CJMM2-6YYC9-MYMM6-REALLY?
One of the things that always drew me to prefer playing videogames on a console rather than a PC was the ease of it. On PC, however, you'd have to input a 400-digit code, install the game, register online, download the latest patch, download the latest graphics card drivers, download the latest version of DirectX, and after all that there was still a good chance the game would hate your graphics card and either refuse to play, or play in super-cripple mode.
With a games console, you just put the game in and play the damn thing. Whoosh, easy. Except that now you don't. Thanks to both console manufacturers and games companies like Ubisoft and EA, making the damn videogame play on your damn videogame console is now a 20-minute-long loading-bar festival to rival the most tedious of PC piracy protection.
The first problem is that consoles are now expected to be online the whole time, which means the fabulous process of patching has become an integral part of the console experience.
Now I have no problem with patching when necessary, to fix genuinely game-breaking glitches that were only revealed after the game's release. But it seems that almost every game at the moment comes with a compulsory patch on goddamn release day. Hey, people, why are you releasing your damn game if it requires an online update before it's even arrived in shops? Test your games better.
The second problem is that current gen consoles (I'm not counting the Wii, obviously) pretty much require harddrive installs to make the games run properly. The PS3 actually genuinely requires installing almost every game, because its Blu-Ray drive is so horrendously slow it can't actually read games well enough. Remember how Sony were telling us that Blu-Ray would revolutionise the way we play games on consoles. Well, they were right; it added 20 minute installation times to every damn game.
And the Xbox 360 isn't much better, as while it's disk drive can actually run game properly, it also sounds like a jet engine flying through a bigger jet engine, and has a habit of chewing up any games it finds particularly challenging, thus making installation the safest bet to ensure your console doesn't a) explode or b) eat your game.
And the third, most recent and most annoying problem is the big companies bid to curtail used game sales. They do this by locking an integral feature of the game, such as online multiplayer, and only letting you play it if you enter a bloody code that comes with the game, or buying one for $10 from their website.
It doesn't matter if you don't even want to use the locked features; the message asking you to submit the code is still going to come up every single time you start the game.
Now I'll probably go into how malicious I feel locking an important part of game to encourage buying a new copy is another time, but the bottom line is, after you add up all the above, you're looking at a wait of anything from 10 to 30 minutes before you get to play that videogame you just paid money for, in the games console you also paid money for.
Is it annoying? Yes. Is it necessary? Nope. Is it going to improve? Almost certainly not, not in the near future at least, what with voracious patching becoming standard and the major companies shitting themselves to an increasing degree about the used game market.
The only reassuring part about the whole thing is that the level of bullshit PC game publishers are pushing on customers in vain attempts to stop piracy have been steadily growing even more ludicrous, so despite all of the above, it's still a load more bloody hassle to play a game on PC than it is on console. Oh wait, that's not reassuring at all...
