After being married and having a few kids, having tons of consoles, controllers, and wires running all over the place ended up being a BAD idea. Most of my stuff that I collected and had on display slowly got destroyed, boxed up, or lost somewhere around the house. It got to the point where I had to give up on the idea of firing up the 3DO or Dreamcast for a quick nostalgic flashback.
When emulation became more and more improved, it gave me a reason to box up the rest of my clutter. When the PS3 first launched, I thought it was awesome that it could play PS1 and PS2 games. I could fire up Street Fighter Alpha Anthology and many other classics without having to dig up my old console. It was unfortunate when my 60gb console died though, and now I'm stuck with a slim PS3 that has PS2 BC taken out.
Right now I'm debating on whether I should build a PC for my living room so I can have "one box to rule them all" as far as emulation and pc games are concerned. If the PS4 has zero backward compatibility with PS1, PS2, and PS3 games, it's seriously going to make me think twice.
Microsoft and Sony obviously dislike the used game market, and making their consoles backward compatible was against their interests. Instead, they would rather make you buy the exact same game over again in digital "HD" form, and they "drip feed" their old library out as well. I'm still wishing I could buy PS1 classics like Road Rash, Return Fire, and Bushido Blade from PSN/SEN.
All of this frustration goes away if I just turn to emulating everything myself. As a bonus I only need to have 1 set of controllers out.
Many people think all video games are disposable, but I think that idea got introduced with the "Achievement/Trophy" generation of games. Once you milk all of your Achievements from a game, you just move on to the next because it's "tapped out" and no longer "fun". It's part of the entitlement age we live in. Games are now like a "job" and no job is worth doing unless you get paid for doing it with some sort of monopoly money.
