The insightful gadget observer 127

PC gaming used to feel gloriously messy. You bought a box, slid a disc into the drive, typed in a CD key that always seemed to have one smudged character, and hoped your machine agreed with the game before midnight. If you were online, you might patch the game through a publisher website that looked like it had survived three redesigns and a legal dispute. If you were offline, you lived with bugs, balance problems, and broken quests until the next magazine cover disc or fan