A Nintendo on my telephone? Yeah, kid. You read that right. What may seem like tragically hip kitsch to some a few years ahead of me (and probably like ancient, pathetic history to those a few years behind) is recognized by many as the 8-bit babysitter who raised them. Taught them. Loved them.
The name NesEmu, for those that haven't spent much time illegally trading the copyrighted property of Japanese companies from the 80s, is a combination of the acronym for the Nintendo Entertainment System and the commonly used abbreviation for an emulator.
Video game platform systems are emulated, usually on a computer, and run ROMs; Read-Only Memory chips. Only in this case, ROM refers to a digital copy of the chip that was originally housed in a cartridge and run on your real, physical Nintendo. So, now that I've gotten the background out of the way and lost all of the people who consider this stuff common knowledge and would care enough to download the app, why not get to the review?
NesEmu comes with fourteen games (titled as in the program):
The controls are simple and intuitive enough, after five minutes or so of play.
For your A and B buttons, you have two choices:
The most appealing to the masses in this collection of games, Super Mario, is pretty buggy and often non-responsive. Contra needs more horsepower. Others function perfectly. The app as available at the time of this writing is an early version.
The dev, Rainbow-Ming, states in the about menu selection that sound, save, load, and snapshot will turn up in the next version. This one is also referred to as a demo, so perhaps a priced version will appear. It would be great if the end-user could load one of the thousands of NES ROMs that are freely available online. Then, you'd really have a Nintendo in your pocket.
As I alluded to earlier, intellectual copyright infringement is at work here, so I can't see this getting approved in a pay-per-download situation. We'll see. Reports of malware in the Market are turning up, so maybe the gatekeepers are looking the other way. If that's the case, you can bet it's a temporary circumstance.
