So this week I spent my time frustrated. It wasn’t for the normal reason either. Normally I get frustrated whenever I run across a game that could use some minor tweaks to take it from ok to great. This time I was dealing with a slew of games that I already knew were great, but sadly they were unplayable. It’s like having candy sitting behind a panel of ballistic glass. Look all you want but you’ll never be able to have it.
Maybe I should actually tell you what I’m talking about already. I was sent a couple of free copies of two new emulators that came out. One was of the C64 and the other of the Amiga, two great examples of classic gaming at its finest. Both emulators were packed full of some of my favorite titles such as Twin Bee and Where is Carmen San Diego. In fact I was overjoyed when I first loaded up the emulators I had thought that God himself must have found it appropriate to bless me. Don’t be fooled though, these emulators are the work of the devil.
Sure at first it all looked good, but the second I tried to play a game everything went downhill. Here is an example for you. I choose to load up Twin Bee and after 5 minutes of the game trying to load to the title screen my computer freezes up. It was bad enough that not even crtl+alt+del could save me. In the end I had to hard reboot my computer. My second attempt didn’t go much better. Sure, I got to the game, but only after letting my computer sit for 10 to 15 minutes to get to the first level.
The C64 wasn’t as bad as the Amiga, but still it took me close right around 5 minutes to get Carmen San Diego booted up and about a minute every time a new area had to be loaded. So sure it ran a little bit better but it’s still a long way from saying it was good.
For those who are thinking to themselves "Maybe your computer just wasn’t powerful enough, Billy," let me educate you. I am the one who wrote the Crysis 2 review that was played on my PC. I have over $3,000 of sheer masculinity and steroids pumped into my computer. The idea that it wouldn’t be powerful enough to play these old games is a ridiculous notion.
I just can’t help but to be disappointed with these two emulators. Everything is there. All the classic games are literally waiting to be played, calling out to me even (I’m not crazy!). So why oh why couldn’t the developers find it in their hearts to actually guarantee that these emulators would work? Who knows, maybe they do work on some computers. Maybe it’s just some sort of technical issue that only causes a problem on a certain operating system. Still, these kinds of things should have been looked into. Sadly I can’t say there is anything good about this collection. What’s the point of giving someone all of this amazing content if they can’t access it?
It just makes me want to scream in frustration. I have to highly advise that nobody buy either of these two collections as you’ll only be wasting money and frustrating yourself. Perhaps if the developers run this on a couple more systems and figure out what the hangups are, then you might want to give it a try. Otherwise, its too random and you may be wasting your money.
C64 Forever & Amiga Forever gets half a GiN Gem out of a possible 5, and that’s only because I can’t give them a zero!