A Gamer's Last Refuge

by James Enright 

Submitted by:	RalaineHalferon@aol.com (James Enright)
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Progress is a sign of the times, they say. People are waiting down the block from yesterday, their arms wide open, embracing what is to be, and discarding what once was. Such is the case with the topic I have chosen to defend. The topic I have decided on may not be the best written, the funniest, the most profound, but I'll try anyway. I come before you good people to talk about something that affects all of us as gamers. I'm talking about emulation. I'll explain what that is. Emulation is almost like the download of MP3s on the Internet. It is very different, however as MP3s are at least somewhat legal. It is not the emulation programs that are illegal in this case, but the compatible file format, known as Read Only Memory (ROM) files. You can literally download any emulator application for any system you can think of.

The whole debate started in early to mid 1999, when a company called "Bleem!" created a patch that would allow gamers to play their Playstation games ported up to PC software, provided they had the game. The problem was, they did this without expressed consent of Sony Computer Entertainment. This case brought emulation to the public eye, and the bad press it received caused most of us to look at emulation as piracy, which in this case, it was. Usually, it's not.

I proudly say that I download games. I do not download them for any ulterior motive. It is for this reason that I am called a cheat, a freeloader. Me and my kind are shunned out of gaming society; we are solely responsible for multilevel companies losing millions of dollars in revenue. Some people download because they are cheap; others, because of the enhanced graphics, and some download to make a profit from others, charging money for the bootlegged game discs. But there are many, like me, who download because they are left no choice in the matter. We are lucky to have these emulators. Without them, the majority of people would not be exposed to import games. The latter argument mostly affects mostly gamers of the Role Playing or Action persuasion, for one reason. We're not getting the games. This is why I am strongly for emulation, but only for certain systems.

Somewhere, some gaming company is deciding which games to release in North America. The results are not pretty, usually. More often than not, the game is deemed unsuitable for our culture, which translates into less money for them. That leaves us stuck here with a huge flock of "Americanized" Role Playing Games. This makes us, the RPG elite, the center of this debate. If you take every console RPG ever created, I would be suprised if 4 percent were of European or North American origin.

I download not for my profit, but my cultural benefit. As my Japanese is functional at best, I download a patch, that, after programming, rewrites most, if not all of the original Japanese text. This lets me look at the game the way it was meant to be seen, fully understood! I can assure you that on my emulator, I have never played a game that is not patched. Most friends of mine are in the same gray area that I am. Hey, if the big companies have any complaints, maybe they should find a better way to deter us, such as releasing bi or even trilingual games.

I can also honestly say that I own just a Super Nintendo/Famicom emulator. Never have I tried to download any other system. The only other system I would even fathom, would be the Nintendo Entertainment System. These systems don't even matter anymore! Where the Playstation and Dreamcast emulators are putting a drain on the market, who cares if the entire North-American population has a Super Famicom emulator? I haven't seen any companies release a Super Famicom game in years, and I've never seen a very Japanese title around. When was the last time you saw a better way of getting import games? Granted, there are mod chips on Playstation, that let you play imports, but what about Super Famicom? You'd better have a good grip on Japanese. If you just go to an import shop, it is most of the time unwanted crap and such. Even if you saw the best looking game, the majority wouldn't be able to understand the description on the back. Boom. Forty-five dollars gone, and what do you get? A bad game that no one liked even in Japan, and to top it off, no way to translate it. If it's a ROM, you can just delete it afterwards. No need to worry about having not tried a game first.

So this is where it is now. Interpol is going to come running into my home at any moment, and confiscate the computer I store my emulation stuff on, because I didn't delete them. Are we common criminals for defending our sacred creed? No. We are just doing what is right.

For these reasons, the emulation issue is one of the most heated debates in all gaming. Can it really be wrong? My answer, after research, would have to be no. So go out and emulate, my friends. For it is all we can do to fortify some Japanese culture to the rapidly changing gaming market. It very well may be our last refuge.

Notes:
The first thing you'll note is that there a lot of tense and comma misuses within this editorial. This is often what word and many other word processing programs often misses or corrects badly. The amount of mistakes also make it somewhat less coherent. There is also a point which needs to be made, as the editorial fails to make these points clear, or he actually denies.

Emulation is indeed legal to a certain extent, as they can be 'technically' classified as backup copies. It is legal to back up your software just in case your original doesn't work. Some areas allow it, others don't. It's a very grey area, since the legalistics is like skating on thin ice in the middle of a hot day. Also, you ARE allowed to own the emulator, and allowed to use games which aren't commerical, [ie, copyrighted] although this varies from country to country.

A note also that Bleem is actually a program. A patch is a file which you apply to the data [the game in this case] which modifies the data. You can't modify what's on a Playstation CD unless you copy the CD off, patch it then copy it back onto a blank disc. A program on the other hand uses data to process and do all sorts of stuff. In this case process the Playstation CD data and play it like a real Playstation would. Which brings a misleading ideas as to what an emulator is.

Also, there is still many places where you can purchase Snes games, including auction sites, so saying that it 'doesn't matter' (implying it won't hurt anyone at all) is somewhat up to question.

A note also that this author supports emulation primarily for import games, but doesn't consider the possibility of playing unreleased PSX games, or for people living outside of an area where games are readily available such as Europe and Australia, which could have helped a lot in his argument.

Well meaning to discuss a seldom talked about topic, and a good attempt, but the facts in this case proved to be the major breaking point.