Re: State of old school emulation

Yeah, emulation really needs a good news site, but is there enough news worth reporting? I don't think retro-gaming has declined, it has simply spread its wings and is no longer confined to one place as sirkakkarot said. I don't really pay much attention, but it seems like emulation sites seem to be silently poofing away. How many emulation sites can you name that are as old as Vimm's Lair? And I don't think gamers will be disappointed with the simplicity of old games, that was the whole concept behind the Wii and we all see how that turned out. If a game was fun 10 years ago, odds are it's fun today (just look at Starcraft). Frankly, I have difficulty buying new games. I already have a huge library of games that I know are good, so why would I buy a game that might be good? For example, I recently played through FF7 for the first time since I bought it and it has been so long, it was like a totally new game. I was so disgusted by the sheer volume of crap in the N64/PSX era and the "2D = bad, 3D = good" attitude that churned out garbage after garbage 3D games that I never really got back into it. A fun game will always be fun, but an awful game with eye candy will inevitably lose it's candy to technological progress, and then you're just left with a crappy game. Just look at any of the bajillion old FPS's out there.

Anyway, I'm sure BitTorrent has taken a good chunk of traffic away from emulation sites and in a way I'm happy because I no longer have to defend the site from collectors. Why would they want to download one at a time when they can grab a torrent? I'd much rather they waste someone else's bandwidth than mine anyway. But for anyone who just wants some nostalgia and doesn't want to spend hours downloading 17 dumps of Super Mario World, there will always be sites like Vimm's Lair. Sure I could disect a torrent and dump it into a database, but where's the fun in that?