“Remember back in the days of 2D graphics?”

This rhetorical question is usually followed by some old timer rant on 3D games being crappy because it’s all about the graphics. Grandpa will then go on to rant about all games looking the same nowdays before giving himself a hernia and ending up on an NHS waiting list for the rest of his miserable life. Pining away on grapes and Quality Street, while demanding his dutiful relatives seek him out the rarest Gameboy cartridges.

So I won’t say that, in the hope that fate does not await me after this article. I grew up in the days of 2D gaming, first with the Master System (with about two games because we were poor Northerners living down a mine) and then, when I was about five, I got a Mega-Drive, and Sonic the Hedgehog. My life was essentially bound to gaming since then. It sounds sad, but all the key events in my life are sorted in my mind by what game I was playing at the time. So you may want to stop reading now, call me a nostalgia ridden old prat (despite being only twenty) and take me out behind the shed to put me out of my misery. What these games showed me was a world of colour, every game worth buying had it’s own individual style that was vastly different from the rest. Because the games aimed for a more cartoony aesthetic, based on the limitations on the hardware, and the fact that gaming was considered a child’s hobby.

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Piracy is such a big scary word, and anti piracy advocates will pull all sorts of monetary figures out of their righteous hats to show you that piracy hurts developers in ways that you can’t even fathom. I’m not here to plea for the developers or publishers of games, I buy the games I think are good, and I just don’t play the ones I don’t think I’ll like, what you do, and however you justify it is up to you.

But if you pirate good games, you are in the wrong. Not because, as I have mentioned, your leading to a decline in profitability, but because you’re leading to a decline in quality. Something which I enjoy very much.

Too oft am I stumbling blindly through my favourite message board (I think you can all guess which), and I’ll stumble across a post along the lines of:

“Yeah bro, just downloaded that Fallout 3 game, pretty cool, definately keeping it on my Hard-drive for a few weeks”

It is then I get angry, not because I feel Bethesda deserve money for the game (though they do), but because that’s a sale lost on a game I’d like to see more of. I know I don’t need to worry about Fallout 3 doing well, it already has, but think of it this way.
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