It gathered the whole family together to play old couch-games[0], something that most powerful consoles haven't even been close --specially with the grampas
Really exited about what the future will bring us!
I continued with Lure of the Temptress. I only had a buggy version where you couldn't save. I played this with 3 other people. Beginning every Friday. Ending on Sunday... It was fantastic to finally finish it and being able to save.
But if I look at all the games I had back then, most of them are not worth it, but if you seriously look at it: they never were ;)
But what a memory.
There's some classic gems, to be sure, but they were also all we had.
By playing an old school game, your brain extracts these happy feelings from the memory. However, it's not a sustainable source of "fun" per say. As opposed to the newer games where "fun" is being caused by the game directly.
Restricting to arcade games is probably justified. I'd say we are in the golden age of video games right now---at least in terms of popularity. And you can still get remakes of all the good old games, or even play the originals.
Some stuff has aged, but some of the best games are in the past and have never been "reached" by any newer game. Ultima 7 is an example of such games - there's just nothing that comes close to it even in modern RPGs.
For 2D platforms the best was made in the past again. All the newer Mario games are either too easy or uninspired, or both.
There's a whole bunch of genres that has been completely a abandoned by publishers and devs for years (simulators, adventure games, RTS, even RPGs - sure we get Witcher 3 recently, but there's really nothing much else on the radar, there's too few of them now compared to how many we were getting back in the days).
It's been many years that the main production money goes into making GTA, First Person Shooters, Open World games, Racing games and that's about it. Of course the indie market is very much alive, but you can't compare the level of contents made 20 years ago by large teams versus 1-2 folks making games nowadays.
You might also find Age Of Decadence interesting - it's a super-indie made over a decade or so by a very, very dedicated team. I've not played it and I understand it's flawed, but it looks to be reaching for the same kind of freedom as Ultima VII.
:-D
I tried the NES original Metroid (also emulated) later, and I was surprised of how many of the game elements were already in place on the much weaker system.
That said there are a lot of absolute gems. To find them search youtube for "best <system name> games".
Master of Orion and the original XCom are just two examples. More recently, the gamemaker version of Spelunky has people still fixing it.
That said! There are tons of great gems in the old archives.. you've got to find them .. we could play Chucky Egg for days on end in our household .. but we definitely had to search to find it ..
One thing you shouldn't discount is the idea of giving your kids access to the 8-bit machines to learn how to program them. This has been immensely valuable to our 8 and 5 year olds' .. they play crap games, but then right away can get access to the code, understand what it does, and learn from it. My 8-year old spends more time reading code (BASIC) than playing games now .. and that is a delight to see.
But most of them were even back in the day. When playing C64 games with friends back in the day, we'd spend almost as much time figuring out what games to play and loading different games as we did playing.
Some games we'd play for ages, but many were 10-minute entertainment at the time.
And others we'd play for ages only to suddenly stop when they got out of the sweet spot in terms of challenge (e.g. Commando and Tapper were two of my favorite C64 games for a long time, but in both cases they had fixed points for bonus lives and once you got to a certain skill level you could basically play "forever", just cycling through the same few levels over and over while accumulating lives, and suddenly they were no fun any more)
I, like you, have been mostly disappointed when it comes to playing them alone.
For example, when I see an original arcade machine (of an excellent game), I cannot not play it.
Most game or not reedited so there is no money to gain fom preventing them from being online. It may even help to keep the brand alive in case a reboot in programmed (Eg: tomb raider)
Often it's a simple calculation of how much revenue could be won if you factor in the fact that you need to pay the team to find the ROM's, send the letters and enforce them once in a while. Basically it's nearly never worth it.
"reedited" should be "republished", I think :)
In any case: this is the internet. You get whatever you want, and the effect of DMCA on that is indistinguishable from zero.
If you have a Raspberry Pi sitting around that you don't know what to do with, just do this. You won't regret it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw_tsjvxUfwFZjZpZlJuTUdLdW8...
There's no fundamental reason why the N64 can't be emulated at full speed on that hardware. The VideoCore IV blows the RDP away in fill rate, after all. It's just that the available video plugins are old and aren't optimized for mobile GPUs. Additionally, Broadcom's drivers have a tendency to stall in inconvenient places and the emulator needs to work around that as well. But once those are fixed, most of the popular N64 games run beautifully.
I've looked at the SNES and N64's hardware to consider contributing to an emulator for one of them, and the hardware certainly doesn't get simpler as time goes on ;-)
The comparison I was making isn't really fair, anyhow. Corn was fast, but the last revision only really covered two commercial games (Mario and Zelda). I'm sure that they heavily optimized for the code patterns in those specific games, without regard to accurate emulation of the hardware in the general case. Expand the supported cases and the problem immediately becomes much harder. Comparing Corn to an accuracy-focused emulator is like comparing one of the cut-down, portable-friendly SNES9x builds to Higan.
I use a PS3 Dualshock controller and it works wonderfully. :)