Pricing
A loose Super Mario 64 cart turns up at every car boot sale in the country, and it's worth about what you'd expect for a game that shipped by the truckload. Put that same cart back in its box with the manual and the cardboard tray,
Pricing
Pull that grey brick out of the loft and the first question is always the same: box or no box? With the Nintendo 64 it matters more than almost any other cartridge-era console, because Nintendo's cardboard boxes were flimsy, the styrofoam inserts got binned by every kid
Pricing
Pull up every listing for a complete-in-box copy of Chrono Trigger – Square's 1995 SNES RPG – and count the different prices attached to what is, on paper, the same game. The spread is not noise. It's a lesson, and most buyers never learn it: the
Pricing
Every original Xbox built before the 1.6 board revision is quietly eating itself. There's a barrel-shaped clock capacitor on the motherboard whose only job is to remember the time while the console is unplugged, and after two decades most of them have leaked – or will – spilling
Pricing
Put a PAL clamshell of Streets of Rage 2 next to a US copy of John Madden Football and you're looking at the same console's library ageing in two completely different ways. One is a hard plastic case that has shrugged off three decades of shelves,
Pricing
Price a loose disc of Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, then price the same game with its case, manual, and inserts intact. The gap is not a rounding error. On the GameCube, the paper and plastic routinely cost more than the disc they protect – and that single fact explains most
Pricing
Every flea-market crate of PlayStation 2 games tells the same story: four FIFA discs, a scuffed Gran Turismo 3, a SingStar case with no microphones – and, once in a while, one box worth more than everything else in the crate combined. Learning to spot that box is the whole
Pricing
Pull a Dreamcast out of a loft box and the first thing you should check isn't the console – it's the VMU still clipped into the controller and whether the little rubber flaps on the back ports are intact. Those tiny details are the difference between a