This holiday I spent some time with my old friend Commodore. Not the patriarch himself, but the sixty third child to bear his name. We did some catching up and despite looking like hell, Commodore is still a lot of fun. But then there’s a problem with emulating your friends; they feel cheap.
When I was younger I had to spend my parents hard earned money to buy every single game I owned. Now with the advent of emulation, I download dozens of designers entire careers in a matter of hours. McGruff may be upset that I have turned to a life of crime, but there is a deeper issue than ethics at work here.
I can’t convince myself to spend a significant amount of time with any one emulated game. As soon as I come up against resistance, I do a hard reset and load a new ROM. The reasons for this are obvious yet intimately related: I own practically every C64 game ever made and every C64 game I own cost me the effort of clicking download and enduring the stupid anime porn flashing graphic on the ROM site I use. → For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a gamer against their game.