Retro Gaming
No D&D this week, due to a birthday party. That was fun.
I've been thinking about (just now anyway) how accessible retro gaming has become in the past five years. When I was in university the only legit way to play games older than the Playstation 1 was to own multiple generations of consoles, and track down the cartridges on the secondary market. Arcade games were pretty much out of the question for legitimate gamers. Depending on the game you wanted you might be looking at a price tag of a hundred dollars or more for a title that was two generations out of date. I had at one point a mass of cables and switches in place to let me have an NES, SNES, N64, Game Cube, Sega Master System, Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, XBox, and PS2 all connected to the TV at once.
How far we've come!
These days all that's hooked into the TV is the 360, the PS3, and the Wii. Barring a couple of Saturn titles, everything in my game library is playable in some form on those platforms. Well, and the few PS2 games I owned, but I don't really mind not getting to use that. It's not perfect, there's still a major laundry list of titles that aren't available that many people would consider seminal--very few classic Final Fantasy games, for example, or stuff with licensing issues like Perfect Dark or Earthbound or whatever, but it's much more common and readily available than it was a decade ago. Even old PC games are relatively easy to find on Steam or other services for reasonable prices.
It's pretty cool really.
I've been thinking about (just now anyway) how accessible retro gaming has become in the past five years. When I was in university the only legit way to play games older than the Playstation 1 was to own multiple generations of consoles, and track down the cartridges on the secondary market. Arcade games were pretty much out of the question for legitimate gamers. Depending on the game you wanted you might be looking at a price tag of a hundred dollars or more for a title that was two generations out of date. I had at one point a mass of cables and switches in place to let me have an NES, SNES, N64, Game Cube, Sega Master System, Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast, XBox, and PS2 all connected to the TV at once.
How far we've come!
These days all that's hooked into the TV is the 360, the PS3, and the Wii. Barring a couple of Saturn titles, everything in my game library is playable in some form on those platforms. Well, and the few PS2 games I owned, but I don't really mind not getting to use that. It's not perfect, there's still a major laundry list of titles that aren't available that many people would consider seminal--very few classic Final Fantasy games, for example, or stuff with licensing issues like Perfect Dark or Earthbound or whatever, but it's much more common and readily available than it was a decade ago. Even old PC games are relatively easy to find on Steam or other services for reasonable prices.
It's pretty cool really.