Is the Gaming Industry Moving Online Too Fast? 185
RyanDJ writes with his reaction to the Sony PSN outage, wondering if our rush to online services and digital distribution for games is a bit too enthusiastic.
"I love technology, I just want it to slow down. I know I sound like an angry old 'get off my lawn' kind of guy right now, but until my 8-bit Nintendo dies from plastic corrosion and age, it will continue to play any game I find just as it was supposed to. Online dedicated games, one day, will lose servers. System crashes, such as the Sony problem, will cause interruptions. I feel if we don't slow down, stabilize the current technology and ensure its safety, find ways to guarantee that items bought are permanently owned even without a physical copy, we might see a company such as Nintendo saying that online isn't worth it!"
Re:8-bit Nintendo is probably not the best example (Score:5, Informative)
Re:8-bit Nintendo is probably not the best example (Score:4, Informative)
All you had to do was take care of your carts and not get crap inside of them.
The 'crap that gets inside of them' accumulates from the oh-so-terrible act of putting the cartridges into the machine. What happened was copper rubbing on copper created a nasty black gunk that'd accumulate enough to interrupt the contacts. The cartridges and the system just needed to be cleaned. The NES's cartridge loading mechanism was far more susceptible to this than the other consoles... which is funny because the design they used was specifically intended to make it look more like a VCR than an Atari 2600.