With modern games you have to wait for like six hours for the stupid thing to download, if you even have the hard drive space to redownload it in the first place
Is that hassle worth it just to revisit some game from your back catalogue for half an hour? Eeeeeeeeeeeenh
I’ve been saying this for years. Consoles gave up their advantage when they moved online. It used to be that they were expensive, but you could immediately play the game, locally with your friends.
Now they have all the downsides of a PC, but with none of the upsides.
The impetus for this post was when I wanted to play some Halo MCC for a bit, only to discover I’d apparently deleted the game at some point. Looking at a 170 gigabyte install size I decided to do something else that evening
Instant load times and no launcher or menus telling you to buy things
I just timed it and it took six seconds from power on to being in-game (as in, save loaded, controls active) for Pokémon TCG for Game Boy (Color). Zelda for NES took four seconds. Doesn’t get much better than that!
Old TV was fast like that too. You flipped a channel and it was instant. Around the 2000s, you got fancy cable that had like a 2 second loading pause on each flip. Really changed the experience
Play UFO50
Oh my god even a game that’s already downloaded takes forever. I had an old Xbox and assumed it was just that until someone had a brand new Xbox that they didn’t want for some reason, still sealed in the box the model was like 2 years old. It still takes like 5 minutes for the game to start and skip through all the intros to get to the main menu.
Usually I’ll pick my game and go to the kitchen for a snack or drink of water, by the time I’m done snacking if the game is even loaded yet my interest is almost all but gone.
I remember back in the day I could be playing an online match in under a minute
On Steam my startup times are pretty decent even when the games are installed on an old-fashioned HDD. You can also disable intro movies, which has been a godsend with Gears of War Reloaded. The studio intro has obnoxiously LOUD grinding chainsaw sound effects that legitimately hurt my ears
Also I often find myself launching a game, then doing something on the other monitor while it starts and forgetting the game there for 10 minutes
