The excitement was palpable. A new game. A shiny new CD or — years earlier — a stack of floppies. After a torturous few minutes, you were up and playing the latest game. Those were the days.
\n
\nInstalling a new game today is more of an ordeal than an anticipation-building experience.<\/p>\n
Case in point: Recently I purchased a game. It was on Steam, so the game was downloaded to my PC from the Internet. No shiny CD, no stack of floppies.<\/p>\n
At broadband speeds, it was an annoying 2 hours to download the entire game, some 13GB of data. Compared to the old days, that’s probably in line: I’d have to drive to the local Egghead or Software Etc., browse the games, read the box, pretend like I wasn’t a spazz, calmly check out, race back home, and eagerly install the game.<\/p>\n
Yeah, that would have been about two hours.<\/p>\n
Of course, back then, I’d install the game and then do something quite remarkable: I’d actually start playing it.<\/p>\n
When I downloaded my game from Steam, I figured it was done. The software was on my PC, and the big, tempting button on the screen read: Play<\/em><\/p>\n I clicked it.<\/p>\n Then, naturally, the game had to finish installation. That I can understand: It needs to check out my hardware, add drives and such.<\/p>\n The annoying driver, of course, is Direct X. My PC, having many games installed (but not too many, just in case my publisher is reading this [and they aren’t]), the PC already has Direct X installed. And it should be updated, right Microsoft? Windows Update runs once a week, so it should keep Direct X updated, right?<\/p>\n It doesn’t. Or at least it seems that way, because every dang doodle game I install has to check for Direct X and install the latest version.<\/p>\n Every. One.<\/p>\n Direct X is Windows technology that allows games to directly access the PC’s hardware, making them run faster. Or something.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Apparently, every game I install is just too stupid to say, “Hey! Look: Direct X is already installed. And by gum, it’s the version I want, or later. I’m good to go!” But no: Direct X is always re-installed. Or something.<\/p>\n So I thought I was ready to play the game.<\/p>\n Wrong.<\/p>\n The game wanted me to log into my Windows account, just so I could share my scores and screenshots with other Windows game players — probably all seven of those people who bought Zune music players. I skipped that step, figuring, “Who cares?” That was a mistake.<\/p>\n After playing for an hour, I attempted to save the game. I couldn’t save, of course, because Microsoft wanted me to log into my account. It wouldn’t let me, because it also needed newer drivers.<\/p>\n I quit the game. I tried to sign into the Windows Play or whatever it was called. It updated. Twice. Then I tried to start my game again.<\/p>\n Again, it wouldn’t let me play: I needed another update.<\/p>\n Many agonizing moments later, I got to play my game again. Nothing was saved, of course, so I had to re-live the first hour of the game. But now it works, despite all the consternation — a frustrating process that didn’t exist back when games were just software and the Internet was for us scientists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, I know this is the n<\/em>th time you’ve installed Direct X. Thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6170"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6187,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6170\/revisions\/6187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}