I have my Famicom and my Disk System and even the Wii now, for Virtual Console stuff, all hooked up to it. It has geometry stretching problems. The corners are blurry. On the middle brightness it's exceedingly bright and on the lowest one you can hardly see anything. Sometimes, when there's a crazy strobe effect in a game I'm playing on it, the entire screen freaks out all distorted-like and I feel like I'm gonna seize bro. When I play La-Mulana, I am never exactly sure how many of any subweapon I have cause I can't tell if it's a 3 or an 8 or a 6 or a 9 up there. When I play Castlevania, I can only check on my CORE and my name is LAYER and I monitor the health of NEMY. If a certain kind of bright solid color fills the entire top of the screen while the rest of the screen is black, the entire picture will roll vertically until I move away from it.
This is my 14-inch, one-hundred-and-one yen CRT TV I dug out of the trash, and I love it to pieces in a way that I will never love my beautiful 42-inch Sharp Aquos.
Part of it is because the thing is flawed and I play old games on it exclusively. Those old games were made with this kinda junk in mind and they just feel right on it, their blocky solid color borders and edges hidden by overscan, their Ninja Gaiden strobes heavy and overpoweringly bright, their individual pixels smeared like paintings. But there's more to it, I think. I stuck the set in what I call my spare room, it's connected to the entryway of my apartment, just a little space. It's on a small rolling cart next to a spare mattress on the floor. I sit on the mattress with my back against a pillow up on the wall and look a little off to the side to play it, the set's two or three feet from my face at most.
Nothing and nobody bothers me in there, which sounds silly considering I live with just my girlfriend and my cat and I don't mind either of them. But when I'm out in the big old living room, playing a game on the TV, I feel like that's what's going on, that's "what's happening" in the apartment. I'm available, I'm near my laptop, I can push a button to switch to other TV shows, I'm all CONNECTED, I'm part of the world I've made. In the spare room it's me and some boxes and my TV, the sounds out the window, footsteps down the outside sidewalk. No computer, no broadcast programming on its outdated digital tuner. Just me and the old TV, the game, if I give up I'm just sitting there and might as well just push start again.
This sort of isolatory setup has enabled me to accomplish some seriously bizarre feats of gaming bullshit I never thought I'd be able to put up with at my advanced age. A few months back I played through the entire prototype of the original EarthBound that a guy burned to EPROMs for me, soldered into and housed in an original Mother cartridge. It took me hours and hours and hours! Random battles, black backgrounds, endless JRPG. But I did it the real way, on real hardware, on my old TV, with my regular saves and my old-ass controller. I beat Ninja Gaiden, and Ninja Gaiden 3. And Battletoads, for real, no cheating (well okay the Famicom version gives you a handful of extra lives). And the original Castlevania, on Disk System. I beat Crisis Force! I have beaten a lot of old games out there in my spare room, ones that take a lot of patience I didn't think I still had and deliver a lot of punishment I wasn't sure I could still take. I sat down for a little La-Mulana this morning before work, and the next time I checked my phone to see the time it was an hour and forty minutes later, I had run to the train like the air was toxic just so I could get to the train on time.
I thought at first it was just cause of the games, the old games are better, more brutal, more classic. That's part of it. But a big part I think it's that it's my crap TV, my crap room, my space full of junk that's so extra it seems wrong to have it out in the main living space, spillover, the rejects. In a way, in that unfinished environment, free of decor or distraction, for a while I'm back to how I used to be when I was a little kid, when it was just me and the game and that was all there was. Me and my unwanted room full of unwanted objects. My garbage TV, my plastic Famicom stuff as old as I am. In the other room my fancy set streams an episode of Glee. I am having a ball.