Reminiscing About My Internet Childhood

January 06, 2022

I first joined the internet in the late 2000s, when it had already become mainstream and was starting to adapt to the new influx of people and possibilities.

Social media was a big part of it, though with remnants of the customizability that made the old web unique. Gaming fan sites and magazines coexisted in a weird but harmonic way, with unique articles that made use of each medium's strength and offered glimpses of what went on in their counterpart. I was personally invested in retro games and Nintendo games in general, lurking both on the web and outside bookstores.

But by far the corner of the web I spent the most time on was emulation. With the rise of user download speeds and my county's prolific pirated game market (you can learn more about it here — I promise it's pretty interesting), it was hard to find a single legitimate PS2 game but oh so easy to pluck whatever Nintendo DS title you could ever dream of right off one of the trillions of sites with "Emu" or "Rom" in their name.

I was introduced to it very early on in my life when I acquired a (obviously unofficial) disc for the PS2 that had tons of old console emulators and games to go with it. I had a couple of those kinds of CDs for Windows as well, but the PS2 one stays the closest to my heart. I don't know where in my room it lies nowadays, and I can't even remember the name etched upon it, but I would recognize that blue tint anywhere if we ever cross paths again.

One of my other prized possessions was a flashcart (unofficial cartridge that lets you input games from the internet via MicroSD) for my Nintendo DS Lite called N5, an alternative to the more popular R4. I had to buy legitimate copies of games that made use of features built into their cartridges like Pokémon and infrared, but everything older than a year was fair game.

Goodnight sweet prince, I wish I could download Digimon World DS one last time. Taken from the Wayback Machine, sadly.

The other half of my time was spent on various MMORPGS. I've stumbled onto my share of obscure ones, like Florensia and RF Online, which are... somehow still active today in one way or another. And it seems in an official manner to, as opposed to the fan-server only realm that some other online games from my past have fallen over. I always get surprised when something that's not WoW or Runescape is still running after this much time.

But anyways, that tangent aside. There was a company that localized a bunch of foreign MMOs to Brazil called Level Up. For a considerable period of time, I played everything they put out. Ragnarok Online, Grand Chase, Perfect World, Dofus, Lunia. But by far my favorite out of them all was Maplestory. It's still running strong today as well, but it's in a weird, bloated and sort of soulless state that I don't really like.

Brazil Maplestory was closed in 2011, unfortunately, before it could catch up to a tenth of what Global Maplestory had to offer at the time. For those a little familiar with the game — we had Zakum, but only the initial four explorer classes. Pirate was being heavily teased shortly before the game shut down.

Those two things — emulation and MMOs — are still something I enjoy and play nowadays. With emulation, I mostly just use it to play games whose remastered versions are expensive and lackluster, as well as some fan-translated japanese exclusives and more weird and experimental titles. And of course, I revisit (and actually finish) games from my childhood from time to time.

I haven't done much in the realm of MMOs until last year, when I got into Final Fantasy XIV. After sinking an embarrassing amount of days worth of play time into it, and having beaten the latest expansion Endwalker, I can safely say it's a game I'll be sticking to for a long time. Or until Square Enix somehow incorporates NFTs into the game.

Seriously, fuck NFTs. Fuck crypto in general, but NFTs especially due to the current fad of companies picking it up for a quick buck despite wide disapproval by customers and the vast environmental impact. What a way to end this blog post, huh? In my opinion every piece of media nowadays should end with an anti-crypto PSA, but that's neither here nor there.

That's not the only thing that bothers me about the current day internet, and that's going to be the theme of my next blog post! Coming out... some time. Things seem to never get done whenever I make a time estimation, so I won't do it this time. But hopefully soon!