Play Classic Video Games at Work

If you're like me, you've grown tired of Spider Solitaire and Minesweeper filling out your downtime at your job. You yearn for the days of your youth, when you could play Legend of Zelda for hours on end in your sweat-stinking jammies. Now you can combine the unmotivated laze of a youngster with the adult stuck in corporate hell. It's emulator time.

Couple caveats here: using video game emulators requires that you download some third-party software, and the copyright on these video games isn't exactly being enforced, so make sure you are gonna be using it on a computer that won't get you in hot water with your boss. In my case, the company offers guest wi-fi so I just fire it up on my trusty laptop.

You'll need to use your search engine skills a bit. The emulator is the equivalent of the gaming console you're used to and the games are called roms. So, quite simply put in a google search for "nes emulators" and you'll get a whole slew of websites that offer emulators to download. Just for the purposes of this demonstration, The Emulator Zone offers emulator freeware and even ranks them by user rating. Download the emulator, unzip the emulator.

Next you'll want some roms. Couple ways you can do this. One is to do a google search on the specific game you want. In this case, I'll do the old stand-by, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out. Simple enough: google "mike tyson's punch-out nes emulator" and wade through the results. But what I do instead is go to The Old Computer Dot Com, which offers an alphabetical library of virtually every NES emulator rom available. It also gives you an idea of what other emulators you can download, from the Commodore 64 to Atari to classic pong.

Emulators aren't just limited to 8-bit and below. There are emulators for Playstation, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64, etc. Additionally, savvy techheads have modded entire video game libraries into XBox and other consoles to turn your newer console into a backwards compatible game extravaganza.

There are certain advantages of using an emulator during lulls at work. For one thing, unlike certain games where you have to find a save point in order to save your game, emulators allow you to save immediately wherever your characters might be located. Zelda could be in the middle of a fight with Ganon when you hear your boss headed for your cubicle. Another advantage is that modern video games have drastically cut down the amount of playing time because it takes programmers such a long time to render such stark graphics, yet the oldschool games were designed for a lot of repetitveness. A classic RPG might have about 20 minutes of storyline and 39 hours and 40 minutes worth of fighting the bad guy's weaker henchmen for experience points. When you were a kid, it was nerve-wracking, but as an adult, not such a taxing feat for $30/hour.

Another plus is the closure you will get in your life. Everybody has had a video game that got the best of them, and this is your chance to finally beat the game. You don't have to deal with homework or a domineering older sibling; you don't even have to blow on the back of the cartridge and pray the damn thing works. All you have to do is make sure the sound isn't turned up too high and that the princess isn't in another castle.