My brother recently sold his playstation 2 and picked up a SNES, some games and had enough change for a fish supper and the bus home... I have many happy memories playing Super Mario Kart (much more fun than the N64 version) the original Mortal Kombat, and even Sim City (once you had the $1m dollar cheat)
Lat time I picked up a Megadrive I went halves with a friend at Uni - there was a space battle game where you could choose from around 8 different ships and fight in an asteroids-style wrap screen. The graphics were crap but the gameplay was sublime. It was called star command/space command?