Fun Fact: Emulators are Good

Emulators. Are. Good. They are good and it is good that they exist

Here's the video that inspired this post if you care to watch. I'm trying not to cover the exact same things Jim does here, but there may be some repeated points, just so you know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTcFFUDgyBk&t

Why are they good? Several reasons. The two most notable being archival and by extension giving people a chance to play games they otherwise could not

If you're into games, you've probably heard of Silent Hill 2. Maybe even Silent Hill 1 and 3 or even 4! Point is, Silent Hill 2 is considered to be one of the best games ever made, and I count myself among that lot. I even passionately defended it recently, and thinking about it I realized what a unique experience it is, putting people into an incredibly uncomfortable position and asking them to deal with it. It is nothing short of a work of art

And it could be wiped from history

Why? Because it's owned by Konami, and Konami is the worst, and it lost the bloody source codes the games which is why the HD release was awful! That means that can't rerelease the game, and when the day comes that there are no more PS2 or no more physical discs, we will never be able to experience such a piece of art again

Except through emulators

Speaking of Konami, you all remember PT? That incredible teaser for what was to be the new Silent Hill game, but then Konami fired Kojima and then removed PT from PS network, so now the only way to play it is either hunting down a PS4 that still has it on there or by emulating it? Well, yeah, there you go (run on sentences are fun)

But it's not just Konami, of course. Another great game at risk of being lost to history is Alan Wake. See, it had a bunch of licensed music in it, mostly from Poets of the Fall but they had other songs like... uh, Coconut by Harry Nilsson. Hmm

POINT IS! The licenses for the music expired, so it is no longer digitally available anymore, so again, when all the physical copies, how are you going to get this game outside of emulation?

Oh, and remember Sonic Mania's two new characters, Mighty and Ray? Yeah, they ain't new. They came from an arcade game called SegaSonic the Hedgehog, but it was never ported to home consoles because the arcade machine used a track ball to move the characters

And, I mean you could hunt down an old arcade cabinet instead of emulating it, but g'luck with that. I just searched for one and all I could find were the circuits for the thing, and I only found 2. One was 60 buck, and the other was 11,00. Hell, the flyer for the thing was 90.

Oh, and as a bonus, it was never brought to the west. So again, g'luck with that

My main point to all of this is I'm frustrated and tired with scummy gaming companies who only view video games as art when they can use it as a get-out-of-jail free card, or just as toys that don't need to be preserved for future generations to experience, but just discarded when they become broken. And heaven forbid that you try to preserve or record games that publisher are no longer making money off of, because that's stealing! Which as we all know, is something major corporations never do

Emulators are good. They are 100% good. I don't even care if the people running them or uploading them are bad (I mean, they are gamers, so hedge your bets accordingly) preserving, maintaining and keeping games safe for future generations is paramount. Whether they be artistic expression or just goofy nonsense, games deserve better. And quite frankly, so do we

Games are good, and if the only people willing to fight for them are pirates, then shiver me timbers and raise the Jolly Roger, you swabbies!