The first game that I specifically remember buying with my own money was TMNT 3 on the NES. And hell yeah it was worth it!

I played PC games since the early 90s, so I am well familiar with how things used to be before steam. And it was fine. I was hesitant to use steam at first, because like you say, I simply didn’t understand the point of it. Sometime after Valve released the orange box, that ended up being the first thing I bought on steam. And back then, some of the first things that I noticed about it was the ease of installing games, and the friends list that let me talk to and play games with my friends. I ended up getting really into team fortress 2, largely because I could play with people I knew, and we could even chat outside the game easily. It was easy to buy other games that these same friends were playing, and then enjoy a different game with them.

I got used to steam and it began to feel convenient, and at the same time, physical media started dying off. Steam let me easily install and uninstall any of my games whenever I wanted. I didn’t have to keep track of any physical media. I don’t have any of my old PC games from the 90s anymore. I have no idea where there went or how I lost them. But they are just gone. However, I still have every game I’ve ever bought on steam.

I’m not a heavy gamer anymore. If I see something I want, it’s easy to just put it on my wishlist and wait until it goes on sale at a price I think is reasonable. If I feel bored, I might open up my full list of games and browse for something to install. My game saves get backed up to the cloud. My controllers just work. Everything related to the gaming experience is integrated into one place, and I like that, it makes it easy. And for the most part, steam kind of just stays out of my way.

NPR reviews games now?

Several years back I got totally fed up with cvs and Walgreens. It was impossible to get ahold of anyone on the phone, and they were always backed up in the store because of lack of employees. It was a huge hassle because I take care of my grandparents prescriptions, and there are like 15 medications per month.

Switched over to a local pharmacy. Every time I go in, they have tons of friendly employees working, I’ve never had to wait more than a couple minutes to be helped, and I call and someone answers the phone within seconds most of the time. And the prices are about the same.

I tried out Linux a few months back, and one of the things I could never get working was my Bluetooth Xbox controller. The controller would just blink and never connect to the Bluetooth. Any idea what needs to be done to get it working? I was kind of annoyed that it didn’t just work since it’s such a popular controller.

I might pick up monster train and doom eternal. Yeah, I still haven’t played doom eternal.

That looks really interesting, but I’m just left wondering what the objective is, or what kind of gameplay is actually there.

A ship sounds a lot less exciting than a city.

I’ve found that as I got older, my taste in games has narrowed significantly. I used to be able to play pretty much anything, or especially any popular or critically acclaimed games. But these days I just don’t give a shit about most of what’s out there. I do have certain genres and developers that interest me though, so I know there are occasionally going to be some new games that I really like. And every now and then I might get surprised by something too.