Games

VirtualNES: Reliving Childhood Memories

Remember when the height of gaming technology was parallax scrolling? Or when you thought sound with three or four channels sounded absolutely amazing? How about when you had to use your imagination a bit because the graphics weren’t exactly photo-realistic?

My high-school years were around the same time as the Sega Master System and Nintendo Entertainment System were bowing out to be replaced by the Megadrive (Genesis for our overseas friends) and SNES (or Super Famicom). While I started off as a Sega follower, I eventually switched over to Nintendo. Ah, those were the days… “My console’s better than yours”, “Sonic sucks”, “Who wants to play as a plumber?” and so on.

There’s a big ROM scene, where you can download the cartridge data and play those old games on an emulator, but what if you’re at work, at an Internet cafe, or just don’t want to spend the time downloading and/or setting up the games? VirtualNES (vNES) offers the chance to play some of the original Nintendo Entertainment System games in your browser: no emulator required, only Java.

There’s an impressive array of games on the site too - the original Super Mario games, and I’ve just spent a frustrating ten minutes trying to pilot a sub in The Hunt for Red October. There’s even Alien3, which I thought was only a SNES game, but there you go.

If you’ve got some time to kill, or just want to reminisce about your gaming childhood, check vNES out and see what you can find.

© 2008 Geek-Speak.