I walked into Best Buy in Sioux Falls to look at televisions. I wanted to find a larger screen for my man cave.
My experiences shopping at electronics stores are very different from what they used to be. The TVs are all flat screen nowadays. You can’t buy a box TV any more, anywhere (not that I’d want to), but I still can’t quite understand why you can’t even give away a box TV for free these days — even one in perfect working order.
Sandy and I tried to sell one really cheap at our garage sale last month. Sandy said no one would take it. She was correct. I had to pay the city $10 just to dispose of it for me.
Seems like such a waste.
Technology, and business practices, change so quickly. I used to peruse the aisles at Best Buy stores at every opportunity to look at computer games.
Back when computers were new and computer video games were hot, entire sections of tech stores were stocked with them. Not any more. It’s as if they don’t exist. In my recent expedition to Best Buy I saw lots of video games for gaming consoles but none for computers. The market has dried up.
These days, I rarely touch a computer game. But there was a time, after I purchased my first Windows computer back in the ’80s, when I played computer games often.
The football games thrilled me the most. I tried them all, searching for the game that combined the best on-field experience with the coolest play-designing mechanism. A company called Front Page Sports made some pretty good football games for Windows. I remember something called “Joe Montana Football” by Sega. It was OK at first, but it became too predictable.
I used to enjoy playing Tom Landry Strategy Football Deluxe because I could create my teams just the way I wanted them (one geared for running, another for passing, one for great defense, and even one for great offense and bad defense) and I could call the plays and watch the results unfold on-screen more or less according to the statistical parameters I set up myself.
Of course I bought all the Madden games. That is, until they stopped making Madden for computer.
I really liked a game titled “Monday Night Football,” but it froze too often. Microsoft came out with “NFL Fever” and it was wonderful. But after I upgraded my computer, it no longer worked.
That’s the problem with so many of those old computer games. They only worked properly on the computers they were designed for. They became worthless when newer computers, with upgraded operating systems, came out.
Just like I said before: seems like such a waste.
I mean, some games are timeless. Like Monopoly.
Not so much in the video gaming world.