Category Archives: Gaming

Winter is coming.  Fall is upon us and that means a lot of big name games are going to see release next month.  Every year about this time, gamers are in the midst of the fall release schedule.  The big names save their releases for November, so some of the B and C-list titles tend to make good use of the season and plan their releases around them.  Every developer is vying for a piece of the holiday pie in the form of your money.   It should be expected, then, that the games you purchase are whole and complete.  However, digital media have a flexibility that other forms do not.  With the internet at their beck and call, getting a game patch to consumers is very easy to do.  So easy, in fact, that game developers expect consumers to accept the patches as a part of the experience.  This is not a good thing for gamers.

I remember the good old days of gaming.  The days when games came on cartridges, and the internet was just a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye.  Those were the days when arcades had the coolest games, and consoles were in their infancy, but growing fast.  The games produced back then were all self-contained.  The developer had only one cartridge on which to create the game.  They had to work within the memory, storage, and computing capacities of any given system.  The result was a game that had been thoroughly tested, balanced, and de-bugged, because the developer knew that it could not change any part of the game once it was released.  The internet has given the developers leeway to get sloppy and we, the gamers, have allowed them to do so.  People, like electricity, tend towards the path of least resistance. Continue reading →