6. Warranties don’t cover physical damage
Every warranty only covers manufacturer’s defects. If you drop your Nintendo 3DS and the screen cracks, then that’s considered physical damage and not covered under warranty. If you spill Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper on your Xbox 360, then that’s physical damage. Dog chewed through AC adapter cord? Physical damage.
The warranty is not a “free pass for a year” for your console. Even if it was, you have to wait 2-3 weeks of turnaround time to get your system back. You might think you can return it to the retail store, but most won’t take it back, because once you buy it the serial number is registered to you.
The point of this is that unless you keep your console in a glass case surrounded by pillows, then you’re going to cause physical damage at some point, which voids the warranty.
As mentioned in the previous point, if you replace your console then you may lose any downloaded games. If you had backups then you wouldn’t run into this problem.
7. Keep community alive
Once a game console is retired, there are still lots of gamers who love to play the games. Some people just grew up with certain games and they find comfort in it, or they may have clans that are dedicated to a particular genre.
Whatever the reason, system emulators and hacked consoles are the only practical ways to play the games of yesteryear. Old consoles will eventually break, and the parts just cannot be found any more, which is why there are so many emulators that run practically every classic console you can think of.
4 comments
I have this thing I do with all my consoles. I either hard or soft mod them to play games from the drive, then load all my games onto the drive. I've done it with my original Xbox, my PS2, my Xbox 360… If it were possible, I would have my Gamecube and my N64 playing from hard drives. Having a room full of game discs and cartridges is impressive, but sheesh…
I thought of another reason…. the physical space that all of these consoles would take up. Instead of having 23 pinball machines in a room you can play a virtual table. I knew someone that had every physical console ever made in one room, and it took up too much space, and he had to have special switches and stuff just to get them hooked up to his tv.
Yeah, when I worked at Nintendo we got a few really angry calls from people when we didn't have any parts to fix their old Nintendo 64s or NES systems. I would love to have pointed them to this article. There are a ton of emulators out there for these systems… and you can easily get the ROMs and then own the entire Nintendo catalogue… not just the few cartridges you have in a box.
Yeah, it's weird how Sony used to practically condone piracy when they were new and selling cassette recorders and VCR's. Now they would arrest you if they could if you even have a thought of downloading an MP3 without giving them money.
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