The Future
Jan. 26th, 2012 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thessalianThere is not enough coffee in the wooooooorld.
Still playing Mass Effect, obviously - the problem I'm having at the moment is that playing in the evenings, combined with my general being-bad-at-this, is sort of giving me a choppy game experience. I'm pretty sure I will get into it, and want to very much, but that starts getting hard when you have to break every few minutes to do something with dinner and do all the other things you want to do while still getting to bed at a halfway decent hour. (Not that I actually got to sleep at a halfway decent hour, as for some reason I ended up tossing and turning until about half-two, but never mind; at least I tried.) Particularly when you're as bad at this as I am. It'll be different come the weekend, I'm pretty sure.
It really does amaze me how video games have changed, though. There wasn't a lot of story to get invested in when I was younger. We played games to say we beat them, and that was more or less it. Now the story's why a lot of us play. Sure, there are the people who only live to play X game on Nightmare mode, but ... well, then there's the rest of us, who appreciate a good, character-driven story and look at the mob-killing as a secondary bit of fun. Put it this way: I wouldn't use a 'KillAllHostiles' cheat but when I heard that ME3 would feature husks that were faster, nastier and harder to kill, I got kind of annoyed. Harder != better, y'know.
Technology just in general has changed so much in my lifetime. I've seen music go from vinyl albums to mp3 players. I was around to see Betamax and VHS fight it out for dominance of the video cassette market. I remember when the Commodore 64 was a big deal, and now I have more processor power in my cellphone. Hell, I just about remember a time before cellphones, even taking into account those bricks they had in the early 90s. I saw the rise of the home video games console and the home computer - when I was growing up, not a lot of people had a computer, and now you practically can't live without one. And, of course, I remember a time before the internet.
I wonder if some of the younger people I know actually understand how ... well, science-fictiony the world is, even from when I was a kid. Okay, we don't have flying cars (and I'm actually quite glad, considering the drivers I've encountered over the years), but seriously, think about it - not so long ago, you needed computers that filled rooms to store the kind of data that you can now store in something that fits in the palm of your hand. That's a little before my time, but I do remember when a laptop (hell, most desktops) couldn't store what you'd fit on a flash drive today, when portable music involved carrying around a briefcase-sized monstrosity, when researching anything involved trips to the library and the home set of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, when you'd need a payphone and a quarter to make a phone call while shopping in town. We can carry around a thousand books on little devices we can fit in handbags and briefcases now; we can store thousands of songs on devices that fit in the palms of our hands. For someone who remembers the boom box, that's pretty impressive.
Well, that wasn't entirely where I was going with that, but it'll do. Certainly food for thought.
Still playing Mass Effect, obviously - the problem I'm having at the moment is that playing in the evenings, combined with my general being-bad-at-this, is sort of giving me a choppy game experience. I'm pretty sure I will get into it, and want to very much, but that starts getting hard when you have to break every few minutes to do something with dinner and do all the other things you want to do while still getting to bed at a halfway decent hour. (Not that I actually got to sleep at a halfway decent hour, as for some reason I ended up tossing and turning until about half-two, but never mind; at least I tried.) Particularly when you're as bad at this as I am. It'll be different come the weekend, I'm pretty sure.
It really does amaze me how video games have changed, though. There wasn't a lot of story to get invested in when I was younger. We played games to say we beat them, and that was more or less it. Now the story's why a lot of us play. Sure, there are the people who only live to play X game on Nightmare mode, but ... well, then there's the rest of us, who appreciate a good, character-driven story and look at the mob-killing as a secondary bit of fun. Put it this way: I wouldn't use a 'KillAllHostiles' cheat but when I heard that ME3 would feature husks that were faster, nastier and harder to kill, I got kind of annoyed. Harder != better, y'know.
Technology just in general has changed so much in my lifetime. I've seen music go from vinyl albums to mp3 players. I was around to see Betamax and VHS fight it out for dominance of the video cassette market. I remember when the Commodore 64 was a big deal, and now I have more processor power in my cellphone. Hell, I just about remember a time before cellphones, even taking into account those bricks they had in the early 90s. I saw the rise of the home video games console and the home computer - when I was growing up, not a lot of people had a computer, and now you practically can't live without one. And, of course, I remember a time before the internet.
I wonder if some of the younger people I know actually understand how ... well, science-fictiony the world is, even from when I was a kid. Okay, we don't have flying cars (and I'm actually quite glad, considering the drivers I've encountered over the years), but seriously, think about it - not so long ago, you needed computers that filled rooms to store the kind of data that you can now store in something that fits in the palm of your hand. That's a little before my time, but I do remember when a laptop (hell, most desktops) couldn't store what you'd fit on a flash drive today, when portable music involved carrying around a briefcase-sized monstrosity, when researching anything involved trips to the library and the home set of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, when you'd need a payphone and a quarter to make a phone call while shopping in town. We can carry around a thousand books on little devices we can fit in handbags and briefcases now; we can store thousands of songs on devices that fit in the palms of our hands. For someone who remembers the boom box, that's pretty impressive.
Well, that wasn't entirely where I was going with that, but it'll do. Certainly food for thought.