Everything You Could Buy Instead Of Galaxy 1 + 2
A £60 challenge that spits in the face of Nintendo
The opening months of the Switch 2 and the beginning of this new era of Nintendo have been quite the ride.
On one hand, the new Switch broke sales records, has delivered some fantastic games already and has plenty coming in the pipeline to make my day 1 purchase feel justified; Kirby Air Riders and Pokemon Legends Z-A (a name so bad it surely makes Microsoft jealous) don’t interest me but Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Age of Imprisonment will soon be with us.
On the other hand, Nintendo’s decade of growing consumer hostility, high prices and questionable ethics have boiled over into widespread discontent with shameless lawsuits, restrictive patents and the topic of today’s post: 2 Wii games with worse-looking graphics re-released at a premium price.
A common justification I see thrown around for butchered re-releases and HD versions like this is that retro gaming is expensive, that old consoles take up a lot of space and that old games are ‘inaccessible:’ a word so vague and shapeless it means something different every time it is used.
I’ve been a self-professed retro gamer since around 2020, when a friend mailed me his unwanted PS1 and I started to stream PS2 games on PS4, this slowly spiralled into the large collection I have today, so when I see these old games and consoles, I know roughly how much they should cost.
Retro gaming is not as expensive as you might think and in this post, using the £60 you could spend on this overpriced crap as a guide, I’m going to show you how much you can really get for your money via CEX.
This post is not sponsored, I’m choosing CEX simply because they’re my favourite. Your money may go further or shorter on Ebay, Facebook Marketplace or elsewhere.
A Whole Wii And Both Games - £65
For just £5 more than this bundle, you could have a (blemished) Wii Mini and both games.
For sure, you’d spend a little extra on postage and an HDMI converter but the level of value you’re getting here is far beyond what you’re getting buying these 2 remasters, the Wii has an amazing library and is dirt cheap to buy for.
The Wii Mini is compact, the lack of Wi-Fi doesn’t really matter anymore since the online services have been shut off for over half a decade and both of these games run at a perfect framerate and don’t possess an outdated save-system or any of that unappealing stuff you sometimes find in older games; remember, Super Mario Galaxy 2 came out in 2010, it’s not exactly retro.
A Sega Mega Drive/Genesis Model 2 With Sonic 1 and 2
For £2 less than this nonsense ‘remastered’ bundle, you could own an unboxed, more compact, feature complete version of one of the greatest consoles of all time complete with 2 boxed copies of some absolute classics.
Get yourself a Pound cable (or an actual CRT if you’re not gross) and you’ve got yourself a retro gaming setup that can be expanded upon with 2 add-ons and 2 other libraries of games for those add-ons.
Again, the price isn’t much different but my point with these comparisons is to show the gap in value; you’re spending roughly the same amount of money and getting a whole console out of it.
A PS1 With Crash Bandicoot
For just £6 more you could have yourself a beloved PlayStation with one of its best games… so long as you don’t mind not having the manual.
If you were wanting a marginally smaller console then the smaller PlayStation One is about the same price as the original. Pick your poison.
Moving On
These are about the cheapest console bundles I could muster up without including ancient sports games or shovelware nobody has heard of, so next I’m going to move onto games.
Let me show you just how many classic games you could get for the same price on various consoles; I love Super Mario Galaxy 1 especially but once again, your money can go further.
The Mount Rushmore Of N64
For less than the price of Galaxy 1 & 2 on Switch, you could get yourself what I’d consider to be the 4 most iconic games in the Nintendo 64 library.
What else can I say? You’ve got the best 3D Zelda and my second favourite game ever: Ocarina of Time, the 2nd best 3D Mario, Goldeneye and Pokémon Stadium, which gets even better if you splurge a little extra for the Transfer Pak.
Every Single Halo Game… More Than Once
Halo: Infinite costs more than the rest of the franchise combined, just leave that one off, it’s shit anyway.
Xbox games: all of them, are dirt cheap so you could honestly buy yourself a complete collection of the best games on one of the Xbox consoles with just £60; I bought my current Xbox off Ebay and it came with more than 10 games for not much above £60.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you want to dip into retro gaming but aren’t too sure, get yourself an original Xbox.
The Best Of The Nintendo Wii
There are many great games on the Wii and for less than the price of Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 on Switch, you can have most of the heavy hitters.
Mario Kart Wii even comes with the Wii wheel and it’s still dirt cheap; you’re getting a whole peripheral to use with other racing games too if you so desire.
The fact that Metroid Prime 2 and 3 have not been re-released or remastered yet when Prime 4: Beyond is just round the corner is a little embarrassing; Gamecubes and their games aren’t cheap, luckily, the Wii has you covered and Prime 3 costs less than a coffee where I’m from.
PS2 Royalty
What more can I say about this one? Metal Gear Solid 2 is an absolute classic and Metal Gear Solid 3, in my opinion, is the best game ever made. MGS Delta is out there if you want to play a modernised version of this game but in my opinion? The ballistics are all messed up.
You could save even more by getting the HD Collection.
Two Of The Best Games Ever… And Their Dumb Little Brother
Although I personally disagree (I like a little more horror in my Resident Evil) I think the majority of gamers would say that Resident Evil 4 is the best in the series; Resident Evil 1 Remake (REmake) is the favourite of classic survival-horror fans like myself.
Here, you can get them both and even pick up the, kind of terrible, Resident Evil 0 if you so desire.
With plenty of room left in that £60 budget you might decide to grab Super Mario Sunshine too if you really want to balance out 2 classics with 2 shitty Gamecube games.
Loads Of SNES Goodness
The best 2D Mario, the best 2D Zelda, F-Zero and Pilot Wings: for less than £50 you can set yourself up with some of the fundamental classic SNES games.
As usual with cartridge-based games, they cost an arm and a leg boxed but if you buy them loose and get yourself some cartridge cases and maybe even some end-labels, you have a safe, sleek storage solution and get to own these games at a fraction of the price.
All Of Classic Mega Drive/Genesis Sonic*
*Unless you don’t count the Mega CD and Mega 32x as their own libraries
Once again: 4 games for roughly the price of two and since Sega retro prices are significantly less bullshit than Nintendo, you can get almost all of them boxed and with manuals too; I actually bought this exact bundle (minus Sonic and Knuckles) and a Mega Drive for my mum a few years ago for Christmas.
After a going over with a cotton bud, everything worked fine and it was received very well.
The Saturn Light-Gun And 3 Of The Best Games
You know something is grossly overpriced when it’s cheaper to buy games for the Saturn instead.
That’s right, instead of buying Wahoo 1 and 2 you could get yourself a whole peripheral for the Saturn which enhances some of it best games along with the excellent Sega Rally Championship and Virtua Fighter 2 if playing fighting games against the CPU is your sort of thing.
The Message
At the end of the day, it’s not for me to tell you how to spend your money but I hate to see people getting ripped off.
All the time I see old games labelled ‘inaccessible’ or ‘expensive’ when in reality, the only thing separating you from revisiting your old favourites is a console, a copy of the game and a CRT; all of the above tend to be quite cheap as I’ve shown today. You can even cheap out further by getting yourself a Pound cable or some other kind of HD converter.
There are absolutely exceptions to this rule: rare games that go for several hundred pounds or if you live in a country where console gaming was never popular but for the vast majority of the Anglosphere? These ‘remasters’ are overpriced crap.
Don’t let Nintendo rip you off, there are always cheaper ways to play old games, always.
Thank you very much for reading to the end of today’s post, don’t forget to like and subscribe if you enjoyed it and I’ll be happy to chat with you in the comments below.
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I feel like I could do a respectable job of this with just indie 3D platformer alternatives on Steam. There are so many worthwhile options in every genre these days that it doesn't seem like re-releasing pared down and taped together ports of older games is going to cut it anymore. Not that that'll stop them trying.
Rest assured, I'll be emailing this article to Nintendo's lawyers, haha.
Great comparisons, 60 pounds or 70 dollars really is highway robbery for a half-assed compilation.