I mean, with a dvd drive that spins up like a massey ferguson you’d be delighted if there was an option where if you wanted 5 minute mindless trashing and bombing while VPN was trying to work out where in the world you are that meant you didn’t have to spend about the same amount of time digging around underneath 4 miles of ethernet cable and vga switches just to dig out the box that you got the thing in over a year ago so of course it’s not actually in the box but in another box because you put it in that box when you took it out last time to put the other one in and you couldn’t be bothered to find the real box which is buried under a pile of magazine front cover discs that you cluttered up your machine with and could never uninstall just to work out that the one you thought would be rubbish was in fact rubbish and blimey those flight simulators run slow even on your system and even when you do find it it’s gone dark outside and the children are in bed so the last thing you want is to fire up a tractor in the next room but hey, how else are they gonna know whether you’ve actually paid 29.99 for it or just gone down the market and knocked 3 times on the underside of the counter to get a ‘special’ cheap copy without checking some cd key on the disc itself as you create a vortex in the home office and cars and cows and all sorts are being sucked into the funnel as the whirring reaches a crescendo of logos and intros until finally the game starts by which time you’ve fallen asleep with your head on a pentel roller ball and you’ll jolt awake in 2 hours with an indentation on your forehead that takes 2 weeks to completely disappear but that’s alright because you tell people you were hit by a cyclist who was robbing a bank therefore preventing a crime and everybody feels it was worth it then and has a story to tell next time they go to the workshop.
the option is, of course, is to get those games online so that there are no dvds involved. it’s very simple. all that happens now is that when you start the game some other spurious process will kick off locking your system for a couple of minutes as it tries to remember who you are and where your master server is and then every time you run it it completely overwrites itself with a new version of itself that is has to download over itself and install back in the original place it likes to install itself not the place you’d prefer it to and actually if it wants to create a start menu item all over again it will thank you and by then you’re thinking it’s probably not worth it but it’s hung waiting to contact it’s uber server before it can even tell you you’re allowed to play the game you brought from it and oh look its a new version of itself so you might just need to take a few minutes to remind it who you are and oops the game has suddenly started at the same time so everything has disappeared and been replaced by a screen waiting for you to tell it who you are before it hangs waiting for the other thing to tell it whether that’s true except neither of them can actually validate that yet and so eventually one of them will give up and blurt some half-baked error screen with 24 point times roman which just says maybe everything’s not working right now so maybe try in a minute which was all you had so it’s too late and then everything will quit but there’ll be a flashing orange item on your taskbar which looks like it might actually be useful as it seems to come from the company who’s lead you down this path so let’s have a look and see but oh, it’s an advert for something else I’m not remotely interested in.
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