I wake up every morning, tired and lethargic, desperately clutching for whatever feels like a vitamin D tablet. Once that struggle is over and done with, I boot up my computer. No time for games, though; uni beckons and I intend not to fail the god awful class I’m taking. Electrical engineering is a joyless discipline, unless we’re talking about making graphics cards or headphones (it’s actually pretty sweet), but I suffer through. After managing, I dunno, about half an hour worth of attention on the day’s learnings, it’s on the bus back home with a Mars bar in tow.
When the patch downloads just right
After an hour and a half of travel and hankerin’ for some gamerin’, I gotta finish up a few niggling tasks that gnaw at my schedule like ticks on a dog. I prove a few fundamental properties of vector field operations, make sure I understand why the delay on transmission lines only get treated as a delay when the characteristic impedance is the same as the source and HEY WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT STEAM IS MAGICALLY OPEN! I’ve done my daily stint of effort, and now I want to sit back and regain some sani-… I’m sorry, patches? PATCHES!? EEEEUUUUGGGGHHHH.
Patches are the bane of my existence. The number one thing I’m afraid of every time I open up Steam is discovering that a game needs to be updated. On the one hand, sure, patches make the game run better (in theory), but then I have to wait for them to download, assuming my internet’s willing to play ball (the effin’ casual). Oh, and get this, some games are DESIGNED to make me download stuff. All those episodic games called HITMAN? Yeah, I’d rather one big hit, guys, not monthly bouts of GB slaps to the nads.
Life is so hard, boo hoo, etc.
There’s the always-on nonsense too. Like, who in their right mind makes a game that isn’t solely multiplayer focused and goes, “You know what? We need leaderboards”. I mean, not to beat an episodic horse here, but HITMAN was TERRIBLE at that when I last played it. The Internet cuts out for a second, WHAM, you’re in the main menu, and offline just doesn’t deliver “the full richness” of the experience, apparently.
I’ve turned into the old, grumpy man with his train set! I just want to play my games! I don’t care if the new patch fixes a problem I never had, I’m okay with this version right now, yo. I suppose it’s more of a problem on Steam’s end, especially Factorio’s RIDICULOUS sync sizes (seriously Wube, what’s going on there?), BUT STILL! I now have a public voice, capable of reaching from here to, like, somewhere in France. Probably Vienna (that’s France, righ- Oh. Well, it’s not quite the Middle East, at least).
… So that’s what a God Complex feels like. Feels good. Anyway, if I can even penetrate the mind of one person responsible for such maddening patches/always-on bullshit, I’ll be okay. If not, I’ll film myself eating a tube of oreos in a bird costume while singing Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys. I won’t upload it, but I’ll do it. Patches might suck, but not as hard as me sucking on those sweet, creamy centres.
