What never stops to amaze me is the equation between number of CPU cycles needed by professional applications and number of CPU Cycles needed by Games. in the “good old days” a game like ‘Larry in the land of the lounge lizards” ( The original one , where all you wanted to do is go upstairs and do the “bouncing block” with that lady ) was only about One floppy drive large and did not send your AT or XT pc’s CPU cycle into lunar orbit. If you were doing some serious Lotus 123’ing, or recalculating some graphs or god forbid, working with Access or something , THEN your gigantic steel Ibm clunker would be panting and sweating while you had time to grab coffee.
These days its the other way around. While I can perfectly do whatever i need to do for “professional activities” on just about any old pc that’s still lying about the house, (Thank you Openoffice and Linux), I need to pass the ‘Games Display’ at the average toy store without being able to purchase a single thing. Even the minimal specs of your average games (which i like to call the “Jerky-Blocky-crappy-settings”) ask for the processing power of a little big-blue computer. The amount of ram, insane graphical specs and demented CPU levels required for ” High-Detailed-performance” are bloody insane. As Openoffice (and Microsoft Office) runs fine on a one gigahertz system with a gig of ram, the average game in the store demands that I get me a new computer.
Now when did it become a fact that computer based entertainment got linked to machines that are able to brute force a quantum computer based password within the lifespan of your average parrot ? When did it become imperative (yes IMPERATIVE) that in order to “enjoy” shooting the bad guy, you just HAVE to see ever single splatter of nose snot arc in a mathematically correct and super-realistic-high-def-500fps arc, before hearing the Dolby surround crunch of his body hitting the ground ?
Am I to be considered old and possibly obsolete that I frown at this over-detailed level of entertainment ? Am I “out of date” when I search for items like “playability, enjoyment, entertainment, challenge and FUN” in this 1080p landscape of 512-bit colors ? Dementia might even be setting in because I could not care a flying duck about “being able to see the mud splatter underneath the enemy’s tires”. You know what ? When I DO want to se ‘mud splatter around’ in a high resolution picture, an infinite resolution and frame rate AND with full immersion technology .. I GO OUTSIDE !!!!! . YEs ! That great game called REALITY that looks SOOO much like some of these first person shooters when it comes to details, its amazing ? Game-Nerds minds boggle as they ponder what Graphics card must power the gigantic display called “A WINDOW”. What gravitational subroutine powers the rainstorm and how many pixels it takes to make all those drops of rain.
So come and join me in my virtual old-folks home where I can tell tall tales about “how games used to be”. Enter and benefit in the magic of “obsolete copy rights” that allow you to DOWNLOAD a lot of classic games FOR FREE. Do yourself a favor, drag up an old clunker and get cracking with some of these great classic games. No I’m not talking 8-bit abandon ware (although you can have a great time with those too), I’m talking C&C1, Mech Commander 2 and more