I’ve been looking for games that I missed out on when I was younger because either I didn’t know about them or I didn’t have the funds for them. Recently, I found a cheap copy of Fear Effect at my local used game store and was surprised to see that it was four discs! I rummaged through my PlayStation games and saw that some titles I’ve yet to play were also three or four discs: Koudelka, Final Fantasy VII and so on. Multiple discs continued all the way until the generation we are at now. Even the Xbox 360 had some huge multi-disc JRPG’s; games I need to play but fear one of the discs may not function.
As I thought about all the games I have with multiple discs, I realized that I had only beaten three games that had multiple discs: Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil: Code Veronica and Resident Evil Remake. That is less than one percent of all the multi-discs games I own; I think that’s pretty sad, I need to up my game when it comes to them. It amazes me how much data one Blu-ray disc can hold; what was nearly impossible two gaming generations ago is now the norm. Ratchet & Clank 1-3 was a three disc deal in the early 2000s; now I can play all three games on one disc on my PlayStation 3. Technology truly is amazing.
I’m glad that technology has found a way past multi disc games; I can’t even imagine how many discs The Witcher 3 or Fallout 4 would be without Blu-ray technology. I even found myself leaning towards buying non-Xbox 360 exclusives on the PlayStation 3 just so that I wouldn’t have to deal with switching discs all the time. For me, it breaks the immersion I have in the game; there’s nothing worse than being in the zone and your game tells you to “enter disc 2.” What’s worse is when your hands are covered in cheese ball goo and you have to touch an insanely sensitive disc and put it into your equally sensitive PlayStation. Now that I am an adult, I do not eat while gaming; controllers are expensive and I sit in a rocking chair, both are not conducive to eating while playing.
Everyone knows the tale of Square and Nintendo and how the rift of changing to discs for Final Fantasy VII ruined their relationship and birthed us the era of the PlayStation. I’m guessing that if Final Fantasy VII was on cartridges, it would have taken more than three but less than ten cartridges – also cartridges aren’t able to handle FMV so the game would have been neutered on the N64. That is so unreal; can anyone imagine buying this at Toys R Us in the 90s? How much would that have cost seeing as N64 games were already about fifty dollars? It is unthinkable to me to have double digit cartridges sitting on my shelf just to play an RPG. While I am sad that a rift happened between the two companies, I’m glad that Sony stepped up and gave us the disc-based games that have just become more common sense.
Since I’m getting older, it is hard for me to wrap my mind around certain things. The fact that any gamer born in the past ten years won’t have to deal with multiple disc games. And if they do it is by their choice going the retro route, but I’m sure by the time they are of age, all the games will be easily downloadable on their proper system. The multi-disc games are fun to set on your shelf since the older cases are huge, but they’re hard for me to play. Back when they were commonplace gamers had less games to chose from and more time to play. Now when I see a multi-disc game, I wonder how long it will take for me to play, so I avoid them. Multi-disc games are only played on my vacations where I can commit a nice amount of time to them. I can usually beat newer games in about a week, so they aren’t as much of a time sink. Hopefully, next vacation I can polish off the first Fear Effect; that’d be a nice notch in my controller.