T w e n t y S i d e d

Remember that time Nintendo released a console named after an embarrassing bodily function? Remember that time everybody was laughing at Nintendo for thinking handheld motion controls were the future of console gaming? Remember when Nintendo followed up their hit GameCube console with…two GameCubes taped together?

The “success” of a console can only be judged in context and with understanding; there are very few absolutes. The Wii did some important things, but only lasted five years…half of the hardware generation it was part of. It was replaced with the WiiU, which only lasted five years as well, and was basically a trial run for what would become the “Switch,” Nintendo’s actual next-gen console. The WiiU was technically a “better” system than the Wii, but is generally considered a lesser success. Our interest in the WiiU is because it actually has the ability to play every Nintendo console that preceded its release.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “An Experiment in Retrogaming: Backward Compatible Consoles”

Paige Francis He/him

So at this point, I had an HP Laptop with RetroArch for 8-bit and 16-bit emulation, and a Wii for GameCube games. I had wanted to keep this as simple as possible, but two systems isn’t really a problem. Except it’s not two systems. This puts me at three systems, actually; because I already had Sony games taken care of. I didn’t mention that before. And arguably, PlayStation and Xbox emulation are really at the heart of a lot of what I want to play. Complicating the issue is that Microsoft *REALLY* doesn’t like backward compatibility. Sony seems to play this weird moving target game. And Nintendo really is just as bad as Sony, if not worse…but they left a couple of big caveats out in public.

And on top of all that, I really don’t want to do this:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “An Experiment in Retrogaming 1.5: This is getting complicated…”

Paige Francis He/him