Showing posts with label preservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label preservation. Show all posts

Friday, November 25, 2011

Satellablog deserves our appreciation and respect

I’ve been meaning to post about Satellablog for months, but kept forgetting.

Apologies to all involved. Satellablog is dedicated to all things Satellaview, the satellite-based add-on system for the Super Famicom in Japan. Arguably one of several forerunners to today’s PSN and XBLA download services. The problem is, the service contained a lot of exclusive content, available nowhere else (most infamously a special version of Zelda which was dumped). In addition, neither Nintendo nor any of the companies from the time are interested in archiving or preserving this rare data. So it falls to Kiddocabbusses and his comrades to source the memory packs from Japan, pray they contain a never before found download, and then dump them for the world. It’s an expensive mission (there’s a donation plea), but it does yield rewards, such as the Satella-shooting trilogy, which ties in with our own Dezaemon feature. I feel no shame in saying that it’s absolutely worth donating a few spare dollars for the preservation of games history. Satellablog and its many ROM dumping specialists deserve our utmost appreciation and respect – because Nintendo sure as f*** doesn’t care about this stuff. Without us, the obsessive geeknocrats, history would simply die. My only criticism: create a proper site with easily navigable news archives. Blogs just don’t cut it for something so important.