Wednesday, November 20, 2013

How many 3.5" floppies is that?

You know how Bill Maher does that "New Rules" segment on Real Time?
Well, here's a game-related new rule: If your new game requires me to free up 20+ gigs of storage just for the basic, version 1.0 install, you have to buy me a new hard drive for my porn.
Get it? "Hard" drive? Oh, I kill me.

Yes, it's a tired old complaint and hard drive space is nowhere near the issue it was a decade or two ago but the real problem is that these games have become as massively overbuilt as some of their non-game inspirations like Word or Internet Explorer, all-purpose websites like MSN or advertising platforms like Steam. They are clunky, intrusive, ad-riddled, datamining-obssessed messes. How much of this crap I'm downloading is actually necessary and now much is just the existential justification of some graphic artist? No, thanks, I don't really need fifteen versions of this triple-layered texture for my sword pommel, nor do I need my preference as to sword-pommel texture constantly uploaded to your marketing department in real time. I will gladly tell you everything that's wrong with your flashy piece of crap of a product myself, and the truth is no amount of pinky-finger articulation for my character is going to fix the fact that your entire multimillion-dollar enterprise still limits me to "kill ten rats."

Redundancy is not quality.

*edit: I was wrong, it's 40+ gigs.

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