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| Steam keeps track of how long you've played a game, but now how often you've enjoyed it. |
When Bioware’s critically acclaimed computer role-playing game, Dragon Age: Origins, came out on November 5th, 2009, I was inexplicably intrigued. Intrigued because it was getting a lot of positive press and because that press seemed to imply that it was one of the last bastions of old school PC games. I’m an old softy when it comes to games: I align computer games, even now, with the wonder they produced when I was a kid. I never had a NES or Genesis, so PC games were my source for geeky entertainment. Of course, I was also a kid so I didn’t have much money to buy games by myself. As a result most of the memories I have associated with computer games are severely tainted with whatever imaginative lens I viewed them through. I never actually played a lot of computer games, but I was fully aware of their existence. I spent quite a lot of time perusing PC gamer magazines and imagining the fantastical lands these games could take me to. And PC games were different back then: I never really put it into these terms, but PC games and console games were entirely distinct markets and the games that came out for them reflected that. PC games tended to be much slower and more precise; console games were far more inspired by arcades and were often, dare I say, more simplistic. Now, console type games dominate the market even on PCs. The console market is easier to develop for and more lucrative, but I don’t have a console and don’t really have any plans on buying one (plus playing first person shooters with a controller is hell – how do those people do it?). So when a game is lauded for its commitment to PC gaming conventions, it has a certain amount of pull for me. Because, you know, fuck those console gamers.
