The End of an Era
After 29 years of video-gaming I am officially calling it quits. Well that makes sense, you might say. After all, I am in my mid thirties, have a baby, work more hours than a Nike employee in China, and need to "grow up".
Wrong! Over the years I have been self weaning away from games for these reasons already. In any given year I might purchase 2, maybe 3 games as my free time is so limited that it has to be something special for me to get involved. This year was a big year - I bought 3 games:
1) Hitman
2) Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V)
3) Batman: Arkham Origins
All three of these games had glitches / bugs / etc. Hitman was impossible to complete one of the extra challenges, which is too bad considering I took the time to complete every other one. GTA V convinces players to put their money earned from missions into the games' stock market to build their own empires. I should have taken my own advice from real life. The stock market is rigged and should be avoided.
But alas, I gave in after getting to a point in the game where I needed more cash. So what happened you ask? Did I lose it all buying Blockbuster and Blackberry? Nope, I invested my hard earned gangsta cash in the "legitimate" video game stock market and then without warning could no longer access my cash. That's right, the game out did real life. When I tried to access the stock market the game glitched that part away. I also couldn't change characters. So I was stuck playing one poverty stricken, stock rich - cash poor thug instead of 3 rich mob bosses who cheated, robbed, bullied, and schemed their way to the top. Sounds like corporate America! So thanks for nothing GTA V - enjoy your life sentence on my shelf. Go ahead and keep the $60 bucks you stole from me - you bamboozled it from me legally so that must make it ok, right? Thanks, thief!
And then there is you, Batman: Arkham Origins. Oh how I love Batman. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge Dark Knight fan. The Christopher Nolan trilogy is my favorite set of movies. Pure genius. At work, we were all given personality tests and assigned a "bird" to put on our cube walls that supposedly symbolizes our personality type:
1) Eagles - strong willed / results driven. AKA management types who believe the end justifies the means and don't focus on details, reality, people, etc.
2) Owls - focused on details, and results. AKA crotchety, cranky, don't like to interact with other people. Think Archimedes from Disney's Sword in the Stone.
3) Parrots - no idea. We only have 3 or 4. Who cares.
4) Doves - soft spoken, quiet, amiable. AKA able to be bullied by eagles, targets of lay-offs, under-paid.
So what bird did I get you ask? None of the above. That's right, I took my test and was never assigned a bird, so I gave myself the one symbol that still has any meaning - The Batman.
So imagine how excited I was when Christmas vacation came along and instead of working 60+ hours I only have to work 59.5! Thank you Mr. Scrooge. So with my 30 minutes of free time (slightly exaggerated, but not far from the truth) I decided to load up the Dark Knight and live out my fantasy of fighting for justice and having the power to make a difference by doing what needs to be done - Batman style.
So after a long night of tracking the Joker, solving Riddler puzzles, and a brief stop at the Batcave that I don't remember (C even posted about this now famous comment on Facebook), I had a brief minute to load this up and continue my quest. "Corrupted Save"!!! How could this be? I never turn the Xbox off while the game is saving. This is the kiss of death. Once corrupted the file cannot be restored. Frustrated, I decided to try again. After rebuilding my progress to roughly half of what I had the previous day, I needed to work on my "vacation" because everyone else is more important than me and despite doing the job of three people, I need to do more and as my Grandfather would say - "push, push, push, man". (He didn't actually believe that. That was his mockery of corporate America that he remembered from a classic episode of the Twilight Zone. Grandpa was a great man and may he finally have some peace in the next realm).
But I digress, I eventually stopped working on December 23rd at 8:15 PM (yay vacation!) and decided to take the last few minutes of consciousness and continue my pursuit of evil. Can you guess what happened next? Bingo - "Corrupt Save". And thus ended my attempt to right the wrongs of Gotham (symbol of what's wrong with this world) and also my love of video games. 3 strikes and you're out.
Both glitches for GTA V and Batman are known by the game developers and despite promises of patches for months, none of them correct these issues. So sorry chummy, better luck next time. Why should they fix it? The Xbox 360 is out-dated, supposedly, and they have my money. Who cares if you can't actually play it. I started to get suspicious about these game developers and it turns out I was right. Guess what else they designed:
Ok, not really, but it sounds familiar, right? Who cares if it doesn't work (either in theory or practice, that's your problem). How is it that games made when I was 6 worked better than what we have today? Sure on the old Nintendo Entertainment System you literally had to put your mouth over the gray cartridges and blow air into them to make them work, but at least they never had the "Corrupt Save" garbage that made the game COMPLETELY UNPLAYABLE!
So it is thus that I officially retire from buying new games (and used ones too). I'm out, I'm done - see you later and thanks for taking one of the last few hobbies I had from me. Maybe it's for the best. Thanks to Obamney Care, I probably couldn't afford new games any way. Well it's 7:30 AM on Christmas Eve, which means only one thing in this God-Forsaken former great republic... time to work! God Bless America and Merry Christmas. I leave you with the one symbol I have left that has any meaning at this time of year:
Wrong! Over the years I have been self weaning away from games for these reasons already. In any given year I might purchase 2, maybe 3 games as my free time is so limited that it has to be something special for me to get involved. This year was a big year - I bought 3 games:
1) Hitman
2) Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V)
3) Batman: Arkham Origins
All three of these games had glitches / bugs / etc. Hitman was impossible to complete one of the extra challenges, which is too bad considering I took the time to complete every other one. GTA V convinces players to put their money earned from missions into the games' stock market to build their own empires. I should have taken my own advice from real life. The stock market is rigged and should be avoided.
But alas, I gave in after getting to a point in the game where I needed more cash. So what happened you ask? Did I lose it all buying Blockbuster and Blackberry? Nope, I invested my hard earned gangsta cash in the "legitimate" video game stock market and then without warning could no longer access my cash. That's right, the game out did real life. When I tried to access the stock market the game glitched that part away. I also couldn't change characters. So I was stuck playing one poverty stricken, stock rich - cash poor thug instead of 3 rich mob bosses who cheated, robbed, bullied, and schemed their way to the top. Sounds like corporate America! So thanks for nothing GTA V - enjoy your life sentence on my shelf. Go ahead and keep the $60 bucks you stole from me - you bamboozled it from me legally so that must make it ok, right? Thanks, thief!
And then there is you, Batman: Arkham Origins. Oh how I love Batman. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge Dark Knight fan. The Christopher Nolan trilogy is my favorite set of movies. Pure genius. At work, we were all given personality tests and assigned a "bird" to put on our cube walls that supposedly symbolizes our personality type:
1) Eagles - strong willed / results driven. AKA management types who believe the end justifies the means and don't focus on details, reality, people, etc.
2) Owls - focused on details, and results. AKA crotchety, cranky, don't like to interact with other people. Think Archimedes from Disney's Sword in the Stone.
3) Parrots - no idea. We only have 3 or 4. Who cares.
4) Doves - soft spoken, quiet, amiable. AKA able to be bullied by eagles, targets of lay-offs, under-paid.
So what bird did I get you ask? None of the above. That's right, I took my test and was never assigned a bird, so I gave myself the one symbol that still has any meaning - The Batman.
So imagine how excited I was when Christmas vacation came along and instead of working 60+ hours I only have to work 59.5! Thank you Mr. Scrooge. So with my 30 minutes of free time (slightly exaggerated, but not far from the truth) I decided to load up the Dark Knight and live out my fantasy of fighting for justice and having the power to make a difference by doing what needs to be done - Batman style.
So after a long night of tracking the Joker, solving Riddler puzzles, and a brief stop at the Batcave that I don't remember (C even posted about this now famous comment on Facebook), I had a brief minute to load this up and continue my quest. "Corrupted Save"!!! How could this be? I never turn the Xbox off while the game is saving. This is the kiss of death. Once corrupted the file cannot be restored. Frustrated, I decided to try again. After rebuilding my progress to roughly half of what I had the previous day, I needed to work on my "vacation" because everyone else is more important than me and despite doing the job of three people, I need to do more and as my Grandfather would say - "push, push, push, man". (He didn't actually believe that. That was his mockery of corporate America that he remembered from a classic episode of the Twilight Zone. Grandpa was a great man and may he finally have some peace in the next realm).
But I digress, I eventually stopped working on December 23rd at 8:15 PM (yay vacation!) and decided to take the last few minutes of consciousness and continue my pursuit of evil. Can you guess what happened next? Bingo - "Corrupt Save". And thus ended my attempt to right the wrongs of Gotham (symbol of what's wrong with this world) and also my love of video games. 3 strikes and you're out.
Both glitches for GTA V and Batman are known by the game developers and despite promises of patches for months, none of them correct these issues. So sorry chummy, better luck next time. Why should they fix it? The Xbox 360 is out-dated, supposedly, and they have my money. Who cares if you can't actually play it. I started to get suspicious about these game developers and it turns out I was right. Guess what else they designed:
Ok, not really, but it sounds familiar, right? Who cares if it doesn't work (either in theory or practice, that's your problem). How is it that games made when I was 6 worked better than what we have today? Sure on the old Nintendo Entertainment System you literally had to put your mouth over the gray cartridges and blow air into them to make them work, but at least they never had the "Corrupt Save" garbage that made the game COMPLETELY UNPLAYABLE!
So it is thus that I officially retire from buying new games (and used ones too). I'm out, I'm done - see you later and thanks for taking one of the last few hobbies I had from me. Maybe it's for the best. Thanks to Obamney Care, I probably couldn't afford new games any way. Well it's 7:30 AM on Christmas Eve, which means only one thing in this God-Forsaken former great republic... time to work! God Bless America and Merry Christmas. I leave you with the one symbol I have left that has any meaning at this time of year:
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