I have noticed an uptake on Twitch and lesser platforms for having All-The-Things on a single stream. This isn’t new by any means but with the influx of multi-emulation platforms like FPGA and Android/Linux based systems it has gotten far more prolific than it was in the simple days of PC emulation. Naturaly this trend is pushing others to buy the things that make it possible and this stretches it into the home enviroment. Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not a dig at emulation, far from it. Over time I have changed my stance on emulation of all kinds and even do some on my own personal Twitch channel. I literally woke up one day and realised if I was to share my passion for Retrogaming to all then I needed to do so from both sides of the train track.

I understand the desire to buy a one-system-for-all. It is cheaper, by far! Takes up much less space and doesn’t require any knowledge beyond that of a quick *shudders* YouTube video. Zero effort, no panic, turn it on and go. To some, that is wonderful but to me it feels lacking. I enjoy the effort of setting up, finding all the cables, prepping the games, hunting for the right controller and on occasion trouble shooting something that “worked last week!”. All of this adds up in my mind and the ability to switch from system to system instantly, slap in another game from the 10k list you have with no effort to, well, disdain for my hobby. It feels hardly worth the effort to stream sometimes and if this is all I had I simply would stop streaming because the other ones can just do it for you and any opinions, topics and debates are rendered mute in a sea of vanilla toppings on a egg white base.

But Hitch! This means more people get into Retro! Does it though? It does mean more people play retro games but from my experience its the same games on the same systems being regurgitated over and over and because no effort was placed on getting these games on the stream most streamers seem to know very little about the systems or the games they play. Again it feels very vanilla. Dull, uninformative with zero knowledge. If you really want to see ten games back to back on ten different systems with nothing to enhance the experience, just play them yourself? You will get far more from doing that than watching some personality free individual spamming “entertainment” to the unwashed masses.

I know I am being harsh in my opinions and I would expect some to get upset at my comments above but realise I say all this because I do still have a passion to experience and pass on that experience to anyone who watches me. I would still rather have 20 people experience my pain of simply loading up a tape on a ZX Spectrum than have 120 people watch me humdrum through instant gratification. I get a passion when speaking sometimes and that passion would just die if I emulated everything or bought a MiSTer etc but none of this stops me from enjoying emulation from a smaller base so you will still see me do some. You will still get the occasional request stream when I am using an Everdrive or ODE but trust me on this, after that stream I walk off uninspired, bored and often sleepy because it was just too easy, too lacking and too bloody boring compared to Real Hardware, real pain and hassle and waiting 10 minutes for a game to fail loading in the first place!

This post was brought to you because nobody was streaming anything cool right now!