BANZAI EMULATION! A personal rediscovery when it comes to gaming....

[Strike105X]

This is probably going to be a weird post but i feel like sharing what's on my mind, last year (during this time i believe), i started making my new intel build, basically i was upgrading from this:

To this:

And after building my new PC one of the first things i tried was PCSX2 and Dolphin (PS2 and Nintendo GameCube/Wii emulation), i dunno if it was because i did something wrong or not, but while with the intel build there was a significant improvement in performance it still wasn't at the level i wanted it at the time for some of my games. At that moment i just felt like loosing most interest in emulation and moved my attention to PC gaming only. 

Moving on to the subject of pc gaming... I never was a great fighting game player (well except for Bloody Roar 2 i did fairly well with that), but i did enjoy a lot playing them, most notably i think i spent over 10 years playing like crazy Battle Arena Toushiden 4 and Bloody Roar 2 Bringer of the New Age on the PS1 (emulated via ePSXe or pSX), Soul Calibur and DOA2 on Dreamcast (via nullDC) and Guilty Gear XX on PC. I had a great amount of fun with them daily even if alone. Fast forwarding when the PC gaming boom started i was really excited, but among all the games i got and played the only ones that really got my attention and i genuinely enjoyed where: Tales of Zestiria and Berseria (well i probably will love Symphonia as well, truth be told i didn't had time to properly play it), Titanfall 2, Forza Horizon 3, Tekken 7 and DOOM, that's pretty much it... Among the genres i would like to focus on fighting games for a bit though, when they started flooding in on steam i was really excited, especially about DOA5 LR but to my dismay something felt like it was lost, among all the fighting games i got the only one i genuinely had a decent amount of fun with was Tekken 7 to be honest (and this considering i never was that big of a Tekken fan), not even DOA5 got stuck with me, compared to the hours i put with the previous games of the series it pales in comparison, i get bored of it rather fast this days... Another problem i found, that its totally on me, is that at one point i felt for the whole "online sharing experience", i was more concerned about making videos and screenshots, trophies and various other such things then enjoying my games which was just wrong (recovered from that :p). Back to fighting games though, in all honesty i started to believe that i had changed, that i just no longer care that much about the fighting game genre (Soul Calibur VI was going to be the last chance i would've taken with this genre)...

Now to speak about the present... due to some free time at work, and during getting back and to work where i'm stuck doing nothing, i decided to try and install Drastic on my Android phone and tried Super Robot Taisen OG Saga Endless Frontier (previously i tried reading, but the problem with that is that i got so absorbed into it that i can barely pull away, i ended up getting my priorities wrong so i dropped reading and tried gaming to fill in the gap), to my big surprise I had and still have so much fun playing that game that i'm honestly shocked, its one of the most fun experience i had with gaming and JRPG's in years (togheter with Berseria and Zestiria of course). I eventually reached the point where i got Kosmos, she's quite fun to play with in that game:

  

  

And having so much fun with Kosmos in that game, it made me want to properly play and finish the Xenosaga series, plus since there's a possibility of a Zone of the Enders II release on PC i also wanted to properly play the first ZOE which i somehow managed to finish on my PS2, the problem is that on the PS2 there's no option for inverted camera controls, and i can't play right with normal camera controls, it was a pretty horrible experience i barely finished both ZOE and ZOEII because of it and didn't enjoy the games as much as i should because of it, so once i got time i started grabbing my backups getting the latest PCSX2 build, and to my surprise ? EVERYTHING WORKS GREAT! I was honestly shocked, i did not expect such a huge improvement especially in performance over my previous tests last year, the only thing i'm doing different is that this time i'm running the games of my SSD, rather then a HDD, but anyway everything works great even in software mode, it could be that i might have done something wrong last time but i know the amount of work people put in this emulation projects even despite their age so its really something to be grateful towards.

Seeing such huge improvements in Xenosaga Ep I and ZOE my excitement got the better of me and i couldn't contain myself from testing more games, they all work great! My biggest surprise was fighting games though, playing games such as DOA2, or Soul Calibur 2 or Bloody Roar, i could barely stop myself from playing them to resume testing other games, i was stunned on how addictive it felt, i'm honestly shocked. I dunno if its me getting stuck in the past or something wrong with some of the games today but after quite a lot of time has passed i'm honestly having loads and loads of fun playing again! Well its true that this is thanks to people who either developed or contribute towards emulation projects such as this, so if any of you are reading this:

Thank You Very Much for giving me the chance to Enjoy Gaming Again!

 

This is pretty much all i wanted to say, sorry to have wasted your time :p.

[Okarin]

It looks like a really neat machine to be used only with emulation. Hope you find some good-looking modern titles.

You can try the BlazBlue series, it's on Steam.

Edited February 19, 2018 by Okarin

[Strike105X]

1 hour ago, Okarin said:

It looks like a really neat machine to be used only with emulation. Hope you find some good-looking modern titles.

You can try the BlazBlue series, it's on Steam.

Yup i do want to complete it for the story some time (i have all 3 games on steam), but as a fighting game last few times i tried it, it didn't kept me hooked, i will give it another chance later on though.

 

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Slightly unrelated but i do am happy that i got DS4 controller sure feels nice when emulating and playing Xenosaga Ep I, and to think at one point i was tempted to sell it :p.