What's the deal with boot-up times? Booting Vista on my Dad's laptop takes about 3 minutes, no exaggeration. I owned a Commodore 64 once, and it booted in less than 1 second.
What's the deal with networking? I've spent many an hour fiddling with router settings and trying to get a machine wirelessly hooked up to the internet. I linked up a 486 once, by plugging a "null modem cable" from it into another computer. It worked instantly.
What's the deal with complexity in computers? Windows is doing about 500 things in the background. That's 500 things that can go wrong, pop up stupid error boxes, or just slow everything down. Back in my day, real men used MS-DOS 6.0. Your computer did 1 thing at a time. Sure, you couldn't actually do anything useful, but what it could do -- it did quickly. And only when you told it to, by typing something in. I get slightly sick every time my virus scanner pops up "Virus definitions updated". Sorry, did I ask you to update? STOP THINKING FOR YOURSELF!!
And gaming? Well gaming has gone steadily downhill. Observe ...
Back in the good old 80's, you bought a game on casette tape, or if you were lucky, a "floppy disc" for the C64. This is back when floppy discs were actually floppy. You chucked it in, it took about 3 or 4 minutes to load, and then you were playing. Brilliant! Chance of the game working on your machine = 100%.
What's the deal with networking? I've spent many an hour fiddling with router settings and trying to get a machine wirelessly hooked up to the internet. I linked up a 486 once, by plugging a "null modem cable" from it into another computer. It worked instantly.
What's the deal with complexity in computers? Windows is doing about 500 things in the background. That's 500 things that can go wrong, pop up stupid error boxes, or just slow everything down. Back in my day, real men used MS-DOS 6.0. Your computer did 1 thing at a time. Sure, you couldn't actually do anything useful, but what it could do -- it did quickly. And only when you told it to, by typing something in. I get slightly sick every time my virus scanner pops up "Virus definitions updated". Sorry, did I ask you to update? STOP THINKING FOR YOURSELF!!
And gaming? Well gaming has gone steadily downhill. Observe ...
Back in the good old 80's, you bought a game on casette tape, or if you were lucky, a "floppy disc" for the C64. This is back when floppy discs were actually floppy. You chucked it in, it took about 3 or 4 minutes to load, and then you were playing. Brilliant! Chance of the game working on your machine = 100%.
In the 90's, you bought a game on 3.5" "floppy discs" (which were not floppy at all), or if you were lucky, a "CD" for your "CD-ROM Drive". You chucked it in, it took about 25 minutes to install, and then you could ... fiddle with loading device drivers and tweaking the EMM386 memory manager thing, reboot your machine about 6 times, and finally it would run. Meh. Chance of the game working on your machine = 80%.
In the 2000's, you bought a game on DVD, which is the same as a CD only it holds more. You chucked it in, it took about 45 minutes to install, and then you could play it. Getting better. Chance of the game working on your machine = 60%.
In 2011, you buy a game on something called "Steam", which takes all of your personal details, bank details, mother's maiden name, a snapshot of the contents of your computer, and an uploaded photo of your underwear drawer. You click through all of that, it then takes about 8 hours to download over Australia's pathetic internet infrastructure, and as long as you're connected to the internet at all times, you get to play the game you just paid $100 for -- as long as you have 4GB of RAM. Pathetic. Chance of the game working on your machine = I don't know, I haven't purchased a big-budget commercial game in about 4 years.
I think the last game I paid money for was Minecraft. It was cheap, it gets regular content updates, and I think I got about 50 or 60 hours easily out of it. When my Xbox 360 crapped itself, I had about 30 games ... that's about $2000 worth. Hardly ever played them. Now I use my original Xbox, it's still going strong after about 7 years, and even though I never touch most of the 50 games, at least they only cost $5 to buy second-hand.
Why did I have more fun with games on my 486 SX/25, that had 256 colours and ran in 4 MB of memory? Is it the old "rose-tinted specs" phenomenon, or did the old games just have better gameplay? I'm eagerly awaiting the release of id's new game "Rage", so that I can tear it apart as the shambles of "technology and visuals over gameplay" that it will surely be.
-Gray
No comments:
Post a Comment