For me personally owning the cart doesn’t make me want to play the game any more or less than a digital version. I struggle with this regardless of my options. Right now I am pretty maxed out on space, so while I’m not looking to sell (at least not a lot), I AM trying to avoid ADDING to my collection. If push comes to shove and I absolutely need more room then I’ll be more inclined to keep my hardware over software I think.
I think the decision paralysis happens a lot with emulation and flash carts. I know it impacts me on emulation. For flash carts I only load the games I want to play and remove some every once in a while. I restrict myself a little by using a 512MB card too so I cant load an entire library even if I wanted to.
I’ve thought of selling up and going emulation only, but I literally don’t have the time to sell all my collection. So I keep putting it off.
I spent a while putting together a barcode scanning system and scanned my whole collection, over 400 original items, not including the gold discs from my teenage years. Of course I’ve neglected to add anything I’ve bought since! Ha.
http://www.rfgeneration.com/cgi-bin/collection.pl?name=matt&folder=Collection
I try lots of games through emulation, only buying my absolute favourites. I’m lucky that my taste is quite different than most, so I’m never looking at the really expensive popular games.