Let Me Play!

Patience has not always been a virtue in gaming. However, these days patience is a must. We must wait, and wait we shall. As gaming became more and more complex, and the medium in which games are played changed and progressed, we as gamers find ourselves doing more of nothing than something.

I for one am quite agitated with how video games have "progressed." It amuses me that years ago I could simply pop in my favorite game, flip the on switch, and boom I was playing. Here I will discuss just how gaming has made us wait far more than we ever had to and why it has caused me such frustration.

First let me briefly delve into what struck me to write this. Yesterday, I fired up my PS3 and wanted to check out the updates to the PSN store. For some wacky reason my PS3 would not connect to the internet, it has never done this before. Thirty minutes later I solve this issue, only to be stopped once again by an update. That took another twenty minutes to download and then install. Finally, that was done, and not to my surprise the PSN store wasn't even updated. So I go and play some Zen Pinball, a quick bite sized game I love dearly. I play the new table I got last week, but I swear I started to fall asleep waiting for it to load...And so the idea for this blog was born.

Gaming Medium:

This is the very first offender to how games over time have "progressed" only to get slower and slower. Now admittedly it started off worse with the Commadore 64, but those memories were quickly wiped away with the Atari and its cartridge based games that immediately started to work right away. Aside from having to blow in those games through the NES era, it wasn't all that inconvenient. Convenient gaming in this respect died right when the Playstation came out. Here we were given a few problems with this CD format. Firstly, of course is the loading times. They got ridiculous. Loading before the game starts, loading before cut-scenes, loading between stages, loading before a round in a fighting game, loading loading loading. You had to get used to it, there was no way around it.

Another problem CD's introduced was the hazard of having to change discs. It was annoying to me for such an advanced medium such as the CD to make me change discs and then remember which one to pop in if I came back months later. What annoyed me most though was that Sony boasted how much more memory its games can contain by comparison to a N64 cartridge, and yet still most great games took up 3 or 4 of them, whereas to play one amazing N64 game I only needed ONE N64 cartridge. A cartridge that didn't load, and that I didn't have to swap out. Oh, and something that didn't die immediately when it got a teeny tiny scratch on it. I have to this day, an old Kirby's Adventure NES cartridge that's missing a large chunk of itself in the top right corner and it works flawlessly still. I have a barely visible tiny scratch on disc 2 of Chrono Cross that causes the game to be unplayable.

Advanced technology my ass.

Updates:

You really can't avoid this anymore, this never used to be an issue in any way. But be it a combination of pirate protection, keeping games working, or keeping things fresh, for whatever reason game developers these days feel the need to update their games constantly and it could not be more annoying. I'm spoiled, I'll admit it, I was used to the idea that I would buy a game and it would be the final product. Now I understand that when I buy a game, they were not done with it yet, clearly they just didn't finish it. I cannot honestly fire up any older PS3 game I have because it will want me to update it, I almost guarantee this. The worst thing is, I'm not even allowed to play it if I'm connected to the internet, there's no bypassing the update. So if I ever want to play Grand Theft Auto, Resistance 2, or any number of games I'd like to go back to someday, I will have to update it. This could take anywhere from ten to forty minutes.

And for what purpose are these updates? Well most of them are to ensure that the new Down-loadable Content or "DLC" they are selling works with everyone's games, it patches them for the DLC to work in other words. But why should I care? I usually don't want the DLC. Very rarely will a game be patched because they want to fix something they didn't during development. It just awes me that I can plug in any Zelda or Mario game without the fear of seeing the dreaded "update" screen and I can't do this with half of my PS3 library.

Installing:

Games load times haven't got better, that's for sure. Now developers are actually having us install our games on our systems just so the load times are bearable. This usually takes thirty to forty minutes too. While this problem mostly pertains to the PS3, the Xbox 360 is not without this issue. Hell even the PSP has optional installation these days. The sad thing is, this really is not the fault of the console believe it or not. This is the fault of lazy developers. There are big badass games that exist on the PS3 with no installation, like Final Fantasy 13....lol, but still it's a HUGE game, no installation, and bearable loading times. But developers like Capcom will consistently have 5GB installations on ALL of there games, for no other reason than that they are lazy.

Logos:

These days, games aren't made by one company. Seemingly, they are made by HUNDREDS (exaggeration) and we are subjected to see who helped make the game every time we fire it up. I remember playing Maximum Carnage on the SNES, and this game drove me insane with the number of companies I had to sift through to finally get to the start screen. This is how it is now for nearly EVERY game made. The worst offenders are the ones that won't let you skip them, which is the vast majority of them.

Conclusion:

So between the loading times it takes to start them up, and the logos, and the possible update to follow, and nixing the loading times with a long installation, or the possibility that your game has a minor defect on it that you won't notice until the game freezes twenty hours in, waiting to play games these days gets pretty intense. Thankfully, not all gaming is like this. Nintendo for instance is still fantastic with the Nintendo DS being cartridge based still, and the Wii games don't usually have a logo problem, they have no installation, and the only thing that ever updates is the system itself and not the games. I breathe a sigh of relief playing those games, games that I know will function immediately without "advanced technology" getting in the way.

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