Harmful Park is today's Eric Vs. 365 game and it's amazing. It's a Japanese exclusive PS1 shoot-em-up that is just crazy and weird and awesome. Great music. Great gameplay. Solid visuals. Just excellent all around. It is also extremely rare and expensive, which brings us to the topic of the blog for today - emulation is very legal*, and very cool. Click to read more and watch gameplay.
First, about Harmful Park. It's a really good shoot-em-up that I can highly recommend to fans of the genre. It has four distinct attack types that you switch between - and each has it's own unique bomb attack - and each one can also be upgraded separately. When you die you only lose the upgrades for the one you had equipped when you die, which is awesome. The game is really kooky and quirky and weird and very charming.
I cheated my way through it with infinite bombs and infinite lives (though I didn't die much anyway). My objective was purely to show off the game itself, not my skill at shmups, so I don't feel any shame in cheating. You can't very well show off a game when you die constantly in the first couple levels. If you don't like that, well, you've come to the wrong place.
I would never have been able to play it without the wonders of emulation and ROMs, though, which I want to address. I don't think it's right to pirate new current gen games or games otherwise available for retail purchase. On the other hand, of course, I see no issue with emulating games that are 20+ years old and the original creators can't make a profit off of anymore. Resellers and eBay sellers who scoop up old rare games just to jack up the price exponentially get no sympathy from me and in cases like this - with Harmful Park and loads of others - you should download with no worries. Screw resellers.
Emulation not only lets you play games you'd otherwise never be able to - because of rarity or the fact they were Japan exclusive or something - but you can enhance them in many ways as well. You can get better performance, better graphics, better controls and, yes, easily use cheats with them. It's the best possible way to experience these old games.
As for the ROMs themselves, well, you'll have to find your own sources for those.
