By Grant Fedorov
Although I had a lot of game consoles growing up, Nintendo was my first. Growing up with the Wii and Mario Kart for the majority of my childhood I soon switched over to Xbox and the DS. The DS was my first time playing a Pokemon game and my first step into my everlasting hyperfixation with gaming. I remember playing on my DS all the time on the bus to and from school. I played through the 6th generation of Pokemon games (Omega Ruby and Y), Pokemon Moon, and Miitopia. I know it’s not a lot of games, but I took my sweet, sweet time with them. Unfortunately, a girl I will not name knocked the DS out of my hand and damaged the battery on it. Because of the broken battery, I started to play on the DS less and less until I put everything into a blue box saying “Don’t open”.
A few years later, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic for the older Pokemon games I played five years ago. I go to open up the box and it’s empty… games and all. After talking to my mom we concluded that either I misplaced them, my mom did, or my sister stole from me. Either way, I was a bit disappointed but it didn’t deter me from trying to play my childhood games. I first looked online for a 3DS but a pre-used Nintendo 3DS cost $200+ and even the generation 6 Pokemon games cost anywhere from $40-80 per game. Now one might say that I could use the Nintendo DS Eshop to buy the game, but the Nintendo DS Eshop closed its services in 2023. This inspired me to look into this further because it seemed weird that Nintendo would refuse their fans to revisit older games for an outrageous price compared to when the game was easily available.
Nintendo has made some effort to make their older games more accessible to us. If you pay for the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack for $40 a year you get access to a whole library of games from the Nintendo 64 and Game Boy era. However, that doesn’t include games that are more than 10 years old, instead focusing on games made 20+ years ago. There is a way to play those games online though. For example, Mario Kart Wii can be played with a dedicated wifi server full of superfans of the game… or you could emulate the game on your PC. Although emulating the game is illegal, if you don’t say you are emulating the game and try to make money from the content of the emulated game then you can’t be charged for anything. It brings up the topic of whether emulating recent-ish video games is truly bad if the game, plus the console costs more than 200 dollars. In my case, I think I’m just going to wait until I get my Christmas money to buy and replay the older games.
I do hope in the future it will be less expensive to buy and play older games. I understand that when a new console comes out, the older consoles get retired to save money and draw more attention to the newer games. However, I don’t think it’s right to completely gatekeeper people from the player of the older games and let scalpers sell the games at ridiculous prices. All I can hope for is to not lose my DS when I buy another one this winter.
Sources: https://www.nintendo.com/us/switch/online/nintendo-switch-online/classic-games/?srsltid=AfmBOoptaCzMM7bJGyYYzPIncyCmOu7Mtz7hQXgnSu_eehA4g6RjU6rM
