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When you add a console to your collection, the first thing you want to do is get a handful of games to keep you busy with your new toy. However, most of us can't spend afford to spend fat pile of cash for a few games. This budget-friendly list should help you quickly find which games will start you off well without emptying your wallet.   Since the SNES is quickly growing with nostolgic collectors, it's getting harder to find real values in the SNES market.   However, as long as you don't mind skipping the harder-to-find cardboard boxes for the games, you can find these classics for $10 or less.  (Prices listed are an average eBay price for US cartridge-only games, including shipping)

Launching in the US on August 1989, the Nintendo Game Boy has been around for 18 years. The original Game Boy set the standard to portable gaming. All the Nintendo DSes and Sony PSPs you see everyone playing today wouldn't be possible if it weren't for the overwhelming success of the Game Boy. It was the quality of the games that kept the Game Boy around for more than ten years until its successor, the Game Boy Advance, was launched. The games that sold well were repackaged with the "Player's Choice" label and sold at a budget price. Here are the top 5 best Player's Choice games for the Game Boy.

Typically, my Cheapest Games Worth Your Time series looks for games that are $10 or less, but with the Neo-Geo, that just isn't an option. This 24-bit powerhouse has always been for only the most financially-blessed gamers with both the system and games retailing for hundreds of dollars each. With a hardcore following and a very limited supply of games, many game prices are still much more than most retro gamers are used to paying for a single title. Because of this, my "Cheap" Neo-Geo list will be rather short and I'll have to adjust my price targets as well.

For my next revision to the Cheapest Games series , I wanted to revisit the Sega Saturn. The values of the popular Saturn games have increased significantly over the last few years - especially for complete copies of the game.  Because of this, I've bumped up my criteria for the list to games that are under $25.   Now keep in mind, the prices quoted below are for complete copies of the game in excellent condition.  If you want to save a lot of money, you can usually find disc-only versions of the games.

Originally designed to be a peripheral for the Super Nintendo, Sony's PlayStation brand would go on a steady climb through the late 1990s to dominate the market for two generations of games. But before it could get there, it would have to go toe to toe with the giants of the 16-bit era, Nintendo and Sega. The PlayStation, sometimes referred to as the PS, PS1, or even PSX, would also see an influx of gamers coming into the field while an older generation began looking for more mature titles. The little gray console would see one of the longest production runs in gaming history, running for over 11 years. Production would finally be halted on March 23, 2006.

The Sega Dreamcast is everyone's favorite hardcore system. Even when the mass market shunned it and went for the Playstation 2 instead, hardcore gamers still loved the Dreamcast to death. Although the games were some of the best and innovative of the era, sales were lacking. For the games that sold well, they were repackaged with a "Sega All Stars" label and released for a budget price. Here are the top five best games of the Sega All Stars for the Sega Dreamcast.

The Nintendo 64 is possibly the most popular videogame console ever made. Some of the best games were created for this system, and surely some of the best videogame hours have been spent playing these games. I received an N64 for my 11th birthday, and I immediately fell in love with it. I played a lot of games on that system, but I wanted to know if my favorite games were anyone else's favorite games. I did a little research, and using the user ratings and, of course, my own opinions, I think I have selected a great list of the top 10 best games ever made for the Nintendo 64.

Not so very long ago, two consoles dominated the market Nintendo's Super Nintendo or SNES and Sega's Genesis. Though the Genesis lacked the competitor's graphics and power. Sega made up more ground in the realm of software support and addictive game play. The good, old three button controller (revamped for six buttons for Mortal Kombat) provided gamers with many different options. The top ten games for the good system, in no particular order...

Beat'em ups, which are also known as Brawlers (and belt scroll games in Japan), generally focus on one player taking on a large number of enemies in some form of melee oriented combat.  The beat'em up genre is also well known for offering co-op gameplay for 2-4 players, which for some people is a big part of the genre's appeal.  The genre should not be confused with one on one fighting games inspired by Street Fighter II, which is a common mistake some gamers make.  Though there is some shared history and crossover between the two genres in terms of characters and certain gameplay elements, they are not the same.

You know how many games were released for the various Sinclair formats over the years? We'll tell you - dozens. Maybe hundreds. Actually, thousands. Maybe a million. A lot. So choosing the fifty best from a list consisting of "a lot" of games is no easy task. That's why we asked you, the Retro Gamer massive, to do the legwork for us with your voting gloves. Vote you did, and the results are in. With Your Sinclair only bursting into fragrant life in 1986, review scores for older games have been taken from re-release or compilation reviews where available.

After producing many games for early home videogame consoles, Sega decided to develop a console system of its own. The SG-1000 and Mark III were available in Japan in the mid-1980s, but when Sega witnessed the early success of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the company knew it wanted a share of the American console market. So, Sega redesigned the Mark III, renamed it the Sega Master System (SMS for short), and released it in 1986, not long after the NES first came out. Unfortunately for Sega, the SMS wiped out in the wake of Nintendo's wave of popularity.

Here we are another year, and another list for you to look at. Seriously why do we need to show off a list of games for a 16 bit console that most people call the 2nd best for its time? Because it OWNED, that's why. The Sega Genesis was when gaming went from toy to fanism, where lines were drawn in the sand and you either wore the blue or the red. If you were in LA at the time, you could not go into a red neighborhood without being mocked about blast processing. Riots ensued and musicals were written (...c'mon no one saw that piece I did 8 years ago?) and to this day the Genesis does what the Nintendon't, and by that I mean make good Saturday morning cartoons.

Whenever a man professes his love for a lynx, people usually assume that he's one of those weirdos that's into furries or something. Well, today I stand before you and I am professing my adoration for a different kind of lynx - The Atari Lynx! To this day, it still remains my favorite portable system, and with good reason. So let's take a stroll down memory lane by looking at the features and history of the system along with my picks for the 10 best games.

There have been a number of classic video game cartridges that have garnered surprising sums on the auction block over the years. On any given week on Ebay, or on dedicated fan sites, you can find plenty of titles changing hands for a couple hundred bucks. Notoriously rare Atari 2600 games like Tooth Protectors or Chase the Chuckwagon (which you got by sending in labels from dog food) trade for sums that far exceed the fun you're ever going to have with such rotten games. But every once in a while a retro cart comes along that goes for not hundreds, but thousands of dollars.

Like every other form of electronic media, most video games are popular for a time and then fade away into disuse. The exact reason this occurs is different for every video game, but is usually a combination of new competing video games, advances in graphics, and low replay value. While quality video games will often spur the creation of a sequel, many times with few differences from its predecessor, few games actually last the test of time. For a very small number of games, despite improvements in video game technology, the quality of the game and more importantly, the replay value of the game, is so great that the game continues to flourish years and even decades after it is first published. The following games are the best ten games ever with high replay value.

Over the last 15 years or so, we've seen a huge amount of fighting games. Mainly in the arcade where they became the most famous Fighting games are the games you would skip school to go to the arcade and play. There have been some bad, there have been some good, there have been some great. But there have also been the ones that are better then great, the ones that really influenced the genre for the better. This is what that list is for. It's for those top 5 fighters that were not only great, but groundbreaking and bringing in many newcomers into the fighting game genre.

The 2000s was a massive decade for the video game business. Over that span video games overtook movies as an entertainment medium, with some of the most powerful game franchises earning hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The past ten years has seen PC software giant Microsoft throw their hat in the video game ring with the successful launch of their Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles. Nintendo faded in the early part of the decade, but game back stronger than ever following the reason of their handheld touch-screen DS and DSi, and their massively popular, ground-breaking Wii console. The decade also saw the release of the best video games of all time, and many of those games will be long remembered in video game history for their innovative gameplay. Trying to pick the greatest of these games was a daunting challenge, and I'm sure the fanboys will be out in full force to defend their consoles of choice. Here are my picks for the best video games of the 2000s...

When I played the Sega Master System for the first time in Macy's in 1987, I had already owned the NES for about three months. The first game I played (or watched, I can't remember) was Choplifter. After seeing how amazing the graphics were compared to the NES, I knew I had to have the SMS A.S.A.P. Shortly after, I bought one in Crazy Eddie and it became my favorite system for the next two and a half years (until the Genesis and Turbo Grafx 16 came out). While it never really became popular, due to almost no third party support and the near-monopoly the NES had (which outsold it by about 12 to 1!), it had some truly outstanding now-classic games, and the graphics and accessories (liquid crystal 3-D glasses and the best light gun at the time) were way ahead of their time. Sadly, I still dream about what could have been if things had went right. Anyway, it's going to be extremely tough to come up with a top 10 list, but here I go...

Generally, these games are those which once left a mark on the community but have been long forgotten or are now unavailable for download for whatever reason. I've included my irreverent reasons for hosting each of them. Enjoy!