When I was about 8 or 9, I walked into the living room, my face a grim mask of determination, and informed my parents that they could dispose of all of my toys, as I would no longer be playing with them. They could throw away my die-cast Voltron, my Star Wars figures, my Transformers, my Madballs. I would spend the rest of my childhood in quiet intellectual pursuit, reading Proust and the like. I've regretted it ever since.

I really wish I was joking, but I'm not. I was spurred to this momentous decision when I discovered a 17-year-old neighbor of mine enthusiastically playing with some G.I. Joe fortress on his front porch. In retrospect, he may have been a bit retarded... clinically, I mean. But even at 8 years old, positively envious of the toy he was using to enact all sorts of amazing battles against Cobra, I still realized he would probably be better off utilizing his time chasing girls.

It seemed like a pragmatic investment in my future at the time, but I've spent the rest of my life regretting that mistake. I eye covetously all the cool toys that I denied myself. Ironically, if I'd played with toys as long as I'd wanted, I probably wouldn't be so into them now. This is also probably the reason I'm into games — my parents wouldn't let me play them growing up, because it "rots the mind." They had a point there; I write for Kotaku.

This is only tangentially related to why I got drooling over the Dreamcast Junkyard's gallery of Dreamcast-oriented toys and memorabilia. Still, even as I check eBay for the collection of Street Fighter or House of the Dead toys, I can't help but wonder if toys aren't more for adults like me as collectibles now than they are for little kids to play with. Which is sad, really — toys aren't meant to be mint and pristine and kept in a cardboard box. They're meant to be ripped open by little kids and used as the avatars of grand sandbox adventures. Florian Eckhardt

Dreamcast Memorabilia! Swoosh. [Dreamcast Junkyard]