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I just shake my head everytime I see these kinds of compilations released. I've been playing these games for years, through emulation. These bundles advertise being able to use filters for 'authenticity' gameplay, online playability and such. Emulators can and have long done these things too.
But, there are people out there, who'll wait for years on end for these compilations to be made and some shamelessly buy them. When you can cut all of that down by spending less than 2 minutes grabbing a ROM and grabbing an emulator before you're well on your way to revisit your old favorites.
I know what community we're in, but I do think that having content be available through legitimate channels is a good thing. Too much of gaming history cannot be accessed legitimately, and that's something that genuinely sucks.
There's an old saying that piracy is a service problem, and here they are trying to respond by offering a better service. Many of these compilations are actually pretty good in terms of extras offered, they go above and beyond just selling you a ROM.
Yeah, I actually agree. If game devs want to remaster old games, they have every right to do so. Ideally, these remasters would bring meaningful quality of life upgrades, while still allowing the fans to replay the game as they originally did.
One of my favorite old games is Final Fantasy X, and the remaster was actually really good. They botched the character face models, but added a lot of QoL improvements that you wouldn’t typically find in an emulator without jumping through a few hoops.
Things like 2x/4x speed which disables during cutscenes, so you’re not wasting time watching the same battle animations constantly. Auto-battle, for when you’re already completely overpowered for an area and don’t want to mash X to keep attacking. An across-the-board buff that makes grinding a breeze. The option to change the random encounter rate, to make them more frequent or non-existent. An option to choose between the classic or remastered music tracks. Etc…
Sure, lots of those things could be implemented in some way by an emulator. But having them baked right into the base game allows for things like the speed boost to automatically disable during cutscenes. Plus it opens the door for native mod support. Untitled Project X is a wonderful mod that is only possible because the game isn’t running inside of an emulator. Even my complaint about the character faces can be fixed via a simple texture swap mod.
All of this is to say that I’m happy to emulate things when needed. But since that FFX remaster launched, I haven’t felt the need to boot it up on an emulator. Because the remaster gives me anything I would want from an emulator, and then some.