Lets do the time warp...

Hello all out there in blog-world. It's been a while since my last post because, honestly, I have a very short attention span and I have been pinging about from one thing to another for the past week, all the while trying to decide what to write about.

My prayers were answered this morning with a package from an e-bayer - a small stack of Total! magazines. For those of you out there that aren't me, Total! was a Nintendo magazine back in the nineties and was awesome. Recently, I have been trawling e-bay trying to find old back issues, and this morning I got issues #1-8, 11, 12 and 14 through, filled with antique Nintendo goodnes.

Aside from the nostalgia jolt (and discovering Join Me's own Danny Wallace used to be a writer there when he was 18), these issues also reminded me of the joys of classic gaming, and that's what we're going to be talking about today.

If you were a child of the Eighties, and were male, chances were you were a console kid. Back then, you were either a Sega or Nintendo. It was like the mods and rockers, but we didn't have pubes yet and we certainly weren't doing it for the chicks. I was in the latter of the two groups, and even to this day I find Sega games to be... distasteful. I have no idea why, other than when you're 10, brand loyalty must be important. Most of us however, have lost, sold or broke our original consoles, and we have no way of enjoying our childhood games, right?

Wrong.

Firstly, how about a portable NES? The Game Theory Admiral (or GTA) appears to be the real deal - a Gameboy Advance clone that plays original Famicom games and for around £40-50, you can't go far wrong with this combo of hi-tech and retro geek chic. Or you could even build your own portable console (see, the internet is good for more than making Semtex!) if you have the solder-skillz. Hell, if you're splashing the cash, you might as well buy one of the original grey boxes.

But paying for stuff isn't what the internet was invented for, so how about emulation? Emulators are programs that pretend to be consoles. You can download NES, SNES, Gameboy, N64 and even Gamecube emulators and then play games on them by finding the game (or ROMs as they are known) in the murkier corners of the Net. Couple your emulator of choice with a half-decent control pad, and you're in for an almost never-ending supply of awesome games, especially the ones you always wanted when you were a kid.

One such game is now the Holy Grail of Nintendo emulation, and that's Starfox 2. The original Starfox was a superlative masterpiece. Featuring a Super-FX chip, Starfox was the first SNES game in 3D, managing to hurtle over *gasp* 100 polygons around the screen at once and provide feverish game players like myself with the first glance at a real 3D world. A touted sequel was built, advertised and lusted after. It was to have free-roaming levels, missions where your ship turns into a land-walking mech-beast and use the FX2 chip, even more pant-wettingly advanced than it's predecessor.

When it never appeared, all but the most hard-core forgot about it and it wasn't until the N64 arrived some 3 years later that Fox McCloud would get another outing. Recently though, leaked versions of this MIA classic have begun to appear on the 'net. First there were incomplete beta versions and then a final beta, or in other words, the finished article. Some talented web-heads have even translated the game, so us Westerners can enjoy it too. ZSNES runs the game remarkably well, with only the occaisional crash (and even they're being worked on).

Thanks to modern programmery wizardry, SNES games can now look even better than ever. Using antialiasing and antistropic filtering, all of the jagged edges can be removed from the sprites in old games, so you don't have to sully your eyes with piss-poor graphics.

Even relatively modern systems like the N64 can benefit from some emulator tinkerage. Resoltions can be increased from the blocky 640x400 resolution of the original console right up to crystal clear modern standards like 1600x1400. You can play Goldeneye 007 with a mouse and keyboard. Even better, new versions of the graphics code mean that all of the textures in the games can be replaced with new, better-looking art. One of the first of these is the Zelda Retexture Project, still in early stages, but looking more and more promising every couple of days. Eventually, they plan to make Zelda as pretty as any modern game. All they need is time.

There. I've left you enough links to get playing with. If you come across any awesome games on your travels, drop me a line!