Sometime after Labor Day of 2016, while the world was gnawing knuckles, desparate for either distraction or sanity, Nintendo released a little hunk of plastic called the NES Classic. It included a bunch of piddly video games built into it from an era of 8-bit novelty, as well as all the Mario and Zelda games. You'd be forgiven for not realizing this happened, for, like, a lot of reasons, but for the sake of momentary storytelling, you might not've realized this happened because they only made (I won't stop writing to fact-check Wikipedia) about twenty of these retro systems.

With scarcity came scalping. You couldn't find them on shelves. A guy with no jawline literally laughed at me when I asked if his store sold them. Lucky for me, there's approximately $4 worth of fun to have with an NES Classic because there are nine games on the original Nintendo that could be considered timeless classics (I can't get into why that number is exactly nine because I don't have two hours and a fog machine).

I didn't get an NES Classic last year. Nevertheless, it'd be nice to have the device as a gift for my brother, or at least as a trophy for all my hard (?) work finding one.

Click the 'GO TO NOW' button and the pre-orders for the successor to the NES Classic, the SNES Classic.

Second verse, same as the first: psychos snapped up all the available online pre-orders for the retro 16-bit replica console. Odds are good that we'll never see one on the shelves of Walmart, the console's supposedly-ideal home, design as a holiday impulse-buy. We could now get into discussions of capitalism and value. We could talk about people buying things up because they KNEW, MAN that they'd be valuable. Yeah, that's thinking more common for the brain of a sparrow, not a mammal, dude. You saw something shiny and snapped it up.

But, look, listen, and read these words.

Don't buy a scalped SNES Classic. Don't pay $225 for a pre-order claimed by a bot from another hemisphere. Just don't do it, alright, kid? You don't want it that badly. Your brain is changing shapes, square to triangle, in an attempt to convince yourself you've gotta have that reborn gray and purple plastic hope-box, but you really don't. You're obsessed with the prize, with the chase, with the participation in commerce's event of the season.

Don't pay more than $80 for a chunk of emulated technology inside a 3D-printed case.

If Nintendo had wanted you to have one, to play their retro games, to permit everyone with the opportunity to buy and play to their content, they'd have manufactured more of them. Since they didn't build enough SNES Classics to accommodate demand, this is 100% an exercise in publicity and word-of-mouth marketing. Product shortages make for great article headlines, just like this one. It's a priceless commodity.

Don't do it. Don't kill yourself and don't pay more than retail for one. If you've gotta play retro games, I bet you can find a Nintendo Wii for $10 at a thrift shop. If you've gotta have a dedicated system, DIY your retro setup and put a Raspberry Pi to work on the task. No, I'm not going to explain what I mean. You've got the internet. You look it up.

Oh, and if you're legitimately bummed out that you won't get to play "Star Fox 2" on the unobtainable SNES Classic, I promise the rom will be dumped on launch day. Just don't spend $220+ on a scalped hunk of plastic that will not recapture your childhood—play Shovel Knight instead.