Day 14: Media

Cartridges were a beautiful idea, quick and efficient.  The limitations came quickly though, as storage space and graphics became a problem.  I mean, there's no way that Halo could have been developed on a cartridge based system.  Back in the days of the Nintendo 64 and the PS1, it was almost novel to see CDs being utilized in every day gaming, even though the Sega CD and the TurboGrafx 16 both used the media.  CDs didn't really catch on earlier than they did partially because of the awful sales that killed both of the consoles.  The PS1 was definitely the biggest winner when it came to CD gaming.  All of the early CD-based systems suffered from the same problems: load times and fragility.  Who didn't sit at their Sega Saturn or their Playstation for 15 plus minutes waiting for a game or specific screen to load?  The system is basically taunting you the whole time too.  Just as you think it's about to load, the game shoots out a telepathic "fuck you." 

It even looks like it sucks; like a giant, old VCR.

The CD-I was the worst of all of the early CD systems.  This thing was shat out by Phillips in conjunction with Nintendo.  Of course this doesn't make it any better, it just means that it could use some characters that were licensed by Nintendo while Sony couldn't.  The thing's just a piece of shit.  Most of the didn't work in the first place, think first generation Xbox 360, and if they did, the load times were horrendous.

I never did understand the design.

So by the time that the PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox were released, most of the load time issues had been resolved.  One game that I do remember being a hassle just exacerbated the issue.  Xenosaga Episode 1 was a pretty excellent RPG game, but it had severe limitations hidden in the length of it's cutscenes.  The fact that you had to wait literally 15 minutes, at some times, to find any playable content was mind-boggling.  It's like all I wanted to do was fight a boss character, but I needed to wait for the cutscene to load, then wait for it to play, then wait for the boss to load, and by the time that the game is ready I'm getting my ass handed to me because I'm half asleep from boredom!

Looking at today's systems, long load times are usually eliminated, though several games come to mind such as Duke Nukem Forever, but if they're still present in a game there's at least something to entertain you while you wait.  For instance, one of the Dragonball Z games allows you to spin a character around the screen while Call of Duty gives you "helpful" hints about various things in the game.  So all of the loading time issues aside, another problem came with the advent of the CD-DVD video gaming.  Freezing.  The entire reason that I bring all of this crap up is that I've recently had my own shitty run-ins with my games freezing and causing me to lose valuable save data.  I know that this is something that's unavoidable, but I don't think I ever once had an issue with a cartridge game freezing.  Can we find some kind of alternative media that's not going to freeze, but allow the same storage space and graphical enhancements?  I know that both the 360 and PS3 are able to download games directly onto the hard drive of your system, so that could be a potential fix, but at that point why don't we just shove all of the game onto separate HDDs and call it a fucking day?  The bottom line is, if you're playing a game prone to freezing or locking up during loading sequences, save often or you'll end up a bitter, angry shell of your former self.  Or maybe you'll just get pissed off and play anyway, your choice.