One of those subjects is videogames.

See, during the 2000's, I had a tug-of-war with myself. My retro-self vs. my modern-self. See, us Millennials, in the mainstream at least, spent all of the 2000's playing hyper-realistic looking PC games with a lot of forward push in technology. And while I have always been predominantly called "stuck in the past" because I use things from the 80's and 90's 90% of the time, I have, and did, give quite a lot of *modern* shit a chance. So this is my page of my grievences for those times I gave in and joined the lamestream in what's "current". A lot of it was peer-pressure being in I.T. and surrounded by other young dudes who like bragging about their 4GHz AMD Athlon with Water Cooling and a RAID 10 config nearing 1TB in size likey they had a 65' Mustang that was driven by a famous racer and then starred in a feature action film. And here I was, Mr 486, still kickin' around in DOS and Windows 3.1. So I gave into the peer pressure, just to see what it's all about....and I liken it to having children, misery loves company.

As a 20 something, it's all fun and games, and you take it so seriously. As a 40 something though, I really don't want to be tweaking, and tuning, and cleaning, and pruning, and dicking around with my computer for six hours to run some piece of software that's incomplete, needs updates, and a $15 a month Cloud subscription! When I was 20, it was a novel and interesting thing to have a game you bought on the internet, downloaded, and then installed with (usually) working DRM. But it was a fast discovery WHY this sucks when they stop offering the game, or stop honoring your purchase. Seriously, FUCK Corporations.

Here's why I liked old DOS/Windows, and old COnsole Games, it was an honest transaction. You bought a physical piece of media and you plugged that piece of media into the machine, you then ran the media and enjoyed it. It was yours, to keep, even if the EULA said you edidn't own it, from a possession standpoint, legally, yeah you did - because you owned that sole copy right there in your hands, and you could play it any time you liked. And all for a ONE-TIME cost of between $15 and $80 depending on what it was and the industry at the time. You owned it, nobody could deleted it or remove it, the transaction was forever as long as you still held the media the game was on. That's all there was, simple, honest transacion.....but now.....

You buy an unfinished product on a sliding scale price based on popularity one way or another, which needs a barriage of updates and DLC added to it as soon as you get it home. After all this, you're paying some goon $15/mo to save your savegames on his server so you don't lose them. Is this really that fucking important that we NEED to pay some lunatic company $15/mo so we don't lose a savegame for something that otherwise has no rhyme, reason, or purpose other than pleasure. Is it really that cool. Oh wow, I can do the same thing with DOOM! Just pojnt the game to store the savegames on my server - wow, and we had that in like what...1993? It's just more bullshit to get more money from you. That's all it is.

Then there's piracy, treating your end user like they're a damn pirate is a good way for them to want to dawn an "eye patch" that let's them get away without ye olde Cee Dee! DRM is a scourage, especially with old games. I was reminded of this horseshit trying to run The Sims 2 on Linux using a whole matter of arcane methods. SecuROM can go die in hell! Whoever designed that was such a sadist they probably enjoy jamming dipsticks up pee holes and taking joy in the screaming. Seriously, I've had kidney stone stent removal that was less huranging than trying to get some SecuROM riddled piece of shit working in 2025 on Linux.

And that brings up another part, SecuROM being "old" now, how in the hell are we still going to play this stuff in 10-20-30-40-50 years when the servers are all down, the activation keys have nothing to activate against, the DRM no longer exists as it did, Windows and Apple are unrecognizable from their incarnations upon release, Corporations work with the Government to see to it you can't run your old shit, or download it off the web, and that anything "oooooold" is ground up and recycled. Sure, some of it can be hacked, but other stuff won't run worth a crap even if it is hacked - The Sims 2 is one of those I was just learning with.

Here's what I went through just on that game alone. Wine, Winetricks, Bottles, Lutris, Windows XP SP3 Virtual Machine (the closest I got to it working), and no dies. Doesn't want to run off it's own ISO due to SecuROM, the NoCD Crack I used to use can't be found anymore, because Google and other search engines marked the site as "Warez/Pron" so finding it is HARDer than ever. The new version costs money, my old working CD's with keys are basically useless in Mac because 32-bit, useless in Windows because "Windows 10" and useless in Linux because "It's Linux dude".