It took my Xbox One more than a day to download Halo 5 on an extremely fast connection: the power of the cloud, eh? It felt like I was back on the Dreamcast. But let's be honest, slow downloads are the least of Xbox One's problems: last week I read an article headlined 'The Xbox One is Garbage and the Future is Bulls***.' While I don't agree, it was hard to read about mandatory installs, updates, and other tiresome minutiae without some empathy. We've all been there and, in the grip of frustration, many of us react by letting rip like this.
With Halo 5 the only appropriate response ended up being humour. It's not that this stuff doesn't bother me, so much as I'm always aware of where we've come from - and when people say the good old days were better, it's hard to take as anything other than nostalgia. My introduction to gaming was a machine that often refused to load games at all. That barnacled beauty, the Spectrum 48K with separate tape-loading deck, opened mine eyes to the light - and when you spend your first few years thinking that video games take ten minutes to load, and some never will, seeing a cartridge in operation is like seeing the future.
In the early 80s, gaming in the UK meant more or less the various models of Spectrum, BBC Micro, and the Commodore 64. Two of these were homegrown machines, while the Commodore 64 was designed in America - which made the UK a unique marketplace. It was a brief but bright era, and one that saw many of today's global luminaries get their start. The Master System and NES did alright, but it wasn't until the 1990s that the Mega Drive and SNES started attracting away the video game-curious public and, in most cases, the best British development talent.
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