In recent years, it has become clear that downloading games have increasingly become a standard - Why would you bother with a physical copy when one can legally purchase and download games from many providers like Steam and XBLA?
I however am viewing such a revolution with a degree of caution. My beef is that is increasingly become compulsory: Sure I can buy a game from a store but what I am ultimately purchasing is not the install disc I was after. The actual installation, so it would seem, involves downloading some monstrously huge exe that seems far bigger than the actual disc would hold. So a physical copy is thus no more than an installation code.
I'm not entirely against digital download - far from it. I would gladly pay for a game that is of a small size (ie Limbo's 98.9mb space) as opposed to some leviathan that chews up a large amount of hard drive space and takes forever to download (ie Dragon Age Ultimate's 23+ gig space).
Speaking as a survivor from the 8 and 16 bit eras, I recall there was a sharp divide between Computer and Console gaming. And one of the major advantages for Consoles was it it didn't have to contend with the load times that plagued the Computer camp - instead it provided games instantaneously. This the advent of the CD era struck me as kinda odd as it introduced load times to Consoles and was, to me, a regressive step from the Consoles' draw-card.
The reason I am bring this up is that people have been talking up the instantaneous nature of digital downloading. But for me, instantaneous does not mean spending more time waiting for the download to complete than actually playing the game.
And if I'm spending more time waiting for the game to download than playing it then something has gone very wrong
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