Physical or Digital?

One of the greatest feelings associated with gaming is going to the store, looking at the games on the shelf, finding the game you want, or something you weren't expecting to find, making your purchase and then leaving, excited to get home to try out your games. As typical as that is, it's a wonderful feeling. Of course if there's a particular game we want, we can always shop online and avoid some stress that unfortunately sometimes comes with that experience, like rude people, the trip to the store and what have you. The digital age also provides a similar feeling when it comes to shopping for games but without the aforementioned hassles. However, since our purchases are digital, we end up with a game that exists only inside a machine and isn't something we can hold in our hands

Finding a physical copy of this game isn't always easy
and if you do find it, expect to pay around the price of
brand new console release. The Xbox Live Arcade version, however,
is a much cheaper and easier option.

Having a game sit on your shelf, being able take it down and actually hold it in your hands, as ordinary as that is, it's a great thing to be able to do. To look over the cover. To flip through the manual, it's nice to be able to do all that stuff. These are things that we cannot do with a digital game. Now that's not to say that digital releases shouldn't be appreciated like a physical release. Just because I can't treasure Mega Man 10 in the same way I can Mega Man 3, that doesn't make Mega Man 10 any less valuable to me. Mega Man 10 is actually one of my favorite Mega Man games. But despite my feelings on the matter, there are people out there that wished Mega Man 10 was released in physical form, some even going so far as to want it on an NES cartridge.

It's not just Mega Man 10 either. Mighty Switch Force, Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury and other retro inspired titles get digital releases and many of them are sold for chump change. Maybe publishers feel that their games won't move as many copies in physical format. As competitive as the market was in the late 1990s, it's even more so now. It's not just about placing your game up against Sonic, Mario or Zelda. There's the Batman Arkham Cities, the Call of Duties, Skyrim and a slew of other mega high profile titles. It really is a jungle out there and even good games that see a physical release get eaten alive. As nice as it would be for every game to get a physical release, that just isn't the game industry that we have.

Mega Man 10 is just as important to me as any
physical release in the series.

I'm personally a big fan of digital releases, especially for older games. I never owned a PC-Engine or a TurboGrafx so I was never able to play Blazing Lazers, Lords of Thunder, Gate of Thunder, New Adventure Island, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and many of the other standout games for those systems. This all changed when I started checking out PCE and TG games on the Wii's Virtual Console. Rondo of Blood is a superb, yet brutal Castlevania title, New Adventure Island is now my favorite game in that series, and Blazing Lazers is another solid shooter entry from the now defunct Compile. I could have tracked down a PCE and TG and these games, but the Virtual Console saved me the hassle as well as cash.

Sonic CD can be experienced by a wider audience
thanks to digital releases.

Sonic CD, held in regard as one of the best Sonic games was originally released on the ill-fated Sega CD (Mega CD for you European readers) hardware and for a long time, it remained a Sonic game that not many played. Sure Sega rectified this when they released it on the Sonic Gems Collection for GameCube, but the recently released Xbox Live and PlayStation Network version of Sonic CD is easily the most definitive version of Sonic's first CD-based adventure, allowing you to hear both the Japanese/European and American soundtracks and letting gamers play as Tails. This version of Sonic CD is also ridiculously dirt cheap, around the price of a value meal at McDonald's. So for less than the price of a few comic books, gamers can easily play one of Sonic's best games without having to find the original hardware or a compilation game. And it's all because of a digital release.

So to answer my own question in this editorial title, physical or digital, I say, why not have both? They've both got their good points and I'm a proud endorser for both anyway.