Article:
Classic Games, You Had To Be There

Retro gaming is big news. Those games that some of us used to play in through the eighties and into the nineties are coming back, and with a passion. There have been plenty of compilation discs for the Playstation, Gamecube and Xbox in the past but now with ‘Game Room’ on Xbox Live Arcade there’s chance to play online, with friends, on some of the oldest and most classic games that started us off in the first place.

The thing is, I’m not sure that I’m overly happy with it. I’ve been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still have mine. In fact I’ve never thrown a console away nor sold anything and have been actively expanding my collection since the mid-eighties. That’s twenty five years of a collection. So when these old games show their faces I can usually go up into the loft and drag a copy out to play right away.

It all comes down to emulation. Is it better to play the emulated games or the originals? Now before I go any further I’ll make a clarification. Whatever you do in the privacy of your own home and on your own machine is purely your own business. I’m not bigoted enough to tell you that what you do is wrong, even if it is.

I’m not a fan of emulated games. Oh sure, I’ve gone round to a friend's house and used his brand new £2000 machine to play a rousing session of Rampage in sixteen colour EGA. Haven’t we all? But there are a few things about them that disturbs me.

Firstly, there is the physical connection to the history. Actually having the games in a physical cartridge or disc is a great thing. Yes, alright it might take a while to get them out of the attic and set them up, finding the right wires and then getting your new 50” flat screen plasmatron to accept the wires and connect them up and tune them in, but then you’re tuned in to a little bit of history and you can’t beat playing with the little square box with the stick joystick and the one button. It’s all there as god and the designers originally intended.

You don’t have to worry about the machine overclocking the game, so that a racing game that should last a good thirty seconds lasts half a micro-thought before presenting you with the game-over screen.