These Are The Good Times!

For those keeping score, FM 2006 was shipped, or “dispatched” as our UK friends say, to me yesterday. Should arrive sometime next week. I also got notification that Civilization IV was shipped today and I should get that on Thursday.

It just baffles me that people actually think PC gaming is dead or near death. I’m convinced that the folks who believe this aren’t playing PC games. They hop from one game to the next like humming birds looking for nectar. Since you can’t hop as many times in PC gaming as you can in console-land, suddenly the genre is headed for a downfall.

I cannot and will not be able to play all of the quality PC games that are out there.

I believe that many of the crappy PC games and their crappy ideas are going the way of the dinosaur rather than the genre itself. Everyone thinks back to the 90s when PC games were all over the shelves, but how many of those games were really worth playing? Not a whole lot. I remember as a grad student (and master of my free time) wandering through Best Buy one summer looking for any, ANY, PC game worth purchasing. There was one good football game then – Front Page Sports Football – and many bad football games. The number of bad football games is much less in 2005, but there is still only one decent football game.

Here are the games that are sitting on my shelf that I will never load in my computer or are off the play list and on my computer – the entire Rainbow Six series, Halo (started it, but only for a bit), Half Life 2 (loaded it, but haven’t had time), Battlefield 2, the entire Splinter Cell series, and the latest Tiger Woods golf game.

These are the games that I struggle to play – rFactor (setting up my wheel is a pain), PureSim, and NHL Eastside Hockey Manager. Games that are out that I would purchase, but I would never find time to play include Age of Empires 3, X3, and Space Rangers.

I’m a slave to World of Warcraft and Out of the Park Baseball. I will cram in FM 2006 and Civilization IV. Keep in mind that Civilization was the first game that I spent an entire day and night playing.

How in the world someone can play two or three online massive multiplayer games like City of Heroes and Everquest is beyond my comprehension. I’d love to check out CoH again, but zero minutes available.

So my gaming day is filled with PC games. I don’t have time for any console games even if I wanted to play them. I just wish the PC genre was this dead back in college when I had time to actually play all of these games.