Tag: video games

Racing Games

TiberiusLeave a comment

“On Speed” by Lightning McQueen

This topic has been in my notes for a few weeks, and up until recently I thought about first talking about what I love most about the racing game genre before listing off my personal best through worst. I should admit, though, that the games chosen for this were chosen partly for nostalgic reasons but also to see how well they hold up. My appreciation for racing games goes back to an old collection of Hot Wheels toys, funny enough.

There was almost no escaping these little cars. While the cars could be found in most pharmacies and dollar stores and in the bargain bin at select department stores, toy stores held the associated sets and tracks and all of them were awesome. Most often, these were battery-powered loops that propel the cars on assembled tracks that go in multiple different directions. I don’t care what anyone says; no matter your opinions on the 2008 Speed Racer movie, toy manufacturers nailed it when they gave us toys and cars based on the movie. Still got nothing on the LEGO sets, though.

I didn’t own the above set, by the way. These things were huge.

To connect the toy cars to the digital cars I raced around in on the TV, these two ran concurrent with each other. I used to collect loads of toy cars and spend a lot of time with racing games, though not to the same extent as the fighting and adventure games. Still, I spent a lot of time with racing games and so for my best through worst:

Best: Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix (2005)

Mid: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 (2002)

Worst: L.A. Rush (2005)

I think this post will get quite a bit long for each of these three, and before I expand on why I put these games where I put them in lieu of probably better options, this is a personal list that I know won’t walk the same stride as others’ personal lists, I have better memories with these games (emulated or otherwise), and for the game in the Worst category, there are objectively worse games like Crazy Bus or Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, but those were glorified tech demos that could be written off as a joke like Hong Kong 97. You’d have to put them on the same pedestal as actual games we celebrate or despise and that’s too much for those piles of crap. I don’t like to go for low-hanging fruit. Now for the list.

Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix

This version of the game specifically is what I remember best as the game I finished 100% many times over, and as a personal achievement, I managed to do it on the PS2 emulator with just the keyboard. Thank god for long fingers!

The third in the Midnight Club series it follows up from its predecessors with longer races, more challenges, bigger cities, secrets and easter eggs and more. Customization options and an open world to explore let the player get creative during a race. More than once while driving through the cities, I came across these routes to find secrets or prepare to the best of my ability for a race that would most likely take a certain route.

The Dub Edition tagline for the regular and remix versions for the game stem from the game’s partnership with the car magazine Dub, who spruce up a prize car from a tournament in their style to include the Dodge Magnum, the 2006 Dodge Charger, the Chrysler 300C, the Cadillac Escalade EXT and others. The game has three scaled-down, fictionalized versions of the U.S. cities of San Diego, Atlanta, and Detroit, and the remix version includes the Tokyo Challenge. All three cities are headed by a mechanic and his auto parts garage:

San Diego’s mechanic, Oscar, heads the Six-One-Nine Customs;

Atlanta’s garage is Apone Team Racing run by the garage’s namesake,

And Vince’s garage is in Detroit. No fancy name unfortunately.

For Tokyo, Speedway is the garage there.

As you progress through the career mode, you’re told over a type of transceiver or cell phone that a new racer is in the city ready to challenge you. Racers driving a certain type of car denote a car club they belong to and upon their defeat, they send word of you to the club who invites you to partake in their races for a prize across the three cities. Additionally, tournaments can be entered for prize cars, customized by Dub or open for customization at the garage.

The customization options are quite extensive. Most likely riding the wave of the Fast and Furious franchise, nearly every car can have extensive body work done to it, essentially turning a station wagon into a supercar and earning you even more speeding tickets because none of the cars you have are street legal anymore. Imagine explaining that to the traffic cops…

The car classes and types matter mainly to the car clubs stateside, but in the remix version with Tokyo included, there are class and car type specific tournaments, and the kicker is that you don’t necessarily have to finish the American races first before flying to Japan. The first tournament you’re offered will require a vehicle class not available until you’re 4/5 done with Detroit, but the way you unlock tournaments in Tokyo is that instead of challenging individual racers, street races which are represented by red dots in the States are represented by purple diamonds, three of which unlock the next tournament. So theoretically, you can complete some races in the US, head to Japan and complete a tournament there, then come back to the US with the prize car, rinse and repeat.

Then, there’s the soundtrack, which couldn’t be anymore mid-2000s. Hip hop artists, post-grunge bands, techno bands, electro-pop; as I recall, select genres went hand-in-hand with the underground racing scene as depicted in media. I have no idea if this was representative of the lifestyle back then, but if so then that’s pretty cool. It makes the replays all the more enjoyable to watch.

The car clubs have an extra feature for certain cars. Specific types can gain one of three abilities: Zone, Agro, and Roar. Zone is a type of Max Payne-like slow motion ability that allows the Tuner cars, Exotic cars, Sports Bikes and select Luxury Sedans to weave through traffic in slow mo. This ability is earned by driving as clean as possible through the city. Agro is applicable to the rest of the Sedans and SUVs and is a type of boost that allows the driver to slam through traffic at a breakneck pace, breaking necks with all the wreckage caused by ramming other cars off the streets. Driving into other cars and causing general damage is how you earn this ability. Roar is exclusive to Muscle Cars and Choppers and it sends a blast of wind to scatter heavy traffic out of the way. Drifting and power sliding unlocks this ability. All three can be used a total of five times, and going by my playthrough of each ability, they’re not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution when a race goes sideways. Zone helps you get through traffic, but it builds up as slow as its ability performs and a single crash can set the bar down as it accumulates. The draw of Agro ability is that you can send offending vehicles to the moon and the impact is literally diminished if you activate it on a free road. The same goes for Roar, but the consequences are doubly so if the vehicles don’t spread out how you hope. You have to think a bit more strategically before activating either of these three.

Lastly, there’s the secrets. The three U.S. cities have RockStar logos that net you extra customization options in the garage from more riders on bikes, to license plates to decals and more.

Above all, not only do I recommend it, I highly recommend you set up your controller if you go the emulation route. Contorting your fingers like miniature twister is better as a party trick than to play games. I write from experience.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2

My next words on this game specifically will surely sound a bit contradictory depending on how you see racing games. The customization options giving me a range of choices heavily influenced my rating of Midnight Club 3 despite me spending less time with it. Need for Speed has little in the way of customization, there’s no overarching plot to become a legendary racer in the underground street racing scene, and the options for cars and tracks is so limited that it’s nonexistent.

That being said, I’m still playing this game and the game modes on display do a lot to make up for what I thought was so perfect about MC3. Granted, NFS HP2 came out in Q4 2002 while MC3 was released around Spring 2005, so older racing games will feel like clean-picked skeletons compared to what would succeed them all, but judging games of this era by their own merits reveals that they’re less about style and more about substance. Midnight Club drips style, but Need for Speed before the EA corruption of the 2010s leaks substance.

Multiple game modes and challenges can be completed and the departure from other games is that there isn’t always an emphasis on getting perfect scores. Some challenges will still let you advance even if you finish in second place. As another divergent example from what’s expected of Midnight Club, transmission systems can be adjusted to suit the player depending on the car: automatic, manual, and semiautomatic transmission. The game is also designed more around skills than simply picking up and playing.

You know how Midnight Club has precise locations based on real-world cities, just scaled down massively from what residents of each would recognize of them (especially for 2005)? Well, the maps in Need for Speed are less precise and more like general amalgamations of a city in a given location. The Mediterranean coastline, the Pacific coast, Australia, the American Southwest, etc. The game also feels less like a smorgasbord of real-life cars and car concepts that with the benefit of hindsight didn’t always pan out.

This concept H3T, for instance, is different from what was sold in 2005 and ‘6, by the way. As a matter of fact, the car brands in NFS were less luxurious and well known and more specific to certain regions if not known to the wider car aficionado demographic. Opel, the now-defunct HSV, one of Ford’s foreign manufacturers, all feature in the game. The cars that you start off with tend to have a top speed of around 125 MPH with an average 0-60 acceleration rate of 5.3 seconds. The further down the line you advance, the top speed rounds to around 200 MPH with a shorter rate of acceleration. With the speeding cars comes new ways to maneuver around the tracks.

Speaking of the tracks, going back to a comment I made about the cars in MC3 losing street legality, they’d all be suited for a race track like how they’re all designed in this game. The tracks within NFS Hot Pursuit all have secret pathways and shortcuts to take but depending on the version you have it may be somewhat different. I emulated the PS2 version and pirated the PC version and the menu selection screens are all different; the PS2 version seemed to be the snazziest of all the available versions, whereas the PC, Xbox, and GameCube layouts are all the same.

Skills play a role in more than just driving and handling. The Hot Pursuit game modes where cops are placed at different points along the track can add an extra layer of difficulty to the challenge and you’ll normally only have that split-second to decide how to avoid them. NFS has a reset button for when you screw up during the race, but in my experience it there are less opportunities to use it during Hot Pursuit mode because the police will catch up to you and ticket you. So best to save those for when you’re out of sight of the police or outside Hot Pursuit mode.

The cops in this game are also aggressive. They’re not GTA-aggressive, but as I recall, in the PC version they’ll deploy helicopters the longer you resist. I know they also do that in the PS2 version though I rarely keep them around for that long to find out. This mode isn’t one sided though — there’s a mode to play as the cop and nab speeding racers as well.

I don’t know if this is true of all EA games from before or even now but their design philosophy, considering Medal of Honor, Need for Speed here, and Battlefield seemed to be based partly or wholly on gaining and refining skills than button-mashing throughout the whole play session. This isn’t a philosophy that’ll resonate with everyone and EA has since divorced themselves from this for darker desires in recent memory, but as I said with Midnight Club 3, find a way to play it and see the game for yourself. It might be too your taste if Midnight Club proves too flashy.

L.A. Rush:

This game is why this blog topic exists. It’s because I hate this game so much that I decided to write this week’s topic. Thing is, for years, I’d never had the words to illustrate my gripes with this game until recently. The YouTube channel BlueTag did the digging and the review on what this game has to offer because I knew damn well I wasn’t gonna put this tripe in my emulator, so here’s the corresponding video.

To spoil the video a bit, this game was developed by Midway Games’ British branch in Newcastle, the same Midway Games that flooded arcades from the 1980s until their 2010 bankruptcy, gave us Mortal Kombat and the subsequent ESRB rating system, and surprise sleepers like SpyHunter and Stranglehold. According to BlueTag, the finer details surrounding development are lost to history, but the game’s inner workings hint at a severe lack of communication between internal departments.

The physics engine is incredibly flimsy for a racing game let alone driving. Slip a finger on the accelerator and the car will hit the nearest wall at Mach 4, with reciprocal results. Forget tanks for cars that could take a beating; this game cinematically emphasizes the damage that comes with totaling the car when this happens.

Funny enough, the main protagonist is supposed to have a fleet of cars, but there’s only one that features prominently in the game at the beginning. L.A. Rush is another game sponsored by a major car promoter, this time MTV’s Pimp My Ride with Xzibit and Lil Jon in tow, but unlike Dub, Pimp My Ride doesn’t have much to offer. Or rather, the Dub team will let you win cars done by them where as PMR often upgrades your ride without you seeing the bodywork or messing around with it until it’s finished. You also stand to lose half your cash to a ride whose paintjob is a surprise until the end.

Speaking of money, you have to pay an entry fee to compete in a race and if you mess up and want to start over and do better, you can’t restart the race from the menu. You have to back out and come back in and pay the entry fee again. Like the other games, cops also play a role in this game but considering the consequences in the other games, this is simultaneously a worse and lax punishment at the same time: it’s lax because you bribe the cops to get them to back off, but it’s worse because you lose money on entry fees anyway so this is another way to lose your money.

Cutscenes meanwhile show the protagonist, whose name I never registered, I think his name was T or something, having already achieved street racer heaven. Then the bad guy shows up, promising to take your stuff which he does. After a few weeks, your cars are all confiscated including the jet black Hummer you rock up to the mansion in, leaving you with a suburban sedan that you have to use to get your cars back, often while under pursuit, and with the crappy physics and whatnot, this is more of a chore than anything.

As for the map, I’m not a native Angeleno, but I’ve heard from the Wikipedia article, that a section of L.A., namely the Valley was absent. Seems weird to put in, but in a racing game a map and layout can make or break a race if not the whole game and what I presume to be a notable location within the L.A. region was done a disservice by its omission. If this is the case, then whatever could’ve been done with the Valley may have killed further interest.

All things considered, if eight year old me was smart enough to see the problems with this back then it should be a warning to how unplayable a game could be, especially the PC port which I learned was worse off than the console version. If you have that Tibetan Buddhist level of patience, give it a go. If not, watch the gameplay and prepare yourself for outdated, cringey dialog, even for a game from the mid-2000s.

Before I move on to the YouTube recommendations, I want to mention a last minute game I also played on the PS2 back in the day, but have fewer moments with: Gran Turismo 4.

My memories with this are hazy as of now, but if I get the chance to emulate and play it, I’ll surely put my thoughts in, no questions asked.

Now for the channel recommendation: Rev says desu. This channel is a commentary channel on mostly anime and anime news and often features the wrong opinions to laugh at and lambast from some of the worst people to speak on a given matter on Twitter. Originally shortform in length, Rev has gotten around to longer videos for more to discuss. Wherever you start, if you like his content be sure to subscribe to him, he makes videos regularly.

https://www.youtube.com/@Revsaysdesu

Under the Mayo and How NOT to Review Games

TiberiusLeave a comment

Hot takes taken to an absurd extreme

When it comes to video game reviewers and YouTubers, I bounce between creators for a time. One of the recommendations I made a few posts ago about Tactical Bacon Productions is one that I firmly believe is in his element enough to get the traffic he needs, even with YouTube jerking him and other YouTubers around with arbitrary strikes and claims due to a screw up that happened on their part. The channels I’ve been recommending for the month of February (and others to come in the future, especially at the end of this post), have been consistent to the best of their ability regarding content. They know what they’re talking about or what they’re doing and few of them have anything controversial surrounding them. The same can’t be said of the subject of today’s video: Under the Mayo.

I came across this channel while looking for content for God of War 4 last year and his controversial review on the game opened up Pandora’s box. Several other YouTubers had come to defend the new Norse era of God of War and call out Mayo for his contrarian viewpoints. And these viewpoints were very contrarian. The video below has a provocative title:

Controversy definitely sells and if it was just a hook to reel in viewers, I’d leave it alone. But viewpoints within the video sounded too ignorant, as if Mayo hadn’t payed any attention to the story of the previous games in the lead up to 2018. Gaming journalists tend to do that a fair amount with the countless number of know-nothings who’s exposure to the old God of War games is surface level or they just forgot. And to lend a straw to Mayo, this isn’t about him misunderstanding the difference between Greek Kratos and Norse Kratos. Hell, this post isn’t unique in what it has to say about him.

On YouTube and select Reddit posts, he’s taken hits for sounding like a hypocrite. Five minutes into a review he’ll praise an element of X and ten minutes in the same video he’ll critique it. Or he’ll highlight a feature of one game, wish for it to be taken out of an upcoming sequel if the game is successful enough and all of a sudden wish for it to come back; or conversely want something to be patched out and regret it when it has. You could argue that most people don’t always know what they want and that’s fair. Too much can be said about an indecisive populace making a generation-changing decision and that sentence alone probably gives you an idea from across the pond.

The point of divergence for Mayo comes in the harsh critique of most games in stark contrast to everything he has said about Doom and Doom: Eternal. Here’s where I admit that the rest of this post may jump into speculation. My exposure to Doom is also surface level, even though I played the original games on Steam and I have the 2016 DOOM on Xbox One that I haven’t touched in a while. I’ve got nothing against the franchise or id Software, my preferences lean more towards the action-adventure variety. I think Doom is an awesomely influential series that most games these days lend an oath of gratitude to, enough that first-person shooters needed a more appropriate genre name than just Doom clone that was the case for it in the 90s and beyond. That being said, if Doom went to court for something (and it probably did, video games that showcase or reference the Devil are gonna get theirs), Mayo is the type of guy that if he were an attorney, he’d drop everything and zoom on over to the courtroom with enough material to sway the jury after boring them to sleep for seven hours, and that’s because even the stenographer wants him to shut the hell up.

id Software’s flagship series has a permanent residence in his head and if his critics are to be believed, if Mayo hasn’t mentioned or shown footage of Doom or Doom: Eternal apropos of nothing, he’s liable to reference it in a review of another game. I’ve watched YouTubers take apart his God of War and Sifu reviews for the flip-flopping, backpedaling talking points, drawing on the conclusion that he says it without sincerity for contrarian’s sake.

Personally, I’ve ventured around this angle before on a few things I wasn’t all that serious about, but Mayo seems determined to die in a bunker with 60 years worth of provisions on his takes.

I hesitate to say that I’m 100% passionate about a singular thing these days, my tastes are subject to change and I could spend my money on things that actually help with survival, hobbies and pastimes coming second. Among Mayo’s critics, he’s come under fire as a hypocritical game reviewer with a singular thing on his mind. With what I know about his review style and what others have said, it seems as though he frames himself as the singular authority on what makes a good game based on only one game and that’s a bad lens to look through.

Speaking of God of War critiques, in GCN’s video on Everything Wrong with God of War 2018 in the style of CinemaSins, one of the criticisms lobbied was one I actually agreed with: games in this day and age need to let go of FromSoftware’s tenets and features of game design. Listing off a round of games that put style and substance front and center like Ninja Gaiden, Onimusha, God Hand, Devil May Cry and the original God of War series, the proof in the pudding there was that FromSoft’s Dark Souls franchise is not the be-all, end-all of game design. In a similar vein, Doom: Eternal isn’t close to revolutionary.

If I may get controversial for a bit, Doom 1993 was a phenomenal influence on the gaming industry. DOOM 2016 and Doom: Eternal are not special. Within the franchise and within the gaming industry, these FPS’s are always welcome to let players partake in the carnage they have to offer, but they don’t have anything new to offer that other games already have for better or worse. Fighting demons on Mars with high tech weaponry? Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Black Ops III all did it a year and change prior with sliding and jetpack mechanics for better and worse. Setting the story aside to focus on ramming a demon horn into said demon’s own throat? NetherRealm Mortal Kombat, Black Ops IV, and God of War either did one or both of these things before that.

For the record, I’m not saying that I think Call of Duty beats Doom; I’m saying that mechanically Doom doesn’t do much to make a difference anymore. The lack of weapon reloading gets back to the style of shooter that literally gave you a gun so you can blast away unimpeded, but beyond that Doom is just a more extreme, more based shooter. And you don’t need me to tell you this. Get the game or watch a Let’s Play and see demon limbs flood the next level in Viscera Cleanup Detail.

Don’t get the wrong idea from this. Everyone loves what they love and hates what they hate, but it’s never a good sign to go hard on one or the other, especially at the expense of the opposite. Mayo clearly has a boner for Doom et al, and he has the right to voice his opinions, but there’s better ways to do it. I don’t want to sound like the internet police and say being an asshole on the Internet is wrong when most people do it, ideally with little consequence to them in the real world (better pray no one knows where you live), but if you’re going to say something, have evidence, write down your thoughts, and if there’s a contradiction somewhere down the line, correct it and try again.

The last channel recommendation for the month of February 2023 is TheMythologyGuy.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheMythologyGuy1/featured

Since this post mentioned a product caked in mythology, it seemed fitting to mention a channel where that’s the specialty on display. TheMythologyGuy talks about various mythologies from Greece to Egypt to Japan to Norse just to name a few. Several of my favorite videos of his are about the mythical inaccuracies in the God of War games, followed close by movie reviews concerning other myths and franchises, notably that of the Percy Jackson variety. The link to his channel is up above and his about page will have links on where and how to support him.

This will be the last of the channel recommendations until April. Look forward to their return.

My Experience with Video Game Emulation

Tiberius1 Comment

In recent times, I have taken an interest in video game emulation and emulators, chief among them is the PS2 emulator PCSX2. This program operates the same as a PS2 with a few different bells and whistles for your computer.

SONY DSC

The PS2 was my first console. My uncle got it for me as a gift when I was about four and my library of games didn’t start collecting dust until I picked up my first Xbox 360 about a decade later. At the same time though, there was a large amount of dust building up around our old 1980s wooden paneled TV and the ports around the PS2’s cords and both had to go.

I discovered the emulator years after that when the nostalgia wave hit me once when I was watching old footage of the 3D era Mortal Kombat games. In my naiveté, I assumed the best way to play this again meant tracking down an old, but refurbished console since I had both the games and some old memory cards. Searching on websites offering them for perhaps a fraction of what they cost in October of 2000 when the console launched in North America proved fruitless.

I don’t know when I first started googling PCSX2, but I know that it was sometime in August or September of 2020 that I had downloaded it to my old computer. My old gaming computer couldn’t handle rendering The Sims 4 in HD and if I dared play a pirated PS2 game on that machine, it needed a new CPU which I could not install. The design of the computer makes it impossible to mod, so I was stuck with the PS2 startup screen and display.

But that much meant that it was in my grasp. I could play the old games I used to have and then some until it was time. For now, it was time for me to find a new computer. And while I have the opportunity to go into a slight tangent right now, I just want to say that modern computers have been extremely nerfed in the years. My grandmother’s old desktop computer, though prone to slow down, lasted upwards of at least six or seven years. My last gaming laptop lasted from August 5, 2017 until May 22, 2021. Less than four years. But hey, the machine I use as of now is much faster and the problems on the other computer are either nonexistent or greatly diminished.

Back to the topic of emulation, I finally after a year and change got the PCSX2 program to work and it’s just like I’m back in elementary or middle school again and this is my prize for knocking out some homework. As of writing this, the games I have active on the computer are as follows:

  1. Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (2002)
  2. Mortal Kombat: Deception (2004)
  3. Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks (2005)*
  4. Naruto: Ultimate Ninja 2 (2004 JP/2007 NA)
  5. Tekken 5 (2004)
  6. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (2006)
  7. Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix (2005)*

The asterisks on Shaolin Monks and Midnight Club are to signify games that I’ve either 100% completed or got as close to getting to 100%. Further sidenote on Midnight Club, the save file still exists, but to make room for other stuff, including legally bought and owned games and their corresponding updates, I had to ditch it from my list of ROMs.

You’d best believe that if I had a YouTube gaming channel, a larger capacity hard drive (ideally 4-5TB), and perhaps a gaming desktop whilst leaving the one I’m writing on for simulation-type games like The Sims or Civilization, I would either record playthroughs and upload or cut out the middle man and try to stream on Twitch. I challenged myself in this game to use only cars that I had won in tournaments and along with the car you buy before the first qualifying race, there’s enough of prizes to fill the garage to near-capacity in the three cities of San Diego, Detroit, and Atlanta. With the addition of Tokyo, my garage was at capacity. I noticed when the last thing I tried was attempting to test drive a car.

Now, this isn’t exactly my first time playing emulated games or even a program to do so. On browsers alone, old GBA and Nintendo DS titles are available to run through and I had blazed through nearly that entire era of Kirby games, sans the original Super Star game and Canvas Curse. Super Star original wouldn’t cost me anything monetary or temporal to play, but memories of the original Canvas Curse on my DS reminded me of how ass my reflexes used to be. Though I still managed to beat Planet Robobot and Triple Deluxe on the Citra Nightly emulator.

As for the games that let me play by going straight to the files, well, there’s an extra step to that. Downloading and extracting files to a 7-Zip location through the WinRAR application makes things all too easy. Even when the app threatens to charge you for using it, it’s not all that much trouble. Just X out of the paywall window and the download will still be there ready for extraction. Easy.

There’s an old debate on the pros, cons, dangers, etc. of video game piracy that has had people talking for years, decades at this point. Before the internet age, backyard engineers have made homebrew consoles before. The Angry Video Game Nerd has a few in his position specially made for select episodes like his Nintoaster and the 4-in-1 console.

But this is different. This isn’t modifying a console; this is grabbing an illegal version of the game made available online. What makes it illegal? Without the recorded sale of a good from a producer to a customer, this is what makes it illegal. But calling back to old Blockbuster video warnings, FBI warnings on nearly every DVD and VHS tape, and movie previews about the consequences of theft, emulating isn’t as easily policed or punished. Hackers can and at times do face the consequences for hacks and viruses, same as a thief who robbed an old lady or the mastermind behind a car theft racket.

Emulation though remains largely unpoliced and unpunished and a lot of the time, it’s rare for their to be a court debate over the issue since a publisher can shut a site down if they catch wind of their old products being made available on the web.

In particular, Nintendo shut down the website Emuparadise, which on the surface sounds like a forum for enthusiasts of birds of large stature and little intellect, but it was more of a storehouse for just about every game available. According to the website owner, he grew up in rural India and had zero access to any of the games growing up. I don’t remember if he explained it on the site, but to my knowledge, the purpose of Emuparadise was to give similar folks the world over a chance to either play these games for the first time, or veterans of old games a nostalgia trip.

While I fall into the latter category, the guy in charge of the site isn’t really all that special regarding his background, but what he made available for the wider public was. People who got into gaming late in life had something to entertain them in the short-term, and veterans like myself have a repertoire at our fingertips. The nostalgia wave hits more like a tsunami, and while I acknowledge most of my old games weren’t as good as I remember, there were things about old gaming that I think a lot of us really took for granted.

One of the biggest of them was DRMs and internet connections to play games. I don’t mind online or offline play when engaging in a legacy run of The Sims 4, but there’s a lot of practices within this 2014 game that probably should’ve served as a sign of things to come for EA going forward. Sims 4 has gotten better over the years, but it’s not very perfect or close to it. Hell, always-online handicapped Destiny in 2014 and almost assassinated the Xbox One a year prior.

Games released before the wide use of internet and mass adoption of social media has this going for them, but as much as I praise and make use of emulators, I can’t ignore the problems that exist within the practice. I mentioned earlier that my old computer had hardware limitations that I couldn’t overcome in order to play on the PCSX2 properly, but there were other problems. Bad ISOs and ROMs make a game literally unplayable. Additionally, what matters is the recency of the tutorial you might view in order to get it right step-by-step. It’s fortunate that the PCSX2 site itself directs you along the way, but more visual learners might try YouTube and without a visible dislike counter to consider (excluding add-ons), you could either use information that’s long out of date or worse be subject to a Rick Roll or something similar.

Granted, these days these are all easy fixes and minor nuisances, but spending enough time in just an internet forum can clue you in to how clueless some people can be sometimes. Another danger that can deter piracy leads into developers sneaking codes into games that make the game unplayable, like the drunk camera on pirated copies of GTA 4. But that’s largely the worst that can happen to a pirate and I’d say they deserve it. Some games aren’t worth pirating. If it’s still available, you can drop a few bucks on it or wait for a sale if you’re frugal. The worst case scenario would be a bait or a scam.

The countless YouTube sponsorships that encourage (read: implore) the viewer to get a VPN like Surfshark, Atlas, Private Internet Access, ExpressVPN, and many others do have a point, not just in identity protection, but also preventive care. If you’re not too careful about where you get your ROMs and whatnot, a lot of your data is up for grabs. I extend this to mods as well, especially those for The Sims.

But above all else, it should be all for good fun. As I said, I’m all for pirating if it means a beloved game is no longer available or if a reputedly acclaimed game can’t be played without the sacrifice of an arm, a leg, or Deez Nuts.

However, I limit my free rein to pirate to the mostly 2D and 3D era. HD games can still be purchased in the modern day and if you really want to play GTA 4 or Mortal Kombat 9 or BioShock, you can drop a few bucks or wait for a sale, or just watch a silent playthrough on YouTube. It is not hard. Speaking of acclaimed games that can’t be played today, I thought I’d make a list of the games, I’d like to play. Some of these I had heard of from a GCN video on Everything Wrong With God of War 2018. They’re as follows:

  1. Onimusha: Warlords (2001)
  2. Ninja Gaiden (2004)
  3. God Hand (2006)
  4. Devil May Cry (2001)
  5. Black (2004)

As I’d done previously, moving some files around and deleting the unneeded would be required if I want to try these all, and the save files all still exist, so not a lot to worry about until I run out of room.