Emulation and Quick Save....

Hi there,

i rarely post here, i use this site mainly for tracking my games and progress.

i started last year to play some games i own on emulation, because most of my stuff is in my parents basement i dont have enough space here as a student in a different city.
i usually play most of the newer stuff, but i started some older games i used to play as a kid or lend from my cousin lately.

iam more of a fan of playing it on original hardware but i came across the following problem:
-i never made it as a kid through battletoads
-i never passed a certain level in r-type 3
-i loved the music and the feeling of gradius 3 but this was also too difficult for me after the third level

so i discovered those games again and finally made it through the games.
i realized that gradius 3 is super impossible and i was so glad having quick save/quick load.

i wanted to ask you?

how are you guys handling it? do you consider this as cheating?
same goes for emulation: i dont have the extra space for my CRT, so i dont have the time and the setup to play the original games, would you still play the emulated games?

as you grow older you have less time to fuck around with hard sections of the game so, i somehow feel relieved to have this for emulation.
every platform older than 5 years should be emulatable, because now i also want to give some dc/ps2 games a try(i have a mac and there is no dc/ps2-compatability).

Quicksaving in emulation has proven to be an extremely useful feature in practicing particularly hard sections in older games where you'd have to replay the entire level / game upon death otherwise. I still attempt to beat said games the way they were meant to be bested afterwards so resorting to quicksave with the sole intention of avoiding the challenge aspect is cheating in my book, but I'm not here to tell you how to spend your time in vydia.

I think it's a great tool that can help you see game content that you wouldn't be able to otherwise. Even if it's just saving you some time so that you can get to more games!!

I try to use it less now, largely because of https://www.retroachievements.org. The way their scoring system works, is you basically earn double points for earning achievements without tools like quickload, slow-down, and rewind. This encourages me to at least try without quicksaves for a while before I decide something isn't worth the effort.

Some people might hate on you for using them, but your enjoyment is most important :)

I'm pretty much with you there when it comes to playing classic games you were never able to beat as a kid but just finally wanna get through.
I usually try to beat a game fair and square without quick saves, but if it's too hard or the game over setbacks just make it unnecessarily frustrating, I will take the liberty of using quick saves. I did that with the original Sonic The Hedgehog where I saved between levels because I just wanted to experience the game once. I didn't care about getting good at it and the old school way of setting you all the way back to the beginning after a game over screen is in most cases an outdated annoyance in game design anyway if you ask me.

In the end you are allowed to play a (singleplayer) game however you want to. I think though that it would be fair to write something like that in the notes if you log a completion on this site.

- Matt

Like others have said, you should play the games in whatever fashion makes it most enjoyable to you. I'm sure there will always be some purists that will argue that save states are cheating, but the good news is that random internet strangers aren't the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong. If you reach a point where you feel like you are cheating yourself, though, then you may want to consider what you're comfortable with. I remember about 7 years back I went on a big kick with short emulator games just to boost my number of completions and I save-scummed some of them maybe every 5 seconds. But I wasn't having fun and I barely even remember most of the games I played during that time, so I had to change my personal save state policy to make my completions feel more rewarding. That said, maybe someone else could enjoy saving all that much--to each their own.

I'm 100% with Matt that Game Overs are outdated concepts that modern players really aren't equipped to handle anymore. They're just a holdover from when arcade games were meant to wring quarters out of kids. It makes for a neat challenge if you wanna go hardcore, but there's no need to torture yourself.

They are games. Don't let anyone influence you to feel that you should be enjoying them a certain way or you're doing it "wrong." Enjoy them how you want to. My kids will play a level over and over and over and over and that's how they enjoy playing. In my head I'm wondering why they don't go to the next level, but they have a ball doing their thing. Fine - they can enjoy it how they want.

Another point worth considering is that many old games were only beatable by the most skilled and dedicated players. This was by design. Back then you saw all kinds of accessories to help you through games. It was an accessory market that doesn't really exist anymore. Controllers with slow motion, turbo fire, auto fire, Game Genie, Pro Action Replay, etc. So even back then when save states didn't exist there were enough people that needed a boost to get through games and were looking for a way to do it. I don't see save states as all that different.

But obviously the only way to really consider a game complete is if you are playing on a CRT with original hardware and a standard controller with the original game while wearing your Billabong jacket and roller skates while sitting on a bean bag on shag carpeting next to your Teddy Ruxpin and Garbage Pail Kids while drinking Hi-C and listening to the California Raisins. Otherwise you didn't actually have fun and it didn't count.

Yeah it's "cheating" but like everyone else says: that doesn't matter. Older games are usually designed to be timesinks, I don't see anything wrong with wanting to avoid that aspect.

Give yourself a reasonable checkpoint in a game that's designed to be difficult and is designed to be beaten by tedious trial and error. just skipping the tedious part of starting at the beginning again is no big deal.

Depends entirely on the game for me. If I don't enjoy it I will use save states / rewind mechanics to just get through it and call it a day. If I feel like I really abused these I won't submit a time for it.

If I do like the game however my goal is to finish the game without needing to rely on them. What I will do thought is place save states at points that end up giving me a lot of grief so I can more easily practice them and figure out how to get past them on a proper run through. I know it expedites the learning process a bit but I do find it really tedious having to say replay the whole game every time just to get another shot at a really cheap last boss or something. At least that way I feel I get a bit of both worlds, the game gets completed "as it was intended" but the learning process / trial and error aspect gets lessened somewhat.

My motto is, "If the game cheats me, I'll cheat back"

My motto is, "If the game cheats me, I'll cheat back"

I like it!! In training they'd say "if you're in a fair fight, you're doing it wrong!"

My motto is, "If the game cheats me, I'll cheat back"

haha, this is a good answer making me smile.
but how do i know that the game cheats?

anyway, there were some good answers.

i usually play everything on my original hardware, but it becomes more and more of a hassle since i dont live anymore in my parents house, putting together the whole setup, from a crt, to the game system to the right game from one of the many boxed up in the basement takes me already more than an hour, so emulation comes around quite handy.

i usually go the purist way, but iam in my thirties and i dont see it anymore of a challenge and more of a wringing quarters out of kids, which is why i stopped doing this.

i really wonder, how you could make this feature even more rewarding...