Mareczek99

Well, I live and was born in Poland in still comunist regime. Even though I was too young to actually rember it itself, I clearly remember the transformation to democracy. Why bring it up? Consoles were not a thing here and were still very rare up till late 90s or yearly 2000s (not counting Pegasus, which was a pretty common NES clone almost everyone had lying around at some point) and 99,9% of us, kids in the 80s and 90s had PCs, Amigas, ZX Spectrums, Commodores and such. Why? Imagine living in a place in which for many years there was no such thing as an Intellectual Property or Copyrights, where it was absolutely normal and fully legal to go to the most luxury shop at the time, pass the nice lady at the counter a floppy disk and legally buy a pirated copy of lemmings for Your Amiga 500. Consoles did not have a chance as their games were on cartridges that were hard or impossible to copy at the time, so distributors did not even bother with Megadrives or Snesses around here. My first legitimate console ever was a PS1 and still most vendors would sell them modded first hand. So, for most of my life I was a PC gamer thru and through. Still, I envy the western kids to be able to play all those amazing games back then. Be it Sega, Nintendo, Atari or whatever. When consoles came here with full force I noticed how hassle free and convenient they were. Also how streamlined their use was. Just pop a game in and boom - You're all set, no setting up soundblaster parameters and even selecting color depth. Today console gaming sucks - it's PCs in smaller packaging with the same patches, updates and installing. I honestly believe You can get a PC running in the ballpark of console quality and performance for basically the same amount of money, even if the parts are used. That is why I collect old consoles today, to catch up one the unknown side of gaming and learn to appreciate what these little boxes managed to do back then given the silly specs they had. I remember when the 200-something mhz PS2 rocked GTA3 while my 900mhz Duron struggled with it. Sure it's a different hardware architecture and no OS but that is still impressive to me.