Welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column the 14th of its kind, now coming to you from an actual house in Atlantic Canada rather than a hotel or a motel but a house without internet for a couple more days. But still, I still manage to shove this out into your eyes and ears week after week. How do I do it? Not all heroes wear capes. Some of them wear a theme tune. What?
(Here playeth the theme tune in the listenable version you can click on above. I heartily recommend that.)
Here’s this week’s FREE BIT. You’re welcome. Some musings on the concept of NEXT GEN when it comes to stuff these days, especially games machines…
I have just taken the Xbox One across one country on via one plane flight, one hotel, one motel and one house. And I’ve walked it between some of those because I am a Scottish Dad and Scottish Dads don’t do taxis unless they are staggering home at midnight from a pub, and then taxis don’t do them.
I was saying last week that the Xbox One first generation is ludicrously large and cumbersome and inconvenient, and I’m thinking perhaps I should really upgrade to an Xbox One Series X or Series S – you know? Get Next Gen machines.
But why? You pretty much get the same games.
Next Gen means something completely different than it did in the 90s AKA The Greatest Decade. In the 90s? Next Gen meant going from a Megadrive to a Saturn. In fact, SEGA were so on the money as a games company they went Next Gen not once but TWICE in that decade. Going Megadrive – Saturn – Dreamcast. It’s like they woke up every morning and said, “OK. We’ve got gamers sitting there spewing great droplets of joy from every orifice BUT IT’S NOT ENOUGH! Let’s invent new machines to create more droplets from even more orifices!”
By the time they came out with the Dreamcast I had so many orifices I was like a human colander.
Likewise, Nintendo. They didn’t dick about either. This was a games machine space race. Sega put a Saturn on the Moon, so Nintendo put an N64 on Uranus.
The leap from the Megadrive to the Saturn was immense. New shape. New name. New colour, New design. Better performance. And discs instead of cartridges. They changed every single thing about their gaming machine except the fact you had to plug it into the wall.
(PIC Will you look at that? A Sega Saturn as I live and breathe…)
It was like leaping from posting a letter to sending an email. Like going from riding on the back of a tractor to driving a car. It was a whole new games delivery system. It was like if you could hold up an avocado and consume it just by thinking about it, rather than having to taste the lie. Because that’s what avocados are. Liars. Avocados are the bullshittingest thing in the history of food.
Food should taste like it looks. That’s how early mankind survived. Cavemen saw an apple. It looked like an apple. It tasted like an apple. He thought, “I’ll have a bit of THIS to survive!”
An avocado looks like it should be zesty, moist, and fruity, and when you eat it? It’s dry, tasteless and splodgy. Like eating day old wallpaper paste. That’s green. You can put it on toast as much as you like you are still a hipster twat.
(PIC Avocado. Looks zesty. Tastes pish.)
The only thing falser than an avocado in 2022… is the phrase Next Gen.
And on that bombshell – that’s your free bit of Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column. You can get stuff 5-6 times the length of this as a PAID subscriber, it costs you about a quid a week and you can cancel at the end of any month. Not that anyone does.
Until next week keep it little, keep it old, keep it purple.
Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #14 FREE