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Despite the fact that I really love emulators and having the ability to emulate whatever game I want (also to just, run any game ever made for every single console ever created), I really never spend too much time playing with them. Like, I want to enjoy emulated games, and to play those games that I keep hearing are all time greats (like Mario 64 or whatever), yet I never really seem to have the motivation or the will to actually play them. Sometimes I give out the excuse that these older games would be too annoying to play, other times it is the fear of this thing that people keep praising ending up being just “fine” and you end up with a “wait, that’s it?” kinda feeling when you inevitably finish that game. Other times, it is the infinite backlog of games that keep reminding me that I still have other great games to play that don’t require emulation, and it has gotten so bad to the point I just can’t commit to any of them, and then I remind myself that I have 150 games on Steam and 400 something games that I got for free on the Epic Games Store. Do I play any of these games? Nope! I tend to just replay the same 10 games or so, again, and again, and again.

It is frustrating, yet you bet I will end up buying more fucking games on the next Steam sale, lmao. I don’t have unlimited time like I used to as a kid, now I am an adult (i guess) and most of my time is spent up by work, and if not work, chores, or sleeping, and the days that I do get off, I just don’t have the motivation to do anything, I feel too tired. And yet, kid me would’ve fucking killed to be in my position right now, to have all this access to these games that just waiting for someone to pick up and play. Maybe I just need a better system on picking out what game to play, and to actually push myself to finally finish that big ass backlog that I have still to this day.

I don’t like the switch (the console)

To be honest, I always thought about the Switch as a terrible console: it was too expensive in the region that I live in, and the games were sold at a king’s ransom. In my opinion these traits should’ve made it an unpopular console (at least in this region that I live in), yet it is the 3rd best selling console of all time. It didn’t matter that the graphics looked like shit compared to other consoles or PC, or that games ran at awful frame rates, or the game prices were awful compared to other platforms, the exclusive games on the Switch were a banger and are proof that graphics aren’t everything at all.

Compared to other platforms, the Switch had great multiplayer/party games, which not only were very fun to play, they were also peak FOMO, and because of that, many people were convinced to spend the money that a Switch was worth just so they didn’t get left out. And it was so frustrating when my online friends all choose a game to play together but the game chosen was a Switch-only game, and since I didn’t have the console, I ended up being left out. And then they would be like “oh yeah we can stream the game for you lug!” without realizing that it only made the FOMO worse. On a side tangent, I really don’t feel like watching a gameplay of a game is the same as actually play it: half of the experience is lost because you’re not the one playing it, instead you’re doing nothing but watch someone else have all the fun.

the switch, hacked right open

I remember someone, somewhere found a way to access an exploit that pretty much opened up the console for hacking and a whole lot of other bullshit. So apparently a paperclip was all what it was needed to hack an original model Switch, and well that pretty much opened the floodgates to anything, and even with Nintendo trying to stop this from happening, it was a little too late anyways, as people were starting to develop modchips, and figure out how the console worked from the inside. I remember someone managing to run Android on the Switch1, since like it is literally a tablet with NVIDIA graphics anyways. Another thing that this allowed was the ability for emulation to flourish, and it would only get better as time went on. Yuzu was able to run shit like Super Mario Odyssey a year after the emulator launched, which is crazy considering that emulation often doesn’t get this good years after the console reaches EoL.

There is something strange about being able to play games that were on sale on the store shelves for essentially nothing, if that. Even weirder are the times that games sometimes would end up leaked out a week before launch, so now you can just play games that weren’t even out yet on the official console on these emulators, which was awesome. Not that I ever tried, however. I bet Nintendo was fucking fuming at the fact people were enjoying these games for free, and were doing everything they could to demonize and make emulation sound more risky than it actually is, not to mention the constant ROM hosting site nuking.

lug finally tries switch emulation

It wouldn’t be until 2021 when I got my first PC that can actually play most games2, and until 2022-2023 when I managed to set up Yuzu to play games. Setting up Yuzu is a pain as you’d expect it to be. And the community surrounding Yuzu was not willing to help pirates play Switch games for free, so it was pretty much going deep into some sketchy forums and Discord servers to get the stuff that one needs. After a couple of hours of research, I managed to finally get to a point where I was able to get a game up and running, and I think the first game I played was Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. BOTW is a game that I seen a lot of videos about (like Green Ham Gaming’s video on the Wii U, where he showcases this game while talking about how powerful is the Wii U really) but never really played, and I decided to actually play it. And it bored me out of my mind. I didn’t like BOTW, and I didn’t really thought it was worth my time. I fucking hated the breaking swords system, I hated the energy system3, or how little health you’d get. I didn’t like the combat in game: it felt weird for someone who was never played a controller game in my life, so I guess that could be on me. And I think the moment I stopped playing was the moment I reached a shrine where I was stopped by the Switch emulator player’s worst nightmare: a puzzle with tilt controls, and my controller, well, was a Xbox controller and those don’t have shit for tilt controls, lmao. I think I forced Yuzu to use my mouse as the so called “tilt control”, but at the end of the day, it was far more annoying than it was worth. I hated this experience and it sucked like ass. And so, I eventually forgot about BOTW. I should also mention that BOTW had some really cool graphical artifacting that came from the fact that it was being emulated, and a lot of people told me to emulate the Wii U version of the game, since Wii U emulators are significantly more mature compared to their Switch counterparts.

A game that I did actually love is Kirby and the Forgotten Land (or KATFL, for short). This is probably the first time I played any Kirby game since the time I played Kirby and the Amazing Mirror on an emulator on my phone, and it was also the first time experiencing a supposedly 3D Kirby game. And by god was this fucking game an absolute banger. I loved every single minute playing it. I really like the abandoned vibe of the world, and how just decay and vegetation has taken over. The abandoned cities, the theme park with no one in it, it makes you wonder what the hell happened that caused everyone to disappear, or abandon this world. The combat in this game is pretty good, and there are some awesome boss fights, especially the last one, ngl. The mouthful gimmick of inhaling objects to complete certain puzzles and other challenges are a good idea, but I end up forgetting about them. In a similar way rocket launchers are only found right where they are needed in modern FPS shooters, so too are these mouthful objects. And for like, most of the game, these are never really used for the most part. When it comes to graphical glitches, the game also had its fair share of strange glitches and other annoying stuff. Occasionally, I would load up the game and I would be jumpscared by artifacting and other graphical glitches that pretty much made the game unplayable. Reloading the game sometimes helped, at least. Overall, I really like this game, and it is kinda sad that the new DLC announced seems to be Switch 2 exclusive, you know, that fucking console that is like 700 dollars here where I fucking live, fucking hell.4

Another good game that I played was Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe. One of my friends is a massive fan of this game and sometimes we would just be in a voice chat while I streamed the game, and those are probably the most fun I have had in a while, ngl. And the game itself was also fun, to be honest. I really like the level design, the characters, Magolor, everything. It is just generally a great fucking game. And it just peak fun.

I also tried a bunch of other games, just to figure out if they would even work at all. So here is a quick list of shit that I tried out:

I do think it is funny that you can play previously PC/other console exclusive games on the Switch, which are often the worst ports to play. Wolfenstein games suffer a lot from being crammed into a 2017 era tablet, with the fast paced combat found in that game being very challenging for controller users, especially when the graphics are turned way down. If there is something good that the Switch 2 gives us, it is extra power that allows developers to play with, and I think now the console is almost at par to the rest of the consoles I guess.

everything came crashing down

Eventually Nintendo would put their foot down and decide to go hard against Yuzu, after news broke out that people were playing TOTK weeks before it actually released. And the moment that Nintendo figured out that people in the Yuzu community were trading ROMs like trading cards, they didn’t held back, and I think the Yuzu developers at the end had to settle for something like 2 million dollars. I think it is insane that the Yuzu developers had this much money in the first place, lmao. The moment the emulation and piracy communities around the internet caught wind of this, they started to back everything they can. The Yuzu GitHub repos were backed up, it was uploaded to the Internet Archive, the source code and executables were distributed around the internet a couple days before the GitHub page was finally nuked off the face of the earth.

A couple months later, even Ryujinx got caught in the crossfire, with Nintendo threatening them with a long and expensive lawsuit, and well, they also folded. Even if they could’ve fought back and won, would you be willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to fight back? At least Nintendo gave the Ryujinx devs the easy way out, at least.

Yuzu and Ryujinx are open source. Which means that if you cut one head off, several more will take its place. As you’d expect, dozens of forks of these emulators went in to fill the void, with Suyu becoming the first one to show up. Nintendo fought against these developers to try and kill these emulators for good, I think at one point they wanted to make the code behind Yuzu illegal to have somehow6, but to be expected, it is very very fucking hard to actually do so. And so you can still probably find the source code to Yuzu in the Internet Archive, there are GitHub forks, and on probably hundreds of thousands of torrents and people’s hard drives which make essentially trying to completely kill Yuzu next to impossible. The same goes to Ryujinx. Ultimately I think Nintendo failed miserably to stop these emulators, since even in this frozen state that both emulators are in right now, both emulators are still capable of playing a huge chunk of the Switch library. The executable files for Yuzu are probably not hard to find, and the ones for Ryujinx aren’t hard to find either. It seems that after the death of both Ryujinx and Yuzu, Switch ROMs themselves have started to become really hard to find, with Nintendo nuking a bunch of popular ROM hosting websites. Getting ROMs now is a game of fighting adware, going through dead links, seeing takedown notices, and other really annoying bullshit.

And I really don’t think this will get any better. The Switch 2 has been made to be compatible with the OG Switch games, which means most likely Nintendo will continue to act hostile against anyone who dares to resume development of a emulator as publicly as Yuzu and Ryujinx once did. And the Switch 2 itself has probably been significantly beefed up in terms of security that I don’t think we’ll see a working emulator for the next couple of years. And with Nintendo having the ability to remote kill consoles now, I think that it will only make things worse.

But who knows. Maybe NVIDIA fucked up again somewhere, and now it is someone else’s turn to find it.

a conclusion of sorts

Ultimately, I think Switch emulation currently in this very weird state. Yuzu was killed and made an example of because the developers were dumbasses that gloated about the fact that they could play TOTK before launch (not to mention the fact that they were passing around ROMs in their Discord server like it was blunts at the evil blunt rotation), and Ryujinx did nothing wrong but it still got caught in the crossfire. Many developers forked and remade these emulators, Suyu was the one I remember showing up days after Yuzu’s death, and I am pretty sure it got DMCA’d as quickly as you’d expect. And so the whole thing goes, Switch emulation is in this constant cycle of emulators showing up, and then they either get taken down or the developers decide to take it down themselves because of fear of retaliation by Nintendo or their army of lawyers. And now with the Switch 2 and all the little restrictions that they have put in place (like the ability to remotely kill your console if they find out that you decide to mod it), I doubt there will be any sort of emulator popping up any time soon. Or who knows, maybe someone, somewhere figures it out. Or maybe NVIDIA fucked it up again and left a cool exploit that someone forgot to notice. Who knows.

Anyways, I really don’t know if even getting a Switch 2 is even worth it. I thought about it for a while now, and like, that price tag always gets me at the end. Where I live the console itself can be found for 400 to 500 dollars, and the games themselves are around 100 dollars because fuck you. It is a really frustrating thing, i guess. Maybe I will get one in two years when the insane prices go down or something. But who knows. Kirby Air Riders looks like absolute fun, and I kinda want to play it, ngl.

tangent 1: PEAK is still peak, the art block is pain, and starting a cd collection

I am still somewhat surprised that PEAK is still relevant in my friend circles, considering that it is usually around this time they find out another “friendslop” game to play now. I think the reason why it is still somewhat relevant is because they did like two updates after the post that I made about this game, and that kept it going for a little longer. And the most recent update added a new biome that will sometimes appear instead of Tropics. That is pretty cool, tbh. This weekend I managed to play the game three times, and so far it has been very fun. I like the feel of the new Roots biome, and the hazards that you can encounter there. There are mushrooms, spores that will turn you into a zombie if you are not careful, mushrooms that you can bounce off, zombies that will kill you, and these enemies (idk what to call them) that will knock you off if you are not careful. I do like seeing more active enemies being added to the game, which forces you to think where you are climbing and where to go.

When it comes to drawing, I been feeling pretty burnt out if that makes sense. Work pretty much is draining me of my motivation to do anything afterwards and like, it just feels so tiring. Like I am not doing much at all at work when it comes to physical work, but it is more the fact that it is mentally exhausting. Maybe I just need a better way to manage this, or maybe I will feel less stressed when I finally get the hang of it, I guess. Shits so bad that I feel kinda demotivated to the point I didn’t draw shit for Halloween, which is pretty sad tbh.

Also on the whole wanting to collect CDs thing, the fact that I finally have a job means that I can finally buy music in CDs, which is something I been wanting to do for a long while. The first CD that I decided to purchase was Discoholic’s Discoholics Anonymous, which is an album that I really really like. I was expecting shipping to cost an arm and a leg considering that I live in a country that loves to stack import duties to anything, especially if it is electronics, but it turned out to be only 16 dollars in shipping and import duties, which prices the CD similarly to the ones that you find sold on Amazon here. You may say this is expensive, but considering everything that has electronics has a price increase here, well it is not too bad I suppose.

So now I’m gonna have this CD, cool, but like where do i get the rest? I really would not like to use Amazon, since Amazon fucking sucks, but realistically there aren’t much places to get your hands on CDs here at all anymore. Either they’re too expensive, or just these vendors that sell pirated CDs. And I don’t want pirated CDs, I want the real deal. I think I may use something like Facebook Marketplace or something, which I seen some people selling their own music collections sometimes.

page updates:

  1. There even is a LineageOS port to the Switch, you can find it here lmao.↩︎

  2. this is a lie. I was able to play games on earlier computers, but when I say this, I am referring to modern games from this decade, not games from the 2000s lmao.↩︎

  3. I thought the fact you got little energy for a game that is pretty large and requires a lot of walking was a pain in the fucking ass.↩︎

  4. Taking a look at the Switch 2 prices now, seems that they stabilized around the 500-600 dollar mark, so I guess that is better at least.↩︎

  5. Some people say that this cheapens the feel of the game. And I kinda tend to agree. I still remember the chill of the first dialogue box opening using my real name (since back then I tended to use my real name for the Windows user name), telling me “You only have one shot, Lug’s real name”. And I guess that kinda disappears when using some emulation of a desktop.↩︎

  6. I remember reading an article about this, but for the fucking life of me, I can’t find it, sorry. If I manage to find it, then expect an update i guess lmao.↩︎