I’ll play devil’s advocate here and say that collectors have just as much of a right to these games as anyone else does.

You say they only want them to look pretty, for the box art etc. but this ignores the same sentimental value that you yourself are looking for when you want to play the original games on the original hardware. You can emulate everything right down to the bugs and glitches of the original systems, but it doesn’t have the same feel to it as playing on the actual systems themselves, so you want some original hardware to achieve that. Nothing wrong here.

Similarly, someone that wants to appreciate the look and feel of the original games can easily print out a photo or poster of the covers, make replicas of the consoles etc that look exactly the same as the originals - but they aren’t the originals, it doesn’t feel the same looking at a picture of cover as it does looking at the real thing, so they want some original hardware to achieve it. Don’t see anything wrong here either.

Not trying to say I can’t appreciate your frustration. I’m down to a single Guitar Hero guitar for my 360, and if it breaks or starts to die, it’s gonna be at least $100 to get a new one, and for something I pick up once or twice a month when the urge kicks in, it’d be hard to justify it. But I can’t be mad at the fact that there’s probably someone who has 3 of them permanently afixed to their wall as an art piece, because they’re getting as much “use” out of it as I am, maybe more since they can look at and appreciate it every day vs my routine of using it for 3 days then burying it in the entertainment center.

“Japan has had the best 2000s tech since the 80s” I think is the succinct phrase you were looking for

I really hate that Nintendo keeps putting “new” in titles. There’s the New 3DS, a New Mario game, and I think there was a New Mario party? Could be wrong on that but I remember there was a “New Mario 2” 🤦🏾‍♂️

Halo of course. I was skeptical until I played a demo, instantly bought in.

That’s funny, I had this exact experience much more recently when Breath of the Wild was relatively new. I heard so many people raving about how good it was but I was never a huge Zelda guy. Went to Best Buy to window shop, they had a switch on display with BotW queued up. I don’t think I even got in to combat before I thought, “ok, this is something special, I need to give this time”. Still play it here and there when I’m bored of other games.

I’ll agree that if I tried playing Sly Cooper for the first time as a fully grown adult I probably wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much. But kids definitely know a good game from a bad one, that’s why there’s games targeted to kids/ teens that sell well and others that don’t. Just because they didn’t grab the attention of 30 year old you doesn’t mean they weren’t great games, you just weren’t the target audience. That’s like someone who was 30 when SpongeBob came out saying that it was never that good.

Out of curiosity, what games from that platform/ time do you consider good? Everyone’s coming at you for your (objectively wrong /s) opinions on these classics, surely there were some that you enjoyed.

Like others have said, any file can be dangerous. You need to be diligent in picking where your ROMs come from, if it’s a sketchy site don’t use it.

That being said I’ve been doing similar activities since I was like 12 years old and have got a virus exactly once, and it was completely my fault for not listening to my gut (disregarded some red flags because I really wanted something to work.)

Others have already given you good answers so I’ll weigh in on the emunand / not getting banned thing.

I spent a long time trying to get the emunand set up and working on my switch but kept hitting some sort of error (it was almost a year ago so I don’t remember specifically what the issue was). After a while of trying I realized that I was trying to avoid getting banned from an online service I never once used and never planned to use, and now I just use the switch in airplane mode. I’ve read that the system keeps a log of what’s been done and will upload it to Nintendo if it ever reconnects, at which point I very well may be banned, but I don’t really care enough. Being in airplane mode makes sure the switch can’t try to auto update itself as well.

Just use the one most like you or something

Perhaps the gender neutral one is the one that looks most like them…?