Physical vs Digital

I recently lost my entire collection of GBA games except for Pokemon Pinball, which happened to be in my Gameboy at the time. I'm the kind of guy who likes to take all of my games with me when I go on a trip, and I had them in a large Ziploc bag that I remember unpacking but can no longer find. This made me very sad. I decided, from that moment on, that I was going to start downloading all my 3DS games because that's an option now. As I said, I like to take all of my games with me and my 3DS library is ever growing. Along with my DS games, I'm struggling to stuff them all in the carrying case I have. Not to mention that I also never keep my games in the cases. Those things just take up too much space, so put my disks and cartridges in storage drawers. Bottom line: I literally have cardboard boxes filled with plastic boxes in case I ever want to sell something in complete edition.

Anyway, like I said, I decided I was going to start downloading all my 3DS games for the above reasons. So, I bought a big 'ol 32 gig SD card hoping it would have enough space. To my surprise, that thing has 200,000+ blocks on it! No problem there, then. My first digital purchase of a retail game was Luigi's Mansion. At first it seemed awesome. I got the game instantly the day it came out. No cartridge to lose. No case to accentually step on and partially crush before I find some place to put it. Game always there when I want to play it. Except now that I've had some time to sit on it, I feel dirty. I'm perfectly okay with downloading games if that's the only option to buy them. But the simple fact that there's an option to get the cartridge makes me feel like I've done something wrong. I'm starting to actually reget my decision. Having grown up my whole life with physical media, it's really something I want to have. I like to look at my collection, carry it around, and swap out the games, even if it's inconvenient. One of my first systems ever was a Gameboy and I'm just so damn used to it. Not to mention the fact that the digital games are the same price and are pretty unlikely to ever go on sale. In general, Nintendo games don't really drop in price, but I occasionally find a buy one get one half off sale or something. Plus, you have the option of buying and selling used. But now I can't take advantage of that. I can't even buy games with gift cards unless I explicitly tell people to get me 3DS prepaid cards as a gift (and confuse the hell out of relatives) or use my gift card to buy another card.

It's crazy– I've actually considered buying Luigi's Mansion again just so I have a game card, and now I'm faced with a stupid 1st world gamer problem. Do I embrace the future and continue to download all my games, or do cling to the past and keep buying physical copies? What do you guys thing about physical vs digital? Is it a good option because it's a handheld? Will you buy or have you bought retail games digitally on your 3DS or Wii U? I know that, at the very least, I'm going to keep buying my home console disks so long as they keep being made. But this handheld thing presents a stupid dilema to me.

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