bite sized - evolution on emulation

Hey, loggers. Welcome back to another Bite Sized episode of the Backlog Breakdown. Our Bite sized episodes are where we kind of take a single thought and instead of kind of really diving into it like we tend to do in a lot of our main episodes, I just give you some thoughts surrounding it. Try and try and massage the thought a little bit. I don't know, that's. That's kind of a weird picture. But anyways, we have. I have one thing to present, so it shouldn't take too long. And that's why we call it Bite Size. Anyway, who am I? I'm your host, Josh, and I'm here by myself. We usually do these solo, although sometimes we like to bring friends on, even though bringing on friends is not necessarily conducive to the Bite Size moniker. I'll let you decide what that means for you in for yours, but I think you know what I mean. Anyways, so today the concept that I wanted to talk about is one that popped up in our Discord. It was a question that was presented in the Discord this past week and. And I have some thoughts. Okay, but before I explain my thoughts, I do just have to say that these thoughts are my own. They do not reflect the entire podcast, meaning the other half of this podcast, Mr. Nate McKeever. I'm sure we will talk about it and discuss it more later. Anyways, this question that was brought up in our Discord server, it had to do with emulation consoles with specific devices that are made to emulate games, old games and ROMs. I say old in particular. There's designation there, but it doesn't matter. The one in in question in Discord was particularly for old games. So we had someone ask, okay, so I was just gifted this handheld emulation console and it has 38,000 games on it. How do I count? Is this like adding plus 38,000 for my beatdown score for the year? And look, I get it. It was a good joke. I liked it. I liked the joke. I'm going with a little bit more serious tone. Like I'm actually addressing the issue here because of kind of the underlying thought process behind it. But I applaud the joke. It was good. And just sharing like, hey, I got this cool thing. What do you guys think about this cool thing? Do you think it's cool? Because I think it's cool. I do think it's cool, actually. In fact, I have a few of my own that somewhat similar just kind of emulation Chinese emulation consoles. I'm holding one if you're not watching on YouTube. I'm holding in my hand the Anbernic RG35XXSP, which uses the form factor of a Game Boy advance sp and it can run a ton of different emulators on this thing. To play some older games. I think it plays up to PlayStation, up to and through PlayStation. It came with some like Dreamcast games and stuff like that. I'm not gonna be playing Dreamcast on this thing. I'm also just not very interested. Although I played a couple minutes of Crazy Taxi just to see if it would actually play and it did, you know. But anyways, that's, that's not the purpose of this guy. And actually the purpose of it I will talk about in just a little bit. So I do own an emulation console and in fact I've used it this year to play through some games. And I'm going to continue to be using this guy for its convenience because it means that I can take older games that would require me to use older systems plugged into older TVs and sitting in front of those TVs in order to play them. Now I can play them on the go, which is very useful for me and my context both as a father, so. And as a guy with a bunch of responsibilities that I don't have as much time to kind of sit in front of a TV and hook up an old console and play in that way. It also allows me to use quick save and loading, so save states and things like that. And that helps. It makes games. It changes. It changes the way that you play certain games. Right. Because a lot of old games require memorization. And while I do still want to play it in a way that at least, at least assumes that you need that I don't use. I don't. I try not to save scum, if you know what that is. You know, kind of safe stating every few steps just to make sure you don't have to play it again. I do think there's something to be said about basically giving yourself unlimited lives or something along those lines so that you're actually accomplishing some of the goals in the game, even if you're not adhering to the original rules of dying and loading. That old games were known for being difficult because of that. That was not the proper, the proper word order, but hopefully it made at least a little bit of sense. Anyways, this guy, this, this emulation machine allows me and it helps me to beat down my backlog. Okay. That's what I primarily use it for, is for games that I already own, that I haven't finished before. So games like Goof Troop on Super Nintendo, I beat that last year. Punch Out Mike Tyson's Punch out on NES Willow, I recently beat and Ninja Gaiden and there's, and I just started Contra 3, the alien wars. Okay, this is a great way to play those games and it allows me to do so to where I don't have to dedicate a ton of time to with setup and tear down and things like that. That said, for the sake of our metagame, the beatdown, of taking, of looking at how many games that you're playing, of trying to focus on beating down your backlog for the year and not getting new stuff for the sake of the beatdown, meta emulation, by and large makes no sense. And when I say that, I mean emulation in the sense of, oh, I can get like an entire ROM set, an entire like, catalog of games for a system. I can, you know, load my. I think this thing came with a card with, you know, like 10,000 games, 8,000 games, like a ridiculously stupid amount of games on it. Whether or not they all run well, I don't know. I like to curate it so that I'm playing the games that I actually own on this thing. Yeah, that's, that's, that's part of another conversation. But for the sake of the beatdown, like, okay, I'm not going to add 10,000 games to my backlog. It makes no sense. What's the point of adding, you know, almost every game ever made onto your backlog? I think it actually dilutes the idea of a backlog so that it just becomes absurd. Like it, like your backlog becomes something that you could never possibly finish if just by picking up something like this or downloading a ROM set that, that those games now all of a sudden are on your backlog. Like, there is no, no realistic reason to me why if by downloading a ton of ROMs, those games are added to your backlog, why anyone would ever want to focus on a backlog? Because you cannot finish all of those games. Like, it's, it's literally impossible. You can't give your Life to playing 38,000 video games, or at least you should not. Okay, I would not recommend that. And I don't think, I mean, I'm sure there's a mathematical calculation that we can throw in there, but even if you play one game, you know, a day, how long is that going to take you? 100 years? Something like that? Over a hundred years. That's, it's, it's ridiculous. So I'm against the idea of using emulation and downloading ROMs and ROM sets for the sake of beating down your backlog. Because one of our key goals with the Beatdown, with this metagame that we have, is to be more mindful about the games that we acquire and to make sure that we are counting the cost in both the time that we play games and the time we spend gaming and in dollars in spending money. So acquiring an entire console Generations library in a single download, it goes against that premise. And I think in practice it actually kind of devalues your gaming time, since you can no longer kind of drink deeply of the experience of the games that you own, but instead you're tempted to kind of skim the surface of a lot of different games just so that you can get to the next one. So for these reasons, I don't think it's feasible to include emulation in our Beatdown metagame. And frankly, if you want to emulate a bunch of games that you don't own, if you want to do that, then the Beatdown, it's probably not a good tool for you anyway, because the whole purpose is to help focus on your backlog. And so if you're just looking to play a bunch of old games that you haven't played before, then I would say exclude yourself from the Beatdown or just, just don't participate in the Beatdown because you're no longer focusing on your backlog. It's just not going to be useful for you if you're just. If you're simply looking to play some old games, okay, play your old games. That's not. Those games are not backlogged. That is my 2 cents on the matter of, of emulation as it relates to the, to the Beatdown. So with that in mind, you might think that. Okay, so. So Josh is, is largely against emulation, but as I mentioned earlier, I have a few of these devices. I use a few of these emulation devices and I enjoy using them. It brings me a lot of convenience and it allows me to go back and have these experiences of games that I have played for years. Again, Goof Troop and Willow immediately come to mind because I've started those games and restarted them tons of times and I had never beaten them until recently. And so with something like this, it allows me to actually do that in a way that's conducive to my life right now. And so I do actually really enjoy emulation. And we've had a few episodes in the past directly addressing the issues of emulation and so I wanted to kind of hop on this, this bite sized episode to talk about emulation for a little bit and where I stand with it because I think my views on emulation have changed a little bit because of kind of where I'm at in life. And it's largely due to the fact of kind of reassessing my own relationship with the physical media of video games. Because I prefer physical media. Okay. I know not everyone listening. In fact, my co host, I believe, I mean he likes his Steelbooks, don't get me wrong, but I know he's. It seems to be that he's a little more neither here nor there. If you can get it digitally cool, if you can get it physically cool, no big deal. I used to be more of a physical media purist and maybe this is just because I like Nintendo a lot and they didn't do digital media that much until the advent of the Switch and the Switch eShop. Regardless, that could play into this here. But especially when we live in a day and age when it is very easy to sail the seas online and acquire ROM sets kind of legality aside, that's, that's a whole other conversation again, one that we've had within these conversations of emulation when it is so easy to access those things and the rights holders of those things do not make their games readily available. By and large, by and large there are some services that, that do allow you to purchase these games or play these games with a, with a subscription service or something along those lines. But by and large there are tons of video games that are no longer available and are readily accessible through emulation. If you're willing to take that step and to search around for them. And our Cough cough hack. We's archived online Cough, cough hack, hack, wheeze wheeze. However you want to. Again, understand, if you catch my drift there. In this day and age, it is easy to emulate games. And there are benefits to emulating games. Like I've spoken about. Some games just actually run better on emulators than they did on their original games. And I don't want to discount even the feeling of plugging in an old NES into a CRT TV and the way that it looks and feels. I love that, don't get me wrong. And in ages past that would have been. There's, there's part of me that's, that's a purist and really wants that experience. Um, but there's another Part of me that is recognizing my stage of life and how that's not conducive to the way that I play video games by and large nowadays. Um, and so because it's, it's no longer convenient for me to do that, I don't do it very often and the games sit in my basement. And so I really do enjoy the fact that you can emulate these games that they can play and sometimes better than they used to play. Certainly more convenient, certainly, you know, with, with save states, saving and loading and you know, being able to hit a home button on an original Nintendo game is kind of ridiculous because I come from the generation where you, you're playing Super Mario Brothers 3 and then it's time for dinner and you ask mom, will you please, please, please not shut this off while we go eat dinner. And then even trying to sneak in keeping the console on all night because you don't want to lose your progress. So I think emulation allows you a lot, it affords you a lot of these conveniences in ability to play these old games. So I am by and large nowadays for emulation so long as it meets certain criteria, so long as you are still doing it to play older experiences that are no longer available or so long as you own those games. Okay, so that's, that's kind of the other caveat to me is like I don't feel any remorse in, in acquiring a, a ROM for Willow on the Nintendo Entertainment System because I own the physical cartridge. It's, it's, it's sort of just a backup at that point. Again, legality aside, that's another conversation. No one has ever legally been taken to court over, over acquiring ROMs. Hosting ROMs, that's different. But acquiring ROMs. And so like strictly legally, I think you can make a copy of your own cartridges. I have not done that and I don't take issue with that because frankly, Willow is not available anywhere. And so I think due to the convenience, I don't have an issue with acquiring it because I own it another way. That's me. That's me. We can have conversations about it. Okay? And that's the case with tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of old games. So my thoughts, my, my evolution of the way that I approach emulation, it's changed. And I really enjoy the fact that we live in a world that emulation is easy to come by and that there are tons of open source emulators out there that help us play these old games. So I like it. My Final. Just words of caution and exhortation that I would give to you as I close this out are just some kind of rules to live by when it comes to emulation. Because as much as I enjoy it, I do have some guardrails in place. Okay. And the first guard route, this is kind of the shining the North Star when it comes to emulation is just don't steal, okay? Don't use emulation just to get out of paying. Paying for games. This is how I would use emulation when I was younger. It's like, oh, there's this really cool game out. I want to play it, but I don't have, you know, 50 bucks or whatever, so I'm just going to emulate it. Don't do that. I believe that that's stealing and I don't think you should steal, so don't do that. I realize that even nowadays that it's fairly easy to emulate the Nintendo switch on modern PCs and even on the Steam deck, I understand that emulation may even be able to run modern games, Switch games, better than their original hardware. So I can't say that it's wrong for you to emulate Switch games, but if you decide to do that, I would strongly encourage you to actually buy the game legally. Okay? I'm not against playing that game on different hardware, but if you actually buy the game, so long as you actually buy the game when it's currently on the market, because if you don't purchase the game and you simply download it to play it while it's available, you're stealing. So don't do that, okay? Just. Just don't steal, okay? Utilize emulation, but don't steal. Also kind of my final point here is that I would say that if you are going to emulate games, then please pick up re releases while they're on the market and support the rights holders. Because I would rather live in a world where these games are readily available. When I can pay a few dollars to download a ROM of a game and then load up my emulation console with legally acquired ROMs. And when I say legally, I don't mean that they're not. That they're illegal anyways. Anyways, okay? What I mean is that I wish I could pay the rights holders for these games. If I could purchase Willow on the Nintendo, you know, online and play it that way, then I would. But we don't live in that world. And so when companies do rerelease old games in series that you enjoy and things like that, then go pick it up, pick it up. I'll tell you, I've been very tempted. I have not yet pulled the trigger. Okay, so I haven't taken my own advice here, but I've been very close to and have my eye on the Capcom Fighting collection. I think that's awesome that Capcom has re released those Marvel vs. Capcom games and they're readily available nowadays. And so what that means is that I am not playing the ROM that came with my emulation console of Marvel vs. Capcom 2. I'm not because I don't own that game and it's readily available. So what I need to do is I need to pick up that game because I want to support Capcom in their efforts to re release their old awesome games. Because I would love to see that from every rights holder. I understand there's issues with rights and licensing and things like that, that, that make that very difficult, but in the vast majority of cases I think, I think it's possible there's infrastructure there, you know, all that stuff. But I would like to, you know, ideal world, Josh's Utopia. Well, I probably wouldn't start with video games, but one of the facets of Josh's Utopia would include readily available ROMs and emulated games for older systems that are no longer available so that you can play them more conveniently. So anyways, that's some thoughts on emulation that I've had. That's where I've kind of shifted in this world a little bit and where my preference is veering towards emulation. Again, I get all the bells and whistles of playing on original hardware and I enjoy that. It just doesn't fit into my game time very well nowadays. So I have to accept where I am in life and then encourage all you guys to join me. Right? I don't know. I don't know. Hopefully this has been encouragement. Hopefully it helps you think through these things as well. And hopefully it's also, yeah, just a bit of an exhortation of hey, recognize what you're doing, recognize what you're supporting and let's play our games and acquire our games and enjoy our games to the glory of God. Thanks guys. Till next time, keep beating down your backlog and we'll keep breaking down the benefits.