I've been collecting for a while now, and the whole time I've told myself I'm not going to do the flashcart/everdrive thing and only collect the real things.. But today I ran into an issue and its got me kinda rethinking my rule. I grabbed my copy of Golden Sun for the GBA off the shelf, popped it and started playing it. This would my first time playing the game, I've always heard great things about the game and being a huge RPG fan I was really excited to get it started. So I'm playing through the intro and like most RPGs this takes a while and you generally have to sit through a bit of story before you get a chance to save. I finally get to the point where I can save and I get a strange error telling me it cant find the backup memory or something like that. At this point I'm thinking no big deal, I've run into dead batteries before and havent had any issues replacing them, I'll just heat up the soldering iron and take care of it real quick; but when I cracked the cart open... there was no battery. At first I thought maybe someone put a bootleg board in there, but it checks out. Golden Sun used flash memory, no battery need. It turns out sometimes the flash memory just goes bad. I did some research and everyone just says to buy a new copy.
I could just go on ebay and buy another copy... but who's to say that game won't suffer from the same issue at some point. I'm sitting here looking at my collection, wondering how many of these awesome games might have issues down the road.. I knew that physical media wouldn't last forever, but this is legitimately the first game I've run into that didn't work and wasn't just something that was dirty or scratched. I have no plans to stop collecting physical media... but it might be time to start thinking about alternative methods of playing my games.
So with all that said, what are you thoughts on flashcarts, roms, backup media?
