the hobby. At the time, you really didn't need a ton of money, but it would've helped of course. It always seemed to me, like the more money I had to spend on games, the more the prices would continue to rise, resulting in making it just as difficult as it was before regardless of what I had to spend.

Around here, I didn't have a ton of brick & mortar game stores besides GameStop, but back then I loved those stores. I used to go to GameStop so much that I felt self-conscious about the employees seeing me come in all of the time, and that was between three different stores that used to be in my town. I would hit them almost on a daily basis, checking for new trade-ins, price drops, and clearance stuff. Man, Nintendo DS games were so cheap and plentiful there back in those days. Of course, most people then still felt like DS was a gimmicky child's console that would never be worth collecting for a serious gamer. So I would regularly pick up $10 DS games that are now going for $100+ today. I probably spent thousands of dollars buying super cheaply priced games at those stores over the years. That's why it guts me to go in there these days, and the whole store has like 20 games over in the corner, and the rest is all a bunch of non-game junk. You have like 10 Switch 2 games on the shelf, and 3/4 of them are key-cards. I don't think the joy of the hobby could be any further obliterated than it is, short of every major video game company shutting down completely, which seems like that's not too far off.

I remember discovering that you could buy used games at Blockbuster, they had some pretty good deals too. We never had anything like Hastings here, but I did order from their website one time. It's funny how I can still point to any game on my shelf that I got all those years back, and could still tell you where I got it at, and roughly how much I spent on it. That stuff is just etched into my memory for some reason. A lot of my retro came from flea markets, and Salvation Army (because Goodwill here never put any video game stuff on the floor) and a few pawn shops. Aside from that I was always at GameStop, Blockbuster, and Kmart. A lot of people didn't realize how good Kmart was for modern game deals back then, because nobody ever shopped at those stores, their video game department would always mark the prices down little by little and you could get sealed games for like $10 - $20, where other places were still asking MSRP for the same game, so I did that a lot. CheapAssGamer used to have a dedicated Kmart price-list thread that I would follow regularly. The guys over there had so much pull with that thread they made some sort of connection with a guy who worked for Kmart corp and started I believe it was a loyalty program called Kmart Gamer which latest for all of a few months. I remember trying to pre-order a game there one time, and the manager had no idea of anything about it and he's like "why don't they just wait until we have the product before they make us sell it", but he somehow managed to do something on the register and give me a pre-sale receipt. It was so disorganized and half-assed, I don't know how it even become a thing there for a bit.

Then there was the time I went to look at some guy's games advertised in a local ad. I got there, ring the doorbell and slip and fell into deep snow. I get up, he opens the door and invites me in and I'm covered in snow head to toe, looking like Jack Frost while I'm melting in his living room. Didn't end up buying squat from him, but hey I got the memory. I'll never forget that. Good times, good times.

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General / Re: Nostolgia for the collecting era

« on: January 20, 2026, 01:38:16 pm »

That's why I'm so seldom here, I'm just not about collecting anymore.  I find that joy tangentially via finding indie games on Steam these days

Not the same, but it's fun to find new games that you've never heard of that look cool.

I do miss the days of going out and hitting pawn shops, thrift stores, yard sales, flea markets, etc. for deals, but yeah, as soon as pandemic hit a lot of people turned to selling online and truly realized they didn't need to sell things for dirt cheap.  I've popped into a few places over the last few years and pawn shops don't have games because they sell online, thrift stores don't have games because they sell online, yard sales price to match ebay/gamestop, and I wouldn't be caught at a flea market anymore. 

I've considered selling stuff myself just to get rid of stuff I know I'd never play these days, but I see that I could sell a game for $20, but shipping would cost me $5, market would take $2-3, payment processor would take $1 or so, I'd probably not even wind up selling it for $20 with a best offer price, and likely I'd have to deal with stupid people just to make $10 on a game I probably paid more than $10 on... and unfortunately, Gamestop and the like offer even less, paying $2-5 for a game that sells for $20, that they will probably list for $40 and that's for store credit.  If someone offered me like 70% of VGPC for the majority of my collection, I'd probably take it, no questions asked.

With video games, it always feels like buy high and sell low. Probably because we don't realize all the trouble they went to just to sell us something. It takes money to make money, unless someone finds that they just happen to be sitting on a gold mine, otherwise they're paying, paying and paying more out the ass, just to be able to sell and end up slightly ahead.

I want full blown retail and I want cash for my collection, local pickup only, or else it's staying with me the rest of my life. Too many years and too much effort into it, to simply liquidate it for some reselling fool.

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General / Nostolgia for the collecting era

« on: January 19, 2026, 10:51:24 pm »

Anyone else get the warm and fuzzies for the good ole' days of game collecting? I'm a very nostalgic person by nature; as soon as an era of life comes to a close and another begins, I start to feel a lot of nostalgia for the previous bygone era. So here we are, light-years into the dystopian future and now it's no longer just nostalgia for our gaming memories of our childhood, but nostalgia for when we collected games as adults.

These days, I feel nostalgic for the era when I first got into collecting games. It doesn't seem like it, but that was quite a long time ago now. I was a young adult, just out of high-school and looking for some kind of hobby to pick up. I hadn't played video games in several years, but I just decided to start watching YouTube videos about people who were buying old games for classic game systems. At the time, there weren't even that many, just a handful of vloggers with their grainy digital cameras showing off their Saturn or SNES collections in their bedroom. That's all it took to inspire me to get into it myself. Finally had my own money, and I figured this stuff would be easy to get because it's old and nobody wants it. Wasn't exactly true, but of course it was infinitely more doable then.

Aside from reasonable pricing and availability, what I think was so much fun about that era was just being completely ignorant to all of these retro games that I'd never heard of, and discovering the games as I went along collecting. Going out with 20$ in my wallet and coming back with a bag of games that I'd never played before. The hunt itself seemed endless at the time, it felt like everywhere you went there were video games for sale. Not just the second hand market, but in retail, every store was dabbling in video game sales at that time. Even drug stores had video games, as physical media was at peak saturation. I couldn't stay content to just collect retro, so I dove into the current scene, knowing nothing about 360 or Wii and discovering several years worth of titles I knew nothing about more or less gave me the same feeling about hunting and collecting modern games too.

You really had to be there, to experience it in this exact way, and lot of you here were, so you know what I'm talking about. Getting into game collecting at that specific time period during the late 2000s / early 2010s is something that can never again be replicated. If you sold everything you owned and attempted to start over, it would be nothing the same. Not only because that era has passed, but because you can only experience something for the first time once. It would just never feel the same again. All the younger folks getting into it over the past few years, they'll never know what it was like when we did it.

I would say the golden years were over by around the time I first joined this forum, 2013/14 or so? Game collecting was getting so popular, and so competitive already by that point, you couldn't find stuff the way you did in the years before. This is when it started to go from being purely a joy, to sort of a chore. You had to be more crafty, more diligent. The world was slowly turning to shit because everybody was getting a smart phone and corporations were beginning to take over the Internet and subsequently destroy society. So there's this sort of split between game collecting in the old days before Internet was real life, and you would just use it to communicate about your real world findings, and then the era after it had taken over where there was little left out there in the real world to find, but everyone online had everything that you wanted and was dangling it over your head like a carrot. I'm not so nostalgic for that era where it all got tougher and tougher, and was mostly relegated to buying things online. The fun was all but gone by that point, especially by the later 2010s.

Once the pandemic hit, the hobby was wrecked. I continued on collecting for several more years beyond that, but it was honestly painful at that point, not fun at all. I haven't actively been a game collector in nearly two years. I don't really miss it, because of what it eventually came to be. I do think of the early days a lot, hence the topic. At this point, I know all of the retro libraries quite well. The sense of discovery is gone, I own most of what I ever wanted, everything feels like a ridiculous waste of money now... the past can't be repeated, is the point. You had to be there. I'm just thankful I'm not subject to the present day, where all the most followed and praised hacks of the retro gaming scene, are all these reseller jerks. Those clowns were probably still in daycare when we started collecting. Little did we know they'd come along to turn the entire hobby into a racket a decade later. If you just want to play the games, you're probably just modding or emulating at this point.

So, that's kind of my ramble on video game collecting nostalgia, without getting too much into the specifics. The memories of first beginning my Saturn and Sega CD collections, going to the flea markets and picking up loads of Nintendo cartridges, buying the newly released Nintendo DSi and knowing nothing about the rich DS library that awaited me, etc, all replaying in my mind with a black and white grainy filter, because it feels like ancient history. Looking back, it was definitely one of the most fun times I've ever had, particularly the period from '09 to roughly 2012? My only regret was that I took it a little too far, and forced myself to stick with it longer than I should have through the years, at some point I did let the fixation almost consume me. Finally beyond that now, and I don't think about game collect much at all anymore. Aside from those early days, maybe I just miss the past in general.

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General / Re: VGC's Anonymous/"General" Topic:

« on: November 29, 2025, 12:29:23 am »

This is the first year in almost two decades where I really don't care at all about the potential deals to be had on video games right now. The problem is multifaceted. There's very little being released that people like myself actually would want this holiday season, most of the stores in my area that still have games have a pitiful selection so even if they offer a discount online the stores won't have any product you can actually go get, and of course, the discounted games this year are mostly last year's games or crap titles and now that MSRP is higher than ever that 25% to 30% off doesn't seem like such a sweet deal anymore.

All the years I remember standing in lines to get fantastic deals on recent releases that were super hyped, and buy two get one sales when there was actually enough games in the store to pick three you wanted. It was always the most fun time of year to be game shopping. This year it just feels like it's over, it's a thing of the past. It exists on a handful of websites, and it's nothing you really want.

So yeah, it's another tradition ruined by modernity.

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Off Topic / Re: How do you deal with getting older?

« on: October 26, 2025, 11:40:06 pm »

I recently had a birthday which puts me in my late 30s. I understand I'm still not old, and by conventional standards I'm not even middle aged yet, but one thing that has been on my mind a lot over the last year or so is how people deal with getting older.


it's a strange thing coming out of your late teens, 20s, and even your early 30s and most things are more or less as you remembered them, but then you realize one day they're not. Your relatives you've had in your minds eye as being around a certain age most of your life are now several decades beyond that, you start to hear more and more about people you knew personally dying, and even you aren't the same person anymore. You don't have the energy you once did, your body has all sorts of random aches and pains you never used to have, and you could have sworn you were just renewing your plates or paying your taxes a few months ago, when it's actually been a whole year already. I guess the passage of time and the reality of how much time has passed is starting to finally catch up with me. Does anyone else have feelings like this or have you dealt with this and somehow come to terms with it?

Poorly. It’s been something heavy on my mind for most of my 30s, and it’s something that I’ve struggled with a lot. I’ve become an old man who yells at clouds mostly, I’m a very nostalgic and sentimental person these days. I cope with it by clinging to the last remaining shreds of people, places and things that still resemble what I miss so much about the past.

I have lunch inside of mostly empty irrelevant diners that are barely hanging on and feel like retirement homes, I shop in old school brick & mortar establishments that have neglected to necessitate tech and Internet into their operation, I visit childhood spots like my local parks to go hiking on the trails and just reminisce the whole time, I listen to my music on a CD player without the distraction of other activities, I play retro consoles on my CRT, I watch reruns of classic TV shows with what feels like a brand new set of eyes and ears (it’s the same but with a totally different perspective), listen to other sad millennials relate tales about the good ole days... I often think about people who I mistook for dinosaurs when they were my age and wonder how they felt about their life when they were at this same point, to come of age in the slower, more stable, more simple times. An experience that I can't and will never know. I've taken a greater interest in history as a whole, learning about the way things were before my time.

There’s nothing that I’m more apathetic and cynical towards than present day. All the garbage going on in the world, the politics, the economic system, the unending drama and noise coming from social media that I’m supposed to care about or get sucked into. I don’t want to be a part of it any longer. For the most part, I’m dead to that world. It feels like a waste of my time on this Earth, and everything about the present day system feels designed to make me feel less human and I want none of it. I desperately wanna recapture the way I felt when I was young, or at least how I felt as a young adult. I feel like I’ve seen enough change for a few generations in just the past decade and a half. The harsh reality is, the passage of time is just a process of watching everything you love wither away and eventually die. Anyone who hasn't already realized that is just refusing to pay attention, trying to live insulated inside of a false sense of security. Life is the ultimate tragic story.

As for me, I don’t feel like I’ve changed as a person, not the core of who I am anyway. It’s important to be true to myself, and preserve my principles and values and not let external forces to pressure me into capitulation. In other words, I’ll be insufferable by the time I’m a senior. I’m always gonna live like it’s still 1999 or 2006 and I’ll never apologize for it, no matter how fast the calendar shreds it's pages. I’m a product of my time, and my time was back then.

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General / Re: Halo is going multiplat...end of an era

« on: October 26, 2025, 12:12:21 am »

Not that it's overly important, but I will mention that Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines 2 is generally regarded as a bad game for good reason and is, at minimum, a game that few fans of the original game wanted in its current design. It's a game based on the TTRPG, but its RPG mechanics have been considerably lessened for a sub-par experience. That is bad enough alone, but coupled with a fair amount of content that's barred behind an additional paywall and its initial price point, they come together in a way that warrants a much deserved negative reaction from the franchise's fans.

I don't know anything about the first game other than it had a very troubled history itself, but none of that even matters to me. I just like what I see as the game that it is. I've seen a lot of mixed reaction, there are those who are enjoying the game. I considered buying at launch, but physical copies sold out on GameStop and Target's websites already. There seems to be a lot of interest in the game,  but there's also a lot of noise coming from the detractors.

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General / Re: Halo is going multiplat...end of an era

« on: October 25, 2025, 04:40:25 pm »

It's still ashame that nothing approximating the final build of the game is ever on the disc from any major publisher, not even thoroughly bug tested. That's the version we get to own down the line.

The consoles do often treat the discs as a key for download when online, as they want to just give you the latest version of the game to install. It believe it only installs from the disc if you're offline.

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General / Re: Halo is going multiplat...end of an era

« on: October 25, 2025, 01:10:42 pm »

I'm not gonna say that I've found nothing of interest on my PS5, but it's the emphasis on the particular gimmicks of the day, the snail's pace of releases, and just the lack of diversity that really sucks. I guess if you're a big souls-like fan, then you're unbothered by the state of gaming currently because that's half of every new single player game that comes out. Currently, probably over 2/3rds of my PS5 games are indie or medium budget games. But it seems like any time a game releases that bucks the current trends, it's ignored, shit on in the reviews, and nobody buys it.

I learned just the other day the studio behind the latest Visions of Mana game abruptly went under. Apparently, that was flop of a game even though it isn't a bad game. Mindseye was another game that had my attention as a change of pace from the landscape of hero-shooters and souls-likes, and of course it flopped hard too. There was Unknown 9 Awakening, which I thought looked like an interesting new title, flopped like a fish and folks shat all over it. The new Vampire Bloodlines 2 game intrigues me a lot, but a lot of folks again are whining about it and saying it sucks. Is it me, or is there a pattern here?

I think it's maybe not entirely just the industry itself that has a problem, I think gamers are a very fickle bunch who don't know what they want, or when they want it. Which is why all we get now are re-makes. They predictably reward sameness and shun risk, and I've seen it time after time. It can't be that it's really that hard for an underdog team to put together an ambitions new game, but almost every time it ends in bad reviews and financial failure. I don't think any of the previously mentioned games are bad, I wish they were more successful. I think those games are made for folks like me, who just want to see a new IP come along and do things on it's own terms, eschewing the conventions and "standards" set by all of the biggest AAA hits of the day. I don't care that every game doesn't do something the particular way another popular game does it. I just care about having a new adventure, with a new IP, and some fresh ideas. That's all it really takes for me to enjoy a game. I'm not an obsessed flaw hunter who gets easily taken out of the experience the moment the game doesn't do what I intuitively want it to do. Call me Pollyanna but I think games are just meant to be met half-way by the player, and to have fun with them.

I think the industry understands that if you do anything unproven, or on your own terms, or cut any corners, you could loose your ass. It's a double edged sword. So they're content to just do stuff that is proven, and just print money, because apparently a lot of gamers cannot get enough of the idea of re-makes and remasters. A phenomenon that seldom has any appeal to me, whatsoever. Gaming today is quite the conundrum of issues.

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General / Re: Halo is going multiplat...end of an era

« on: October 24, 2025, 10:07:24 pm »

I fondly, to this day, remember a conversation I had at 16 with a Game Crazy employee. I read in OPM a rumor that Halo was coming to PS3 (this was all around the mysterious PS3 pre-launch window) and he got pretty heated (remember I'm just a kid and this is a grown man) saying Halo will NEVER come to PlayStation. It literally can't. Microsoft owns it and would NEVER allow it in a million years.

People have been crying out to end the console wars, but competition breeds innovation. Without competition everyone will stagnate. I honestly just want the industry to crash. Every major AAA studio to fold, get gutted, and sadly the cycle will start all over again. Smaller to medium size indie studios will buy up franchises and start out small and form more major corporations.

It's not like buying the physical discs means anything anymore

I'm not sure what you mean. I had my internet go out for 3 days about a year ago. I bought a 2TB SSD for my PS5 and every disc installed offline. Sure, we won't get patches when the service goes down one day, but everything installed off the disc. I installed probably 30 games both PS4 and PS5.

I could never imagine a lot of the shitty things that go on nowadays, gaming or otherwise ever happening at one point, but now they routinely do and it's just normalized.

As far as game discs, it depends on the game. Ubisoft, Microsoft, and I believe EA (the usual suspects) refuse to put data on their discs as of late. Then some smaller publishers are also dabbling in online requirements just to play the single player mode. Usually games that are more multi-player focused (unfortunately a lot of games now) but offer a single player, tend to have this asinine restriction about accessing the game at all offline.

I'm so sick of every developer squandering all of their time and resources chasing that ever elusive multi-player hit that ain't gonna happen. It used to be most games were a single player campaign, with a multi-player mode as an afterthought. Now it's reversed, multi-player focused games with maybe a single player adaptation of a game that was built for multi-player. It's getting so old.

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General / Re: Halo is going multiplat...end of an era

« on: October 24, 2025, 06:17:44 pm »

For sure it's the end of Xbox, which has been dead to me since the start of this gen.

Xbox has struggled to establish trust and true brand dependability since the very beginning, the closest they ever came to a success was Xbox 360 - affordable hardware, solid ports, decent exclusives, XBOX Live was very influential in that era.

But now we're in the 9th gen, also known as "hell", where corporate greed and boardroom idiocy reigns and destroys everything in sight, and that goes for Sony and Nintendo too. All of these companies are subject to enshitification, which boils down to individuals with too much money and authority over a company not being restrained at all whenever they come up with a dumb, hair-brained idea, and then it tanks the company / makes the product or service objectively worse as they continuously gas-light the public and tell us that it's actually so much better than ever.

Everything Xbox has done since 2020, I would argue is bad not only for Xbox but for console gaming, including Game Pass, the purchase of a bunch of important studious, the release of physical games with no media on them, underwhelming multiplayer trend chasing first party titles, continuous price hikes, etc. I might be sad if they hadn't turned into such bottom-feeding garbo in the past 5 years, but alas. They were always looking for the next big thing. Break into console gaming, but then spend 15 years trying to eclipse console gaming and move beyond it because the profit isn't good enough.

I'll never own a Series X, probably never own another so-called Nintendo console, and I've made peace with that. Console gaming as we knew it is going downhill fast, and we're just dinosaurs not realizing that the comets are already hitting, and it's over. The modern gaming market, save for indie gaming, is totally enshitified and begging for it's own destruction. Halo 1 the remake, just the game that everyone was clamoring for, and that's how you know it's the 2020s. I'm so excited. 

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Off Topic / Re: How to deal with rude drivers cutting me off?

« on: May 11, 2025, 11:41:29 pm »

You just yell loudly, and shout obscenities while not really thinking too deeply about it. You should always expect the worst out of traffic, and be impressed when someone doesn't actually suck. Also don't forget we all make some stupid mistakes now and then, and I'm sure that we all have pissed someone else off. To others it can look intentional. Sometimes the easiest mistake to make is merging on someone who's tucked in your blind spot.

In the end, I'm not taking part in a race or competition to "win" anything against traffic by shaving off a couple of minutes at every opportunity. Being a driver, we think we're given agency over the outcome as we travel, but it's not that way. It's just like any other form of transportation, it serves a purpose to get us from "a" to "b", and it takes however long it takes. Just keep your eyes peeled for sucky drivers to defend your property and well being against.

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General / Re: VGC's Anonymous/"General" Topic:

« on: May 05, 2025, 09:17:34 pm »

I seldom bought new games when they were $60. Since they went to $70, almost never. At $80? I don't know I'd ever wanna play a new game that bad. The shit-kicker is that most of these new "Triple-A" titles that come out are not only not half bug-tested at launch, but the devs know there's a ton of other shit they're withholding to sell us later, so that we end up spending what, $100+ on a game by the time it's all said and done?

I'm just not doin' it. How can you be a financially responsible adult, amidst inflation plus the global economic stupidity that's poised to screw us further, and spend that kind of money on even a semi-regular basis for entertainment purposes? It's time for a reset on this industry. It's begging for apocalypse.

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General / Re: Does anyone know what causes yellowing without sunlight?

« on: May 05, 2025, 09:06:12 pm »

I've raved about this for ages. It's the nature of paper when it's a pure white variety. Over time, with environmental factors accelerating the issue, the chemical compound of the paper breaks down and looses it's vibrant white appearance. It doesn't necessarily turn yellow, it just becomes less and less vivid as it breaks down and becomes less stable. Compared to the white plastic of the case, it will look like a different color eventually.

Has happened not only to my Wii artwork, also my Sega Saturn artwork, Dreamcast artwork, the white banners on Xbox 360 games, PS5 games, etc. Anything vivid white, will eventually become dingier white over time. A lot of my PS5 games are already doing this. I live in an environment where air humidity levels tend to fluctuate from dry to normal-borderline damp, and that's a nightmare scenario for thin little slips of high gloss paper. Hell, all of my handheld console screens turn yellow over time too, because of these dry to damp shifts. It's a common problem in Japan due to their climate conditions as well.

You have two options. Just accept this shit will turn dingy and look bad, because you know it's something that happens outside of your control. Or, use a scanner to do high-res scans of all of your artwork (avoid the low-res crap found on most websites, because it'll look like a cheap counterfeit), photo edit to tweak the dingy tint back to white, then reprint all of your artwork. It'll be good for a while, but it'll just happen again eventually. Still, you can do a refresh as many times as you'd like ones you've got all your stuff archived...

A third option, buy some cream colored DVD cases?

I think there is definitely some control

cause in most cases wii covers are still white. this is not the normal, maybe after a hell lot more time has past but not in the current era.

even with people that don't give a shit and treat wii poorly covers are still white in  most cases. I don't think wii covers are as fragile as comic books or some of that old toy cardboard. let alone ps2 covers in europe which all have white backsides. most if not all are still white. only time they get yellowed is when people actually get dirty with em. smudge insane sun damage etc didn't happen by itselves.

if this was an actual issue that happened out of nowhere people be complaining for days. just ain't it. poor storage, maybe said guy living in a humid environment it definitely didn't happen out of nowhere

It's a similar reason why people keep pictures under glass. If they didn't, the pictures would fade eventually. If you have an old book sitting around, you'll probably notice the tips of the pages look dingy compared to the pages which have been kept closed. Many types of paper when exposed to air, will eventually disrupt the chemical composition and alter the appearance. It doesn't exactly indicate that it's been abused or mistreated, a lot of times very normal use and storage can result in this outcome. Folks who ended up with cheddar cheese Super Nintendo systems didn't abuse them, the composition in the plastics were triggered by the environment, resulting in a color change over time. Other Super Nintendo systems made of a different plastic, won't do this even if it was in the very same environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7YgfdWffh0

Random collection video as an example, but I can notice that a lot of the artwork shown here is darker than the white of the plastic cases, and that's what OP is talking about. The covers are technically still "white", it's just not a vibrant white anymore, it's more of a cream color. This is typical and only becoming more common with Wii collections.

Have you seen the pic the op send? his mario kart turned yellow.



This is not normal, nor is it common at all. unless usa wii games are shitty quality compared to pal land. but haven't seen it all that much on ebay or with my own usa wii games
if this was somewhat common sizable wii collections would have turned yellow by now.

also wii cases never had identical color to the plastic cases. they are close but not the same.

Also imo I don't think wii covers have changed color from when they where brand new and if thy did it's a very small diff that I don't notice.

i agree with you on super nes and nes consoles but this ain't it.  and with snes consoles it's mainly usage and it getting hot. cause it's always the consoles that are barely used in plastic that are still nice and grey. unless you are lucky with certain plastic revisions of the snes it's gonna turn yellow when you use it to some degree.

His example is on the extreme side, but it also might be due to the color balance on his camera that's exaggerating the color. If you notice the discoloration is more extreme towards the top and bottom edges, I see that a lot in my collection too. This is an indication of air reaching the artwork, and this is def not paper that's going to stand up to air exposure. Could have a really loose, compromised sleeve, maybe even sticking out at the top a bit, but almost all of mine show some discoloration near the edges. Like I said before, including some factory sealed games. I believe the sleeves on these are just not very well made.

If you environment is ideal, it might not happen to the extreme degree shown. But, I mean take a look at some of these random collections and notice how many are a warmer off-white than others.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wii/comments/s390fa/my_wii_collection_been_collecting_off_and_on/#lightbox

https://www.reddit.com/r/wii/comments/123nlaa/quality_over_quantity_only_the_best_games_what/#lightbox

Post up a bit of your own Wii collection, and let's have look? See if we can't find some of those warm off-white buggers.

15

General / Re: Does anyone know what causes yellowing without sunlight?

« on: May 03, 2025, 10:26:40 pm »

I've raved about this for ages. It's the nature of paper when it's a pure white variety. Over time, with environmental factors accelerating the issue, the chemical compound of the paper breaks down and looses it's vibrant white appearance. It doesn't necessarily turn yellow, it just becomes less and less vivid as it breaks down and becomes less stable. Compared to the white plastic of the case, it will look like a different color eventually.

Has happened not only to my Wii artwork, also my Sega Saturn artwork, Dreamcast artwork, the white banners on Xbox 360 games, PS5 games, etc. Anything vivid white, will eventually become dingier white over time. A lot of my PS5 games are already doing this. I live in an environment where air humidity levels tend to fluctuate from dry to normal-borderline damp, and that's a nightmare scenario for thin little slips of high gloss paper. Hell, all of my handheld console screens turn yellow over time too, because of these dry to damp shifts. It's a common problem in Japan due to their climate conditions as well.

You have two options. Just accept this shit will turn dingy and look bad, because you know it's something that happens outside of your control. Or, use a scanner to do high-res scans of all of your artwork (avoid the low-res crap found on most websites, because it'll look like a cheap counterfeit), photo edit to tweak the dingy tint back to white, then reprint all of your artwork. It'll be good for a while, but it'll just happen again eventually. Still, you can do a refresh as many times as you'd like ones you've got all your stuff archived...

A third option, buy some cream colored DVD cases?

I think there is definitely some control

cause in most cases wii covers are still white. this is not the normal, maybe after a hell lot more time has past but not in the current era.

even with people that don't give a shit and treat wii poorly covers are still white in  most cases. I don't think wii covers are as fragile as comic books or some of that old toy cardboard. let alone ps2 covers in europe which all have white backsides. most if not all are still white. only time they get yellowed is when people actually get dirty with em. smudge insane sun damage etc didn't happen by itselves.

if this was an actual issue that happened out of nowhere people be complaining for days. just ain't it. poor storage, maybe said guy living in a humid environment it definitely didn't happen out of nowhere

I see dingy looking Wii artwork a lot when browsing used games in a shop. Hell, I have Wii games still in the shrink-wrap, and games in box protectors, that used to have pure white artwork and have turned dingy. Some PS2 games in North America also have a lot of white on them, many of which have also been in my collection for years and I'll agree that on average they have not turned nearly as dingy as the Wii artwork has for most of my Wii games, all kept in the exact same space for many years. If you have an ideal environment that's never too dry or never too damp, this will happen a lot slower, but it will happen. Paper over time looses it's vibrancy.

More people are noticing hence why OP has brought the subject up, and I suspect more will in the future.

It could be a different grade of paper being used, it could be due to PS2 sleeves being a superior more protective grade of material, and perhaps holds the artwork more securely from air exposure more effectively. Probably all of the above. I know that PS5 cases have horrible sleeves which bulge out and expose the cover to the air massively, causing waviness and discoloration at the edges of the artwork, which I find to be super common. With every generation, the sleeve quality gets worse and worse as it's made of cheaper material.

It's a similar reason why people keep pictures under glass. If they didn't, the pictures would fade eventually. If you have an old book sitting around, you'll probably notice the tips of the pages look dingy compared to the pages which have been kept closed. Many types of paper when exposed to air, will eventually disrupt the chemical composition and alter the appearance. It doesn't exactly indicate that it's been abused or mistreated, a lot of times very normal use and storage can result in this outcome. Folks who ended up with cheddar cheese Super Nintendo systems didn't abuse them, the composition in the plastics were triggered by the environment, resulting in a color change over time. Other Super Nintendo systems made of a different plastic, won't do this even if it was in the very same environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7YgfdWffh0

Random collection video as an example, but I can notice that a lot of the artwork shown here is darker than the white of the plastic cases, and that's what OP is talking about. The covers are technically still "white", it's just not a vibrant white anymore, it's more of a cream color. This is typical and only becoming more common with Wii collections.