Game Emulation Stories: Volume 1

This might be the start of something I want to do, but we'll have to see if it pans out and if I talk more about it. I've had my share of playing games via emulators and emulation over the last decade or so. I'm going to talk two games in this volume.

One of the games I would keep playing via emulators was the Sega Genesis version of Home Alone. I had tried it back in the mid 2000s on emulator, but 2010 was where I played it extensively. It would be something I would get a chance to play any time I didn't have any college work. Around Christmas, I walked down to a local used game store that had been open for almost two months and found a copy of it. Along with Tecmo Super Bowl (Genesis), Doom (PlayStation), and Mission: Impossible (PlayStation), I bought Home Alone.

It is a game I always try to play around Christmas. This is a fun one that captures the spirit of the movie. The graphics are solid for a game released in late 1992. Christmas vibes are what I think of with the outdoors and each house is unique. There is fun in assembling weapons and setting traps. It may be the best of games that the first two films had.

The last is another Genesis game. As a kid, a cousin of mine had Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure. I played it a few times in the early 2000s and that was it. Around the same time in 2010, I played it again after a long time. It was a hit of nostalgia since I hadn't seen the show in about almost a decade at that point and about seven, eight years since playing the game. It's a Sonic the Hedgehog type of game. Looks like the show, has a great soundtrack and has solid controls. My only complaints are a somewhat high difficulty and a complicated password system.

I played it for a while in 2010, but stopped and didn't come back to it until August of 2011. It was one of those nights where I played it overnight on my laptop and used save states to beat it. When it got to the credits, I knew a few characters, but most I didn't know or remembered. It got me very curious and it got me to watch clips of the show. Then it grew to watching episodes and writing a spec movie script of my own. I do own an actual copy of the game and have beaten it legitimately on a real Genesis.

Hope you folks enjoyed these two stories and hopefully I'll do more of these in the future.