Emulating older consoles is a great way to enjoy your favorite titles on modern hardware. It’s not just useful from a video game preservation point-of-view either; emulation makes it possible to play old-school games at high resolutions and fast frame rates.

I’ll admit, there have been plenty of disappointments in the emulation spectrum, with the recent Yuzu-Nintendo fiasco and the abandonment of AetherSX2 being the prime example. But compared to the modern gaming industry that’s littered with the corpses of failed triple-A titles and incomplete games with more bugs than content, the emulation landscape is going strong even in 2024.

Mobile games are chock-full of microtransactions and ads

While PC and console titles have their own issues

Although the titles developed for smartphones were unique and downright ingenious in the early 2010s, the situation is a lot different now. Sure, mobile games have always been designed for the casual audience who typically end their gaming sessions after short bursts. But the addition of freemium models slowly devolved the mobile gaming industry into a landfill for pay-to-win titles filled to the brim with ads and microtransactions. Today, it’s hard to find decent single-player games that aren’t shovelware or don’t have huge paywalls after every third level. In fact, the situation has gotten so bad that, barring a few amazing gems, most of the worthwhile games developed for mobile phones are ports of older PC and console games.

Meanwhile, the PC gaming industry is plagued by another set of ailments. The majority of the triple-A games don’t meet the standards set by the titles of yore. Over the last few years, the modern gaming landscape has become a cesspool of half-baked games that are released with missing features and enough performance issues and bugs to turn off even the most passionate gamer. Plus, it has become a trend to release incomplete titles and launch the rest of the game as paid DLCs.

Emulation makes the best titles from every generation playable

You don't need cutting-edge systems to enjoy the classics of the bygone era

This may sound rather obvious when you think about it, but since emulators let you run games from any console generation, the library of playable games has become absolutely massive in 2024. From the beloved GameCube and SNES to the (relatively) newer PlayStation 3 and Switch, there's a battalion of consoles whose functionalities can be replicated by emulators — essentially increasing the number of playable games multifold.

Another cool aspect of emulation is that it removes the concept of console exclusives from the picture, because you can run titles that were previously locked behind specific systems on most modern devices. Speaking of systems, unlike modern gaming, which requires a lot of computational prowess to run at playable frame rates, even the most underpowered modern systems can run entire families of consoles.

To put that into perspective, the RetroPie emulator supports over fifty consoles on mere Raspberry Pi SBCs. Even if not every console supported by RetroPie has a massive library of games like, say, SNES, there's still a truckload of amazing games you can play on tiny RPi systems. That's before you include the emulators for the newer consoles that you can run on more powerful systems.

Emulation keeps things fresh and interesting

By allowing gamers to experiment with fun mods, playable frame rates, and better resolutions

Although emulation is often used to refer to retro games, there's a lot more to this field than outdated titles. I'll admit, nostalgia-inducing games with clunky mechanics and fewer QoL features from the pre-2010 era are a part of every emulation enthusiast’s library. But emulation also involves running games developed for modern games, and there are plenty of reasons to look into emulators besides video game preservation.

For instance, relatively newer consoles like the Nintendo Switch can barely run graphically-intensive titles at 720p30FPS, let alone at higher resolutions or better frame rates. On top of that, many classics that are arguably better than the majority of trending titles can’t even be experienced natively on modern systems due to compatibility issues caused by outdated drivers.

There are still a few reasons to love modern gaming

I may be judging modern games too harshly, but I have to admit that there are still a handful of things to love about the current gaming landscape. The staggering rise in indie titles, for one, is something I wholeheartedly support. Plus, not every triple-A game is a blatant cash-grab attempt, with titles like Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Ghost of Tsushima, and the smashing hit Baldur’s Gate 3 serving as clear indicators that there’s still some hope in modern gaming.

But on a broader scale, if I was given the option to play a random game released in the last 2 years or go for a relatively older title on an emulator, I’d pick the latter in a heartbeat. And the situation is only going to get better from here on out. There are a few PlayStation 4 emulators in development, with fpPS4 already running 2D games. Meanwhile, gaming handhelds can already run most of the popular console emulators at respectable frame rates, making it easier than ever to carry your entire game library with you on-the-go. The Android sector has also made a lot of headway in the emulation landscape, and tools like Mobox and Winlator are fully capable of running several PC titles on your smartphone.