I hope it also supports putting multiple games on one cartridge and choosing between them at boot time? Don't see a reason to waste a multi-gigabyte SD card on a single ROM of a few megabytes.
While I like the idea of physically separate cards for each game, at $10 per card it seems economically limiting.
I would assume the quality of those things is not great, but the design of this system means they're basically read-only so that should hopefully help them survive longer.
When you hold a game cart in your hand, you can close your eyes and imagine holding that entire game’s essence in the palm of your hand, you can see it and picture it, and in this sense it’s no longer just bits of data, but rather an entire world just waiting to be explored.
These people who don’t want carts and just want everything downloaded straight to a device and packed in an NVME can fuck off, I see now that it was this kind of min/max thinking that killed a lot of the fun rituals that made the gaming experience more magical. The practicality and instant gratification wasn’t worth the trade off, that’s why games suck today and we get micro-transactions and subscriptions shoved down our throats.
Same goes for the Atari 2600, with the difference that the game selection was made with physical switches instead of a menu screen.
For me, the practicality of gaming doesn't get in the way of the same enjoyment that you described feeling. I love it that I can have my favorites and current ones loaded in a single console, which I hold exactly as dearly as you described with the game cartridge. To me, most games are experiences though, and therefore I have no use for the media, packaging etc after I have experienced it. When I want to refresh my memories, I rather look at the screenshots and videos I took of the game, rather than the box or cartridge, as the media I created is much more personal.
And part of that magic was the UNIQUENESS of the "cartridge", be it a Genesis cart, an NES cart, or even a PC big box. Having them displayed in your bedroom on a shelf was part of that experience. Personally I think you lose a lot of this magic with a tiny and somewhat generic looking SD card.
Also let's not pretend that there wasn't a metric F###-ton of garbage day games [1] back in the day. The only difference is the barrier to entry to game development and production is significantly lower - so there's just orders of magnitude more.
There are still plenty of VERY high quality games released today - you're either not looking for them or deliberately choosing to ignore them. (Spelunky, Shovel Knight, BG3, Tomb Raider 2013, Doom Eternal, Cuphead, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, etc.)
Having a tangible thing somehow makes it mean more, think about picking out a record or CD to play and leaving it to play as opposed to scrolling through infinite music to choose what to play.
I think that what you really want is going back to pre-internet times when access to media was limited, so every single piece of media had value. You had one casette, you'd listen to it back to back because there was nothing else. Nowadays media feel meaningless not because they're not put on physical plastic, but because you have infinite access to it at all times. Some people argue that you could try to restrict yourself to some specific subset, but deep down you'll always know it's just a theatre.
Since I accepted the fact that I hate most of humanity and 99% of commercial products are slop, I started valuing things much more. The rush of "wow I found something that isn't slop" mimics the old feeling of getting a new disc.
There's already every single mainstream platform offering what you want. This is clearly a niche product serving a niche usecase: recreating the experience of physical carts like an SNES or a PS2 or a Gameboy. Some people, necessarily a minority, enjoy this. Why are you so angry? I don't get it.
Although, to be honest, if the digital world didn't exist at all, I'm sure I'd manage to have a good time all the time. It's just that now that it exists, I prefer it more - streaming over physical media for example.
>Having a tangible thing somehow makes it mean more, think about picking out a record or CD to play and leaving it to play as opposed to scrolling through infinite music to choose what to play.
The same could be said in reverse. Just to highlight that this is a subjective experience, and not an objective truth. "Having an infinite pool of music somehow makes in mean more, as opposed to the dusty collection that you happen to have at home".
On the other, there's something deeply "unmagical" about loading up a huge menu of games. Even if they're organized in some way (console, genre, studio, whatever), even if you include box art and info, it's simply not the same experience. Most retro gaming channels I watch on YouTube talk about this phenomenon--mostly in the context of "why do you have shelves full of games".
Different people will think different things about this. I have a 77 square meter home (~830ft2) and like, I'm not fitting all the games I ever bought in this place, let alone all the albums, books, etc. I have flash carts, hard drives, and a kindle keyboard v3. I kind of chalk it up to "life is a beautiful struggle". Friction is good, actually, it enriches life, and these kinds of little agonies are fun to just discuss and find common experience over.