When I shelled out for my first Xbox, I plumped for the 20 gig model. I was too oldschool for my own good at the time. I'd seen the offerings on XBLA and decided I wanted no truck with it. Frankly, those early games looked pretty naff. A list of vintage arcade games that I could easily emulate on my PC with MAME. I thought digital distribution would never take off. I figured 20 gig would be ample space for my savegames.
Shows how much I know.
Some time after I got the Xbox, Geometry Wars 2 dropped. And it was incredible. From there there was no looking back, and I ended up having more XBLA games than boxed ones. But there was a problem. After around two years of gaming bliss I found myself banging my head against the suddenly restrictive 20 gig HDD. I found myself wishing I'd paid the extra few pounds for the Elite model. Fortunately, some might say, soon after this happened, the old Xbox red ringed and I had an excuse to upgrade. I got the old one repaired, gave it to my sister and never looked back. There are more than thirty XBLA games in my 250 gig Xbox, and it still isn't close to half full. It's wonderful, and I take it for granted. So long as I resist Microsoft's attempts to turn my GAMES MACHINE into some kind of media hub, I can't see myself ever filling it up.This is in direct contrast to my PS1 and PS2.
Going further back. How the hell did we manage with a measly single megabyte of memory on the PS1? I have five memory cards, into which are squeezed the completed, or near completed saves of upwards of 65 games. As I've written this, I've remembered what used to happen when I ran out of blocks on my memory cards. A moment of frustration, then ages spent working out how I was going to rustle up the considerable sum of pocket money a new memory card would cost me. My parents got the consoles, but apart from that, I had to fuel my gaming habit myself. A memory card was a considerable investment back then.
Bizarrely, I find myself in the curious position of having to buy my first console memory card in around six years. It feels strange.
One extra step into the past, we didn't really even have memory cards. My MegaCD was the first console I ever had with internal memory. It never filled up because I could never find enough games to fill it with. But who remembers having to write down passwords to continue in your Megadrive games? I do. My copy of Road Rash 2 still has a load of paper in the box that is covered in sequences of random numbers and letters. Entering those is an experience I can tell you. Especially when you do it and you find out that you're worse at the game now than when you were when you were eleven. It's a sobering feeling. Worse was the password system for James Pond 3. It was a long set of objects in different colours. I genuinely have a notebook somewhere full of passwords written out in the format of, blue teacup, red umberella, blue laser, yellow laser, et cetera. Who thought that was a good idea? They always seemed to be EA games too.I never owned a Snes or a Nes, so I may be utterly wrong on this, but I have vague recollections of Nintendo carts with battery backup saves on them. Did they ever go flat? What happened if they did?
Kids these days don't know they're born. With their massive HDDs, high definition and high speed optical media. It's all so easy you can ignore it. You think loading times on a PS3 are long? Try loading a game from both sides of a C90 cassette (old tech, if you don't know what a cassette is, google it), only to have the game crash at the 89th minute. It really used to happen, back in the days when Atari made their money out of computers rather than the royalties from slapping their logo over hipster tee-shirts.
Progress is amazing. We've got it so easy now.
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