I played the same games on an emulator and the original console, and one difference changed everything

I love gaming, and over time, my appreciation for older titles has grown. I love collecting them, too, not just playing them, so I have the original hardware for at least some of these games. Sometimes, though, emulation is easier, and for retro titles, I do believe it's completely justified.

I've played the same games using both emulation and the original hardware, and ultimately there's really only one thing that matters if you're struggling to choose.

Most games will feel very similar

It's just about preference

Frankly, for most retro titles, emulating them or playing them on original hardware will yield largely the same experience. A few games may have graphics rendering issues when emulated, and you can argue that one method or the other feels more comfortable, and overall, emulation and the real thing feel very similar.

I tried a few of my Game Boy titles, such as Super Mario Land and Wario Land 3, and I felt no real difference between playing on my gaming handheld and my Game Boy Advance SP. I do prefer the feel of the original buttons, and the smaller screen of the GBA SP makes things feel much more at home, but overall, it was the same experience.

Wario Land 3 was where I got a hint of one of the biggest benefits of emulators, though.

Old games can be extremely slow

Pokémon is a great example

It's not that it's necessarily long, but the intro sequence in Wario Land 3 is slow and unskippable, and since it's a Game Boy Color title, it's not particularly flashy. As I geared up to compare these experiences side-by-side, having to watch the intro twice started to get annoying. That's where emulation became the clear winner thanks to a single feature: time manipulation, and in this specific case, fast-forwarding.

But this is just one tiny example. Another great one is almost any Pokémon game from the earlier generations. Almost any game that predates the Nintendo Switch has a lot of slow moments, with repeated, slow animations, slow scrolling text, and so on. This has improved in recent years, and it's easy to forget, but when you go back to those older titles, it becomes painfully obvious.

The oldest platform I have Pokémon games for is the Nintendo DS, and if you aren't aware, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl have a particularly egregious example of taking too long: the animation for dealing damage to a high-HP Pokémon like Blissey, as shown in this video.

But even if you discount that particular example, everything else I've mentioned also contributes to a slow experience in these older Pokémon games. For example, trying to teach a Pokémon a move using an HM. I have to open my bag, then scroll down the list, which is extremely slow. On real hardware, you can speed this up a bit by scrolling with the touch screen, but it's still pretty slow.

Then you select the HM, and the game shows a series of messages you have to press A repeatedly to skip. It adds up, and holding a fast-forward button to get through these menus saves me a lot of time and (mostly) patience.

And just as with Pokémon, you can say the same for a lot of games with longer exposition sequences in the 80s and 90s. Even The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has a slightly long intro because of how the text is presented, and I often fast-forward to make the experience more tolerable during that opening sequence.

The opposite can also be helpful

Rewinding can be a lifesaver

Even though fast-forwarding is a big reason, I'd say emulation is worth it over playing on the original hardware; the opposite can be just as valuable. Rewinding a game can feel cheap, as it undermines some of the game design elements of the original game, but in some titles, quickly undoing mistakes can be worth it, as older games often make you lose a lot of progress after losing a life, and saving your progress is sometimes made unnecessarily difficult.

I find rewinding a little too extreme, but I rely on another emulator feature (though some flash cards also have it on the original consoles) that makes it easier to avoid losing progress: save states.

Over the past year, I played the original Donkey Kong Country trilogy on live streams, but the games often bar me from saving my progress until I reach a specific save point in each world, which meant I would have to either accept losing some of my progress or have to keep playing for much longer than I wanted to reach a save point. Save states let me save whenever I wanted, so I could keep my campaign going across streams without repeating huge chunks of the game.

These are hard games, too, so I have already repeated many of these levels dozens of times over. I don't think I would have finished those titles if I had to repeat them even more often, because I couldn't save when I wanted to stop playing for the night.

In more extreme cases, I also had to fall back on the rewind feature. Some boss fights in these games are very long, and I couldn't always figure out the attack patterns or what I had to do to avoid them. Having to repeat the earlier parts of a boss fight I had already struggled with, only to reach a point where I was likely to lose again, became frustrating, so I had to rewind to figure out these attack patterns without losing my mind.

It raises questions

Am I really beating the game?

As useful as these features can be, they do also raise some questions about what it feels like to play them this way. As for save states, I have no problem saying they're a genuine quality-of-life feature, and that many older games simply weren't designed to respect the player's time. I've used save states for most retro titles I've played unless they offered a reasonable save option.

But fast-forwarding and rewinding can be a bit different. I mentioned the Wario Land 3 and Zelda: A Link to the Past intro sequences, and it's true that they can be annoying when I'm trying to get into a game to test something related to work. But if I'm genuinely playing those titles to enjoy them, speeding up these sequences destroys a lot of what they try to do. They provide context for the game, and sometimes great music plays during them. Fast-forwarding strips some of that charm from the game.

As for rewinding, it can definitely feel like cheating, and whenever I use it, it's out of sheer desperation to finish a game I'm really struggling with. I always have to tell myself I'm not trying to prove anything by beating it "the right way," but I still see it as an admission that I can't beat the game as intended.

And the sooner you resort to this feature, the less you get to experience what the game is really supposed to be about. At least, that's how it feels to me. I'm always in favor of experiencing a game for what it is first, and only falling back on these features when absolutely necessary.

Time manipulation is the best-selling point for emulators

Whether it's fast-forwarding or rewinding, messing with the timing of older games can make a huge difference in how I perceive them. Some of these titles require a lot of patience to get through, whether it's because some animations are slow, they require repetitive actions after losing a life, or they have long sequences with no player action. It has downsides, but overall, it is a great capability.