ROM Sites are Important

 

In the last couple of days well used emulation website CDRomance I assume got contacted by some legal types and were forced to take down all of their download links.  A sad day for users of emulation as CDRomance was probably one of the easiest places to get even some of the most obscure games you could think of and now those users have been scattered to other sites once again as a giant of emulation has fallen.

There are going to be a number of people, mainly Nitendo fans for some reason, who will see this news and think "Good! Another piracy website getting what it deserves" but I wish to point out to these idiots that emulation websites like CDRomance and Emuparadise before it are probably the best thing we have when it comes to the preservation of old games because we all know that developers and publishers sure as shit aren't going to preserve the data themselves.  In fact, companies are going out of their way to erase the past in the form of the hundreds of remakes that you see every year.  One look at Twitter when Resident Evil 4 Remake came out with people saying absolutely insane things like "Resident Evil 4 was always bad and this update was completely needed" and it paints the picture that even so-called "gaming enthusiasts" don't care about preserving the past of the medium.  People are more than happy to have the old thing erased if we can get another version of that old thing that just looks a bit shinier, even if its completely removed from what that original thing was.

There are purists out there who will also argue that emulation is bad because if you wanted to play or preserve the old thing so bad then you should go through the effort of aquiring original discs/carts and hardware.  Well there's two big problems with that.  The first being is that no physical media will last forever.  As much as I enjoy owning discs and carts of my personal faves there will come a day, maybe within my lifetime or maybe after I'm dead, it doesn't matter, that those discs and connectors on the carts will rot and the data will be lost.  You can make all the clone systems you want to play them but that doesn't change the fact those carts and discs will die one day.  Just because it might happen a few generations from now doesn't make it not a problem.  The second issue is that a lot of these games, the ones people want to play and preserve are prohibitably expensive thanks to absolute idiots treating old games like NFTs, not as games to be played or pieces of art to be preserved, but things to speculate on and hopefully get rich off of.

Don't forget, that when you buy an overpriced video game off some sausage fingered unwashed cunt on E-Bay or whatever other service, you aren't supporting that game in any meaningful way.  The money doesn't go to a developer that worked on it or even a grimy publisher that put it on store shelves, it goes right into the pocket of that unwashed cunt so that he can find some other obscure Saturn or N64 game to buy on the cheap and sit on it in the hopes that it'll build in value.  These phsycial copies don't hold any real purpose if they are priced so high that most people who remember them fondly or may want to experience them for the first time can't get hold of them.  

That's why emulation is so important, it makes the entire history of the medium avaliable for everyone to play and who knows how these older games may inspire another users who otherwise may have never gotten to try them.  How many games that have been locked to Japan for years for most people have been made avaliable to wider audiences thanks to emulation and ROM sites.  NO ONE would have known what fucking Racing Lagoon was if not for the efforts of those fan translators and sure, a bunch of people "pirated" the game to play it in English but if you think about it another way, the interest generated from that fan translation should maybe have the cogs going in some Square Enix money-mans brain to do a remake or a sequel.

Companies need to put the legal threats down and let ROM sites for old games just exist and a "necessary evil" for the sake of the mediums history.  Sure, if you have some sweaty nerds pirating the lastest Switch games to run on Yuzu, sure, take that shit down but if little Timmy wants to download fucking Albert Odyssey (real game btw) and experience it for the first time then fucking let him, I'm sure SEGAs bottom line will be just fine even if 100,000 people did that.

Leave the ROM sites alone
Fuck you Nintendo

Note: I'm aware of the half-truths in this post but I'm not discussing that here, shut up and enjoy your tickets in silence, idiot