Friday, September 16, 2011

A simpler time...

Remember when all you had to do when you wanted to play a video game was just plug the cartridge into the console and you were ready to rock and or roll? I'm referring to the Atari 2600 of course, the last console I had that didn't require a degree in computer science to operate. Some of you are probably arguing, well, Nintendo didn't require you to do anything else. Bull-honkey! You had to pray to whatever diety you believed in and hoped that the cartridge would work, I remember spending 2 and a half hours once trying to get Castlevania to work, I'm not kidding, I blew and blew until I couldn't blow anymore and the thing finally worked after that amount of time. Things have only gotten more complex since then. We eventually moved away from carts to discs. Discs gave us better graphics, sound, and CGI, but it also gave us loading times and scratches. I was usually pretty good about taking care of my games, but I've had a few that were unplayable after I left them sitting on my desk for too long.

As technology evolved, we are at a point today where your game console does everything but cooks you breakfast, (unless you own a George Foreman PS3) but we have to sit through long load times and installs, anyone who recently bought Resistance 3 knows what I'm talking about... my whole issue with it though mainly involves PC gaming. PC gaming has always at least in my point of view, sucked. I recently downloaded Portal for my laptop, keep in mind, my laptop is less than 2 years old, and can run blu ray movies, but I can't play Portal on it! For a game that came out so long ago, you'd think my laptop could handle it, nope. Video card can't render 3D. I try to play the game and get as far as the loading screen and the game crashes. WTF?! This of course was something I found out after my 6 hour download time (I'm on the equivalant of DSL because I'm cheap and would rather pay off my house than have quality internet, although I'm beginning to re-think that.) So my choices are buying a new PC again that can handle the game, or shelling out the 20 bucks for a copy of Orange Box that has that and Half Life included in it, (which ironically I already own and have installed on my 10 year old desktop running XP...at least it's not windows 98... so to make a long story short, I'm going to go break out Super Punch Out on my Super Nintendo.