Chewster said:
Sidenote: probably you're aware of this already but there are people out there who can reprogram old carts with new games or you can even do it yourself if you're cool enough and have all the right equipment/patience. I don't know if that game is the same thing and I've yet to get around to paying someone to make it but I'd always wanted to play that Eric Ruth 8-bit Left4Dead on an actual NES because that would be bomb as fuck.
http://ericruthgames.weebly.com/games.html
http://callanbrown.com/index.php/basic-nes-reproduction
http://poorstudenthobbyist.blogspot.kr/2014/10/making-your-own-nes-reproduction.html
Yeah, you can get ROM chip encoders to hook up to your PC, and it's fairly easy to change from vertical to horizontal processing depending on where you solder the chipboard. You can buy the cartridge case themselves, or even make them if you're pretty good with 3D printing. 8bit L4D looks pretty awesome, as does The Incident.
The Incident is pretty darn good.
As I was saying, the NES is like the AK-74 of gaming ... you can smash them together from a myriad of different sources, none ofthem that exensive. And it's still going strong. Long live the console. In all seriousness they're still making Apple II components for hobbyists ... And it's not merely a Western hobbyist thing, there's guys in Korea that make chipsets for old 'consoles' still ... either by engineering them with newer infrastructure, or self design.
As long as other people are like me that appreciate old machines, and they're still breathing, you'll still have consoles floating about. And hey... it turns out Millenials are keeping libraries and hardprint books alive, so who knows? Maybe we'll bring proper retro back.
I think as the jobs market gets harder for new millenials, and there's a natural disdain growing towards A.I. and automation basically meaning only the Baby Boomers are the only ones benefitting by the rampant technocracy towards Taylorism, rather than actual improvement of the human condition, I think it might also float on the back of the idea of 'cool resistance'.
We saw something akin to it with the end of Maoist China, after a decade of the post-Deng XiaoPing generation. How a lot of Chinese youth started looking to old mythology and culture once more. As such people might examine an era when technology provided genuine hopefulness, rather than crippling uncertainty.
When youcreate a jobs market where you need four qualifications to survive paying rent in Sydney... pretty sure people are going to start imploding when they that start seeing even socializing jobs like in
community services, and semi-artistic/humanising jobs like being a cook or corporate planning handled by biometric scanning for lie detection during job interviews ... pretty sure that sledgehammer to that robotic scanner is a few years away.
Forget religion, gaming is the opiate of masses of the future. Say what you like, when gaming starts looking like all their frustrations in life with alienating concepts like
being security chipped to work, that's not going to be a healthy outcome. I already got annoyed at my phone asking for me to register my fingerprint just to fucking use it a bit quicker. Only so far you can push the already volatile.
But hey, maybe I've become old already ...? When it gets to the point that you have 70% of people looking for extra work on the side, only to be met constantly ... face to face ... with that which is removing all their securty. With no cheap education options. No real marketplace for creativity, but rather re-marketing the same consumerist crap ... and suddenly in the news you start hearing of increasing violence toward the machines responsible? That 70% of people might not become instantly violent, but a part of them ... that black, abyssal nugget of coalesced frustrations ... a part of them will be silently, invisibly nodding. Igniting that fuse.
Part and parcel why automation is a dead end, but more importantly why it's important to distract humans from their troubles.
That's part and parcel why I thing retro game will continue to last, why consoles even if 'underpowered' will still persist. Because ultimately if you're going to give people something similar and reminiscent to the systems of their own insecurities and expect them to buy it at an inflated price point they won't be able to afford, of course they're going to go with options they can avoid it, but also do not alienate them from other people.
Also the reason why I think board gaming numbers are growing exponentially. That's just a theory, anyways. Frankly I'm all for robot smashing or looking at technology as per what it can inspire or achieve, not how it can merely save the already wealthy more money.
I fully expect I'll be that 80 year old with their walker beating up on that creepy arse Japanese waifu model-T5 android.
Everybody should have goals in life.