Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@Euler there's no need to be upset Nintendo owes you nothing, so stop being such a blind white knight sycophantic fanboy.

@Ralizah
I think emulating classic games is fine. It’s when people start doing it to new games that I find it to be sketchy. Like Metroid dread for example, and how some news site was promoting just emulating the game and not paying for it.

I don't see an issue with emulating new games so long as you've bought and paid for them.

We've just got to move away from the attitude that emulation is always piracy. If you've bought a game you should have the right to play it on whatever hardware you can, via emulation and bypassing any anti-piracy measures that might prevent that, if necessary. That's even what the law says in most jurisdictions.

I'm sorry but prefering Mario 64 DS over Mario 64 proper is an absolutely insane take.

In terms of unpopular opinions I felt the puzzles (especially the Temples) in Breath of the Wild were dreadful and a big part of why I rank it in the lower echelon of 3D Zeldas (better than the DS iterations but much worse than Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask).

@moomin Waaa, I liked oc of time and majoras makes puzzles, I thought they were creative.

@Snatcher Agreed, OoT in particular had simple but satisfying puzzles. I see a lot of people praise BotW puzzles for having multiple solutions but in my experience there was one very obviously intended solution 90% of the time, and I very rarely felt accomplishment from them. If the puzzles were as good as the exploration feel it would be a modern classic, but as it is I find it wildly uneven and disappointing.

@moomin Botw puzzles, just didn’t go all the way with the idea in my opinion, it was there, but the way they were executed, not all that great.

This.

I definitely got the feeling of quantity over quality, yeah.

@Eagly Counter: the graphics are better on a technical level but look (and have aged) worse than the simple cartoony art direction of the original; the controls being locked to a D-pad kills any sort of improvement the camera makes; more content =/= better gameplay; the new characters don't mesh with the original level design (and you're forced to start as Yoshi of all characters).

Oh crap. I concede defeat.

Dumpster diving can be theft. If you search for personal documents to steal someone’s identity, or break into GameStop to look through their garbage it would be. If you’re searching through stuff they left in a public area and it happens to include games (for whatever reason, they didn’t send it back to the publisher for credit as they normally would) it’s fair game.

What a ridiculous comment. There are things called libraries and museums to preserve artwork, books, film, and the like for future generations. Forging a painting and giving out copies of it (while the author is still alive and well, in this case) would be the equivalent of the crappy ROM site you’re shilling for. It’s not about preserving anything, it’s about people like you being too cheap to pay for your games. And it’s incredibly bizarre to trash Nintendo when the games wouldn’t exist at all without the company (along with private property and strong copyright laws).

I kind of have to agree with the emulation thing. Having a museum would be preservation, but at the same time no one would actually be able to experience the game. They'll be able to look at the box or see blurbs about it, but they won't actually get to experience the game or play it. So many games are left behind on older systems that people don't own anymore, and there's no current way to get said games, given that the devs won't bring it over, no longer own the IP, or lost the original source code for the game. Thus, in my opinion, Emulation is fair. At least, so long as you can no longer purchase the game anywhere else.

Also, with video game libraries, no company is going to go out of their way to make something like that. They're already disinterested in porting these games to future consoles, so what makes people think they'd open up a library? For a Museum, again it wouldn't work like other mediums, since most of the experience is playing the game, not looking at displays.

May as well through my hat onto the ensuing fire that is brewing here by stating my opinion on emulation: I will (try to at least) only emulate games that have either never been re-released or are very unlikely to get re-released on modern platforms any time soon.

I think examples that show off the two sides of this very well are Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Apollo Justice. Paper Mario 64 is one of my absolute favourite N64 games that I've played alongside titles like WinBack, Kirby 64, etc. and TTYD is basically that....but better from what I've heard. However, for whatever reason, one of the most influential RPG's ever made has never (and I mean NEVER) seen a re-release (with the closest thing being backwards-compatability with the Wii) and even now is very unlikely to see one what with the direction PM has taken in the years since and Nintendo's sheer denial to port anything Gamecube to Switch (unless it's Mario Sunshine and maaaaaaybe Zelda TP/WW if we ask nicely). In that case, I'd gladly fire up Dolphin if it was the only way to experience the sequel to one of my favourite games on a modern platform.

In contrast then is Apollo Justice (and by extension the sequel trilogy). Anyone who has seen me on this site knows that I am an absolute AA nutcase (so much so that I'll try and sneak in references whenever I can on comments and such) and I would absolutely kill to play these 3 games. However: I will probably never resort to emulating them. Why? Simple: they've got a modern re-release on phones. I won't be playing the phone versions myself since I think that's an incredibly sub-optimal way to experience them for the first time but it gives me hope that we'll EVENTUALLY see console ports and be able to experience the way that I want to experience them (I've heard AJ described as both the best and worst entry in the series and that makes me really damn excited to play it and see why that is ).

There's plenty more examples I could give for both sides but I think you get my point. TLDR; I'll only consider emulating something if there is literally no other option.

I go to the library every so often and they have a huge game section with PS2/3/4, Wii U and Switch games, along with a large anime/manga selection, and when I see it I always think "damn, wish I had all this when I was in middle school". This isn't even a big city library.

Anyway, more to the point, it would be cool if game preservationists teamed up to make an interactive museum. Give a chance for people to experience super rare games like Gimmick!, prototypes and early builds, unrelease stuff, games on old home computers like the X6800, hosting exhibitions for different devs, etc. (Games & monitors behind glass to prevent theft of course).

Also, there is absolutely no moral conundrum in emulating games that are no longer available to purchase. That's absurd. Is legally buying overpriced crap from retro resellers any different?

@moomin The thing about making a museum that's interactive is even then, I'd imagine most people would want to play older games in the comfort of their own home, on their own time, instead of going to another place where tons of other people gather, having to wait in lines just to play a game, only for the place to close down for the day soon after.

Also, with checking games out at libraries, some people might not have the console for said games, which would hinder the point greatly. Not to mention for people who want to get a game in pristine condition, they'll have to worry about what the last person who borrowed the game did to it.

Maybe an interactive gaming museum is niche but I'd argue they could survive in a major population center/tourism hotspot like Tokyo or NYC or such. A sort of mecca for hardcore gaming dweebs (I use that term endearingly) as well as tourists who are just in it for the novelty. Those who are interested can play the games, and those who aren't can just check out the cool exhibits.

And I agree that a gaming library probably wouldn't be logistically viable; I was just pointing out that the local library here has a surprising variety.

@Fizza Pretty much how I feel. I was emulating banjo and kazooie, but then learned they had it on Xbox, and Microsoft store, meaning I could buy those games on a pc if I wanted to, so I stop emulating it, Mario 64 in on there service now, so ai stop emulating it. Me, you, and a lot of people just emulating if there is no other way to play it, if there is no option other then dropping cash for a old overprice console and game.

@Snatcher There's an odd thing in regards to companies' official services when it comes to retro emulation for me where, even though I'm fully aware there are probably much better alternatives, I still really like them. This is probably being heavily carried by being able to play such games on the go in regards to the Switch retro collection (Mega Drive games on long car journeys just feel so damn good man) but I guarantee you: I wouldn't have given games like Spanky's Quest, Wild Guns and especially WinBack a ghost of a chance had they not been added to NSO services and now they're some of my all time favourites on each of their respective systems. I'll always rally for them to be better don't get me wrong, but they've done a lot for me on the retro end of things and I really enjoy them because of it