THROW AWAY GAMES/GAMING Well Christmas is nearly here, time to man up and tidy through the mountain of games in the front room in preperation for decorations, heart attack food and alcohol. Just looking at my pile of shame (games I've bought and not even tried) makes me shudd...Posted by koopa42 on Dec 10, 2010 09:30 (Dec 10, 2010 09:30) |
Well Christmas is nearly here, time to man up and tidy through the mountain of games in the front room in preperation for decorations, heart attack food and alcohol. Just looking at my pile of shame (games I've bought and not even tried) makes me shudder. Why did I even buy half of those games? I'll tell you why, because they were cheap, cheap like a crack whore on the rattle. I count 8 games I've bought and not even opened the box, hooked like a fish on the £1.99 price tag or 400 for £20 deal. It got me thinking about how a) we are now spoiled gaming brats and b) how it does actually damage our gaming life. Back in 'the day' I remember that the games you got were squarly in the domain of birthdays and Christmas with the occasional £1.99 (or if you were lucky £2.99) tape game from the spindle thing in the local papershop. When big release games were between £7.99 and even (god forbid) £9.99 you made sure you fucking played them, played them to death EVEN if they were total tripe, you didn't even ADMIT they were total tripe! You even played the cheapo cornershop games like they were mana from heaven even when they were clearly nuggets of poo snipped from satan's ass. Even back then the throw away game started to rear it's ugly head. You'd start to get C90 tapes full of the latest releases from 'dodgy steve' who in turn and nicked them from his older brother 'Bob' and straight away you didn't seem to have the need to play......well.....any of them and especially not with the type of voracity that you used to. However, with the arrival of console gaming (try getting one of those on a C90) put a quick end to captain pirate Bob and his cronies. £65 for an import of Street Fighter II on the SNES? I battered that for about 4 years! Sonic? Mario? they had kicked the throw way game clean in the balls, a kick that would have it grounded for the better part of a decade. But once again, you can't keep a good throw away game down. I'll not mention the ST or Amigas but they were also rife with the throw away game. Fast forward a decade (or even 2 for some of you old bastards) and you get the PSX and Dreamcast, the PS2 and xbox and the era of 'chipped' consoles arrive, this was the first time I really started to understand how damaging the piracy/copied game was to a gamer. When I bought my original Xbox Crystal it was the first time I'd bought a 'modern and indate' console/machine since my Amiga 1200. I was McLovin' it, what a machine! lots of great games many of which had massive replay value. OK so the games were expensive (for new titles anyway) but it was all good. The last game I bought for my xbox was Doom 3, I completed it a couple of times and put lots of hours in.......that was the last time I put any real time in on the xbox, I'd decided to get it chipped shortly afterwards. Again, within a month I had probably 50? 100 'aquired' games, some never even saw the disk tray and others such as Half Life 2 (a game I had been looking forward to forever) just didn't warrant playing time! Why? because with zero cost comes zero NEED to play, sure you might have a blast but you lose that 'NEED to play because it cost a bomb' factor. I also had a chipped 360 for a time and yet AGAIN I ended up with a pile of games that never saw the disk tray, I'm glad I sold it in the end. I'm not against piracy especially with the inevitable 'digital download' furtue of gaming (but that's a whole other blog entry LOL) but I will always warn against the real damage it does, not to the fat cat gaming industry but to the time you want (and should need) to put into a game you've been waiting for. The cheapness and availability of games has (in a way) contributed to this, especially because you'll buy a game that you don't even want when it's 99p on a 360 or PS3 then add it to you pile of shame, admit it, you know you have one. Games you buy and never play LOL crazy times! |
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