I first made my foray into legal emulation with Midway’s Greatest Arcade Hits Volume 1 and Namco Museum, I then moved on toCastlevania and Contra. and then picked up an e-Reader (and several packs of cards, of course) and Animal Crossing.
And it just keeps getting better. Classic Metriod is locked away in Metroid Prime, Nintendo is giving away Legend of Zelda game discs with the NES Zelda games on them, Midway is releasing a compilation of their old arcade games, Capcom is releasing a Mega Man collection, and there are an insane amount of conversions of classic games to the Game Boy Advance.
This is an incredible trend, and I certainly hope it continues. Maybe I’m looking at these games through glasses stained with nostalgia, but I honestly beleive that we are seeing some of the best games from the earlier days coming out of all this. It gives us who grew up with these classic games a chance to play them again without having to fight finicky systems, and it introduces the new generation of gamers to some games that, well, they need to play.