It's the lull before Christmas . . . the period in which I don't buy any new games because my family will inevitably overdose me with them come December 25th. As a result, my primary gaming companion of late has been Sonic the Hedgehog, purchased via the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console. In glorious 480p (thanks to my jury-rigged component cable built using paper clips) and upscaled by my 5.1 surround receiver, Sonic has never looked or sounded better.

And it's been a while since I really had a chance to appreciate the old hedgehog. While nowadays you typically only find ROMs in the more "unsavory" parts of the Internet ("vote for my site" buttons are like the Internet version of pawn shops and "checks cashed" places - if you see one it's time to lock the doors and keep driving), back in 1998 or so there were many very slick, professionally run sites where, in addition to a selection of ROMs, there would be screen captures, user reviews, and ratings of each game. They had, I believe, every single game up to and including the 16-bit era. Nintendo and Sega, while not condoning such sites, had yet to really assert themselves and crack down on that type of thing - in fact many sites advertised that the downloading of ROMs was legal if you deleted them in 24 hours. I will admit to thinking I was perfectly in my rights to download from these sites - indeed, at the time there was probably no other way for me to experience these classic titles, and I had the hunch that, in a few years, they would become altogether extinct.

Thankfully I was wrong. It's a few years later now, and Nintendo's Virtual Console is is making it fairly easy to purchase classic games - it's there in the same menus you use to launch your disk-based games, and the interface is quite simple. But there's a couple of catches - instead of being free, as in those old, illegal ROM sites, each game is $5 - $8, and instead of featuring every classic game in existence, it only features a few select titles - launched in small batches each week.

But are these really catches? I don't think so. In fact I think Nintendo is on to something really great here. While they could probably just deluge users with hundreds of games, with the result that we buy a couple and play them for about 10 minutes each before moving on (like in the days of unregulated illegal ROM sites), they're presenting us with small chunks of the 8- and 16-bit eras, every Monday. And while personally I might charge less for these games (around say 75% of what they currently cost), making gamers pay for individual games actually makes them feel more invested in their purchase. For myself, the whole Virtual Console experience has been sort of like re-living the 80's and early 90's - as with back then, the limited selection makes me more likely to experiment a bit and try a game I've never played before, and because I have to pay for it, I'm more likely to actually play the game for a while and appreciate it.

And thanks to component cables, the games look way better than they did on the original systems.

So far I've invested multiple hours in the VC Sonic the Hedgehog, which is way more attention than I ever gave to the ROM I downloaded back in 1998. Hopefully Sega and Nintendo will forgive me for that transgression!

As ironic as this may sound coming from an emulator author (not that CowBite was made for - or ever reached the point of playing - commercial ROMs), I now understand why Nintendo is so opposed to software emulation and all the various ROM sites. They aren't just sour grapes, trying to keep gamers from enjoying otherwise inaccessible titles; rather, they really do have a plan to bring these old titles back to life - and in a way that gives them the attention they deserve.

I'm definitely looking forward to this coming Monday.