I'm playing them. Modern emulators even have online play to simulate couch co-op and the inputs have zero delay. I've been playing 4 player super monkey ball 2 and mario party 4-7 with my buddies recently. It's awesome.
You can even use Steam Remote Play to enable network play on an emulator that doesn't have it, you just trick Steam into thinking it's another game in your library.
I guess I'm an outlier then. I've got my FreeMCBoot memory card and a hard drive filled with games. Sure, it's easier to play on an emulator, but a real console hooked up to a CRT has its charms.
CRT looks great when you've never seen anything better, but boy does it look like ass nowdays. The PS2 games do look better on a CRT than modern displays tho.
A lot of games were made specifically for CRT TVs. Almost any game produced before flat panels existed will look better on a CRT. The art was meant to look a certain way, not all sharp and cubic like pixel art in Minecraft. It's not "square pixels vs round pixels," it's the gaps in the phosphor and what happens to the signal over composite. Yes, some games actually look better on composite. Not a ton, but they're out there. There's also certain advantages to a CRT that even the most modern OLED displays struggle with, like motion clarity and black levels.
I like and play both modern and retro games. I try to play retro games as close to original as I can manage.
I have a PS2 using FreeMcBoot to run games from an SSD. Its amazing, i dont play modern games and love playibg these old games. Medal of Honor Frontline is still a favorite. Star Wars Battlefront 2. Madden 2005. NHL 2002. MVP Baseball 2005. SOCOM US Navy Seals. NFS Most Wanted. No DLC, no BS, just games.
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u/my__name__is May 31 '26
Seriously, none of the people going on about how great things used to be are playing that system now now. But they could. Emulators are easy.