The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
It's been almost a year since the Nintendo Wii was released. Coming out in the mad rush before Christmas of 2006, this console was basically unavailable for months. Last week I finally managed to find one and convince my kids to let me buy it. So all this week, we've been jumping around in our living room waving the motion-sensitive controllers through the air, most likely leaving anyone walking by my house wondering what is going on inside. It has been interesting getting this system. I've been playing video games since Pong. When I was a kid we had one of these systems that hooked up to our TV. Then when I was a young teenager I won an Atari 2600 in a draw that my hockey team made. It was the hottest thing going for about six months, until one of my friends got an Intellivision that was much better. Since then, its been one system after another. For years I played video games on my computer, but lately I've been going back to consoles since my kids first bought their Nintendo DS Lites a year ago, and now we have our Wii to spend countless hours on. What is interesting is that although all of these games and systems have been improving all the time, there is still a huge call for older games to be revived through emulators. Emulators are software downloads that turn your brand new, screaming fast $2,000 desktop computer into a Commodore 64 for you to play eight-bit games on. Many more people who grew up on these games are looking to play them again, and using this software, they can. A quick search online for emulators turns up all sorts of websites selling everything from Atari to Intellivision to old Sega Dreamcast emulators. The range of games is wide and cheap and leaves me wondering why people want to pay for these. I think a lot of the rage behind emulators has to do with the same thing that has made the Wii so successful for Nintendo. When it was first released, over a year behind the Microsoft Xbox and several months later than the PlayStation 3, people were astounded at how basic the graphics were, until they played the system. It was innovative, it was different, but most of all, it was fun, though there is no argument that both of the other consoles have much more realistic, high-powered graphics. Emulators capture our attention because they bring us back to the games that we grew up on, games that we first played for endless hours in a basement somewhere. These games were new, many of them were the first of their kind and they were simple to play and fun to win. This is the same thing that I'm finding with the Wii. It is different. It's fun to go bowling from home where you actually need to swing the controllers to bowl the ball. It's fun to play Rayman and shoot alien bunnies with plungers. Emulators are not going away. As a matter of fact, as the number of games from the past grows and systems keep outdating themselves, we will find more and more of this software to keep us entertained. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
