What Interest Me This Week

Retro gaming

As a family matter I dipped a toe into the business of retro gaming and unintentionally fall into the deep end of the pool of trying to get Street Fighter II playing on the family media center.

It started with me trying to get retro games running from within Kodi. The richness of the library is immense, but it didn't work with my gamepad.

An attempt was made with Steam, but that's overkill for what I'm trying to achieve.

Finally I got it working with a desktop SNES emulator. That worked out great, even with two players (one on keyboard, another with gamepad).

But somehow the edition of the game I got did not feel right. I neglected to research the many version of SF2 that were made, and the 'right' version was not for SNES but the arcade. A whole world opened up.

Next thing I do will be to trying the MAME emulator and the acrade version of SF2.

I'm typically not fond of being nostalgic. I think of appeal of retro gaming isn't about nostalgia. After going a few round of the game I think the appeal is about the craftiness of game designs that doesn't demand a lot of you.

Modern AAA titles are universes that want to suck you in and keep you there. They expect skills from you that require life time of practices. Once you've invested, you'll come to love the game out of Stockholm Syndrome.

Retro games however did not have that luxury. They had to rely purely on game mechanics to deliver the entertainment. Most of all it doesn't demand commitment from you. You keep playing because it's fun not because you've invested.