Xbox Series
The Xbox Series S can't read a disc. There's no drive to attach, no workaround – the small white half of Microsoft's November 2020 launch pair simply assumes you'll never own a physical game. For collectors, that one design call splits this generation
PS1
Ask anyone who owned a launch-era PlayStation why it ended up sitting upside down on the carpet, and you'll get the same sheepish grin. The optical drive in early units wore with age, and flipping the console over was the folk remedy that kept your cutscenes from
N64
Grip the analogue stick and rotate it slowly before you look at anything else. If it wobbles in its socket like a loose tooth, sits low, or crawls back to centre like it's exhausted, you've just learned more about that console's life than any
Wii U
Nintendo shipped roughly 13.5 million Wii U consoles across the machine's entire life. The Wii before it cleared 100 million. That gulf – the hardest faceplant in Nintendo's home-console history – is exactly why the Wii U has quietly become one of the most collectable Nintendo
Market Insights
Pop the hood on an original Xbox that's been sitting in a loft since 2004 and look for the small barrel-shaped capacitor near the middle of the board. If it's wearing a fuzzy brown crust, that motherboard is quietly dissolving itself. That one component – the