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Almost 20 years old, and still relevant: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21
by AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
Almost 20 years old, and still relevant:
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/12/21
- pmarreck 8y agowow, straight from the dawn of the cable-modem era
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoA reference to Half-Life 2 perhaps? That 120MB mandatory launch day patch was painful on dial-up!
- dlbucci 8y agoHalf-Life 1, you mean? 2 didn't come out until 2004, I think, and this comic's from '98.
- slavik81 8y agoA comic shockingly ahead of its time. While there were an increasing number of games that were borderline unplayable without their Day 1 patch, I think that comic was just extrapolating the trend. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that game boxes came with nothing more than a CD key in them. Back around when that comic was written, Computer Gaming World had a policy of only reviewing the unpatched versions of games. That became increasingly untenable and they eventually had to scrap the policy. The parent probably figured it was Half-Life 2 because the HL2 launch was a disaster. It was one of the first games requiring online activation and the servers were completely overloaded.
- chaoticmass 8y agoGiven the way the URL is formatted it would appear to be from Dec 1998, so not HL2.
- wingerlang 8y agoI bought HL2 (disk) on launch day, had to wait 3 or 4 days to play it. 56k dial up was not fun at the time.
- aidenn0 8y agoI beta tested ultima online around then and it took ~8 hours to download the patches when I installed the day my CD arrived.