Gaming corporations are doing their damnedest to get rid of emulation and piracy on top of getting rid of original versions of these games. Sure, we can re-download these things from piracy sites but keep in mind that these sites are constantly being attacked by copyright ghouls. Archive.org or your favourite rom or torrent site might not be around tomorrow. The internet is becoming increasingly corporate and restricted and it’s important that these things not be lost to time and the only versions left are bastardised “remasters” locked behind a subscription to be ended anytime or until the next bastardised remaster comes along.
And if you’re lucky enough to own a physical copy of a game, learn how to dump that shit onto a computer.
I have an inkling that the modern gaming experience will eventually become so intolerable that playing old retro games will become the final refuge of gaming.
Oh come now, as long as you buy all the DLC you still get a full game!
There’s a qualitative shift that occurred in the gaming industry at around the PS1 era, namely the shift from arcade coinsuck games to ones that tried to provide enough gaming experience in a somewhat more accessible way to justify the high price of purchasing games as well as utilising the new expanded capacity of home gaming systems.
Of course there’s always going to be outliers to this trend but the shift from, say Contra style games to Final Fantasy style games is really apparent. The Wonderboy series is probably a case study in the transition between these two points, with Monster Land still being very much a coinsuck lite RPG platformer and The Dragon’s Trap being less of a coinsuck but still strongly influenced by this style of gaming.
The learning curve of coinsuck games is usually really fucking steep and punishing af.
I wonder if this is going to have an impact on how people engage with retro games? I mean, I used to be good at playing Psycho Fox but these days I can’t really get much past the first level without constantly leaning on save states and my persistence in the game simply doesn’t exist the way that it used to.
On a side note, I have a weird but legitimate fear that the older generation of gamers as they reach their dotage will not have the ability to play the games from their childhood because they are mostly prohibitely difficult and rely on such an extensive memory of the game, very quick reaction times, and a lot of persistence. I think that as this generation reaches the point of natural cognitive decline they would get a huge amount of comfort from setting them up with the old games they used to play but I don’t think that they will really be able to play a many of those games - it’s hard to imagine a dementia patient really getting very far playing the Contra game from their youth, y’know?
The happy medium might be in that era of the PS1 through PS2 when games weren’t just coinsuckers, but were also designed without “online experiences” in mind. Once we got to PS3 and the other 7th generation consoles, we started really getting into awful always-on online shit. I’ve been playing through the Assassins Creed Black Flag on the PS3, and it’s crazy how much of that seeps into what should just be a self-contained game.