I realized, with the release of Halo 2, that part of my life’s ending. I’m not upgrading to Vista – I wrote about it earlier, but the DRM we-own-your-machine-you-just-lease-it is finally too onerous for me, and I’m calling it quits (side note: Google’s acquisition of Feedburner made me realize exactly how much data Google now has available to it, and it scared me).
I started playing games on PCs back when I had to play Adventure, or type them in from the back of magazines, and I’d inevitably typo on some DATA statement and fubar the whole thing. I could talk your ear off about my favorite games and what they meant, why they were awesome, and how they influenced games that came after them (more so than I could for books, say, which I took a bunch of college courses on).
Now that’s it. It feels, weirdly, like I’ve decided never to watch television again, or read a book. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is quite likely to be the last boxed game I buy, with stuff off Steam — the Half-Life episodes and Portal (Bring me Portallll!!) until they go Vista-only, too.
I can’t explain why I’ve been willing to put up with DRM on my games (as long as it’s not Starforce or particularly horrible) and even the ridiculous Windows Genuine Advantage on XP but drew the line at Vista’s hobbling. And I’m not confident that I won’t eventually be forced onto a disagreeable platform. But there it is: it started with Adventure and other text games, and this is where the end comes.
I’m sad.
“Genuine Advantage” pisses me off more than I can express. I just got a new computer and went out of my way to get XP instead of Vista, but of course I’m still fucked, just less fucked. Some year I need to bite the bullet, learn Linux, and learn to live without a lot of applications I take for granted.
This has nothing to do with this post, but I just saw on the USSM blog that you’re going to Clarion West. Look forward to meeting you at the parties.
–Mark (CW ’06)
I’m choosing the rely on the future technology solution. Future hackers will solve my Vista problems for me.
That said, I’m not upgrading to Vista anytime soon, either, and I don’t see that as an impediment to my gaming habits. Independent developers will still produce XP compatible games (hell, independent developers still produce DOS and Amiga games), plus I do still have a lot of older games to play. Furthermore, I highly doubt I won’t be able to get around Vista’s DRM crap if I try hard enough.
I’m currently fighting with my ISP so they’ll give me more comprehensive documentation for the DSL modem they just sent me. They didn’t give me any at all, and while they insist I don’t need any other hardware, I’ve already detected a remote connection to one of my machines since I set it up (which means it’s not doing its job as a hardware firewall the way it says it does). After I sort this out, then I’ll deal with Vista.