At least the old consoles came problem free

While playing Assassin's Creed on a friends Xbox 360, since the laser in mine died, I guess the disc got dirty and the game was stopped due to an "unplayable disc." My friend was with me and told me that this wasn't anything new, and that he has had to clean the disc repeatedly and still the error would randomly show.

At first I was ready to tell him that maybe his laser was dieing like mine had, which first showed signed of a loud noise and an inability to read certain discs on the first go, but he said it had to be the game because his system was one of the newer 360 models.

And so... I began noticing that it wasn't until the new generation of gaming, post-Super Nintendo/Genesis era, that video gaming to a fragile turn. Think about it, the PlayStation was one of the early adopters of console CD gaming and if that disc got scratched or that laser got damaged, you were screwed. Solutions, at that time, would be either to replace the game or maybe try to use a CD/Laser cleaner and hope it worked.

It just seems to me that when something went wrong with any SNES or Genesis game, all you had to do was the "magical" cartridge-blow technique and your game would run fine. Now I know that you might be thinking, "obviously those would work on cartridges, but the newer 'fragile' media was able to bring us better graphics and gameplay. So as long as you took care of it, you were fine." You're right, it was that simple, but we don't have that kind of luxury for this generation of gaming.

Now we don't even have a chance to wonder what happened to our video games because we are receiving glitchy discs that might or might not work on our consoles and if they do, we have to expect crashes/freezing. And if that's not enough, we have to hope that the console itself doesn't just up and die from shoddy workmanship. It just seems to me that back in the day it was much easier to play video games. You didn't have to worry about problems such as, how long you were playing for before giving the machine a break and if a certain game is glitching/freezing so much that you want to scratch your eyes out.

All I'm saying is that it seems to me like those were simpler times.

- R