Gaming Why are original Pokémon cartridges so expensive?

[JuanMena]

Because there's not a single rom dump of those repetitive games which makes physical copies a rarely seen item.
Oh wait! There are! Everywhere!

Gotta download'em all!

But with all seriousness, I would totally kill for original GB cartridges but they're super expensive here.
You should try and get... the games... by other meanings... not because I endorse auch behavior, but because there's patches that restores exclusive Pokemons and special gifts/events in certain games.

Like:
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4935/

and

https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4391/

Post automatically merged: Nov 1, 2022

- Posts automatically merged. Please don't double post! -

Also, OP, any chinese online store will sell you clone cartridges, if you're desperate, you could buy a "pack" which usually contains 3 games (say, Red/Blue/Yellow) for cheap.

 

[romanaOne]

All of the fake Pokemon carts I bought over the years were complete trash: they seemed ok at first and then they either stopped working or had save problems.

I got a fake Crystal, Green (English translation), and Emerald. Mostly I wanted to experiment with overwriting the games on some cheap flashable carts. Green failed completely within a few weeks of use. Crystal drains its SRAM battery in months. Fake Emerald has a strange save where it uses part of the ROM for its save or the dumper thinks the save is part of the ROM, I don't know. I think I overwrote it with some JRPG. In any case, after soldering on a battery to get the SRAM to work, I discovered the battery drained in less than a year on Fake Emerald too. I guess all this trash hardware makes real games look good.

There is also lack of new ideas in 3DS and beyond. Just a bunch of remakes targeting the next generation of naive young suckers. Long, boring intro movies and GBs of 3D artwork and no real change to the same-old 90s game loops. Maybe this stokes a certain nostalgia. I'll probably keep my old games forever, esp. after buying disappointing shite like Arceus.

 

[Maximumbeans]

The definitive way I read is by opening the cartridge and verifying its board, but *hopefully* most old Nintendo handheld cartridges out there on eBay are genuine.

I'd open them just to be safe. There's even fakes of anime DVDs which looks identical to the real thing and it's hard to tell it's a fake. One way of knowing? They use DVD5 discs rather than DVD9 as they're a lot cheaper, so with that alone you can see the video/audio quality is inferior.

I've never opened any of mine up but they pass all the other checks so hopefully I've not been duped...hopefully.

In fairness I think a lot of sellers genuinely don't know that they have a fake on their hands, especially when they willing send me a photo of the cart's back that shows a nonidentical serial number