I don’t remember Malware as being much of a thing in 1998 or so…I mean, those sites WERE sketchy, but it was because they were constantly being taken down. I don’t ever remember using WinZip to unzip anything I downloaded and finding anything in them other than the ROM.
I’m kind of creeped out to think what emulation would be like today.
I’m replaying FF7 right now and…I’m enjoying it quite a bit, don’t get me wrong, but it’s all coming from revisiting things that I either gloriously remmebered, or totally forgot. This is par for the course for all the games I revisited from my 2003 PS1 purchasing spree, but unlike Tactics…FF7 is…well, now that I’m older, I’m realizing that it’s kind of embarrassingly easy. I have not even come CLOSE to dying in it, and I’m near the end of disc one (I took a couple months off to rewatch The Wire and The X-Files.) This is kind of a knife in the gut.

Two hilarious quotes about El Duce:

With regards to the scene in Kurt & Courtney where Duce, who looked about 25 years older than he was, claimed he was offered money to kill Kurt Cobain, Mark Prindle said “He was lying. Nobody would trust that drunk to mow a lawn, let alone carry out a hit.”

When I told a friend of mine who was discussing Duce that he died falling asleep on the railroad tracks, the friend said “I feel sorry for the train that hit him.”

Oh, I played EarthBound YEARS before it was cool. I bought the huge SNES box with the Nintendo Power Players’ Guide in it in 1995 and was completely addicted to that game for a very long time. To this day I’d list it as being maybe my sixth or seventh favorite game after Yoshi’s Island, Mario 3, A Link To The Past, Ocarina Of Time and FF6.
I stupidly sold all my SNES games around 1997 or so to get money for an N64 and start anew, only to end up buying the majority of them back in the years to come when I realized how badly I missed them. This is one of the dumbest things I ever did. And what game have I never re-added to my collection? You guessed it– EarthBound. I’m always looking around for a copy, but copies of the original SNES cart now go for about three thousand dollars. And of course, now the game is utterly beloved. I wanted the cart bad enough to the point where I never bothered to get a ROM version for emulator, but I probably should have done that back in the day.