Following the closing to new purchases from the 3DS and Wii U eShops and picking up a handful of digital games (and a few physical ones), I have recently run into a bit of a self-imposed moral dilemma when it comes to writing articles about the games that I am playing on both those newly semi-discontinued systems.
I recently (as in Thursday, May 18th) finished Metroid: Samus Returns on the 3DS and found that writing about this game is difficult for two reasons. First, the game was released six years ago, and being the first fully side-scrolling Metroid game since Metroid Fusion was released 15 years earlier, there are over 1.5 million hits when you search for the game. People were excited, to say the least when this game was released. Secondly, it is for a system that as recently as three months ago, is no longer available to buy unless you decide to pay increasingly higher and higher prices from scalpers and collectors looking to lighten their collections. So writing this from the perspective of someone playing the game within the last six months for the first time ever, how do I approach that? Do I still recommend the game to people who can afford to shell out the money for physical copies while snidely poo-pooing the people who can no longer buy a digital copy of the game? Do I advocate the downloading of ROMs because the game is no longer available on actively supported consoles?
This is the question I have unintentionally posed to myself as I look at the games in my queue. But then at the same time, would I feel the same way if I decided to go back and play Paperboy 2 or Star Trek: The Next Generation on the Game Boy, two games that are no longer available on that specific platform unless you go out and find the cartridges. Or download ROMs and play on emulated software. I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that the eShop for the 3DS and Wii U closed fewer than six months ago, whereas the last "official" Game Boy games were released in Japan on March 30, 2001. That was 22 years ago.
And now again, we find ourselves in the realm of game history and preservation, to which I do not have a fully-fledged out answer.
Part of me is in support of emulating software to be able to play games on consoles and systems that are no longer in production and the only way to play "legitimate" versions of those games is to have the original hardware and the original cartridge/CD/floppy disc. I have even reviewed games here that I have played through software emulation. Hell, we even have "Emulator Hour" as a not-all-too-often recurring series here, which essentially just means that we are playing a game not on the original system it was released on, be it a ROM or an official port. And then what is the window for game emulation to be "okay?" Is it within 24 hours of a system and/or its games being discontinued? Should it be "okay" to emulate any and all 3DS games as of 12:00 AM on March 28th? Should it be a year after that system is no longer supported as there might still be copies of new and non-purchased games still in circulation from non-3rd party retailers. What is the acceptable window or time frame? At what point do Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony no longer receive any kind of money from games after a system is discontinued and new physical games are no longer being purchased or sold?
I obviously do not have any of the answers to those questions because I am just a guy sitting at a desk in an office building wondering about these things while on my lunch break. If I am lucky, I will have reread this article two more times before publishing it on Friday.
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