EB and PC: A new low

I was in my local EB today to ask about a PC game that supposedly shipped 3 days ago.
Was told that they would not get it in until Thursday: “We don’t overnight PC
games anymore,they are no longer our target market” :(

MAN were those the days! We had an Egghead at our local mall. The sales staff were required to wear white dress shirts with ties and they actually knew what they were talking about. I remember going in to buy an Adlib sound card, and the sales dude talked me out of it and into a Soundblaster. One of the best sales pitches I’ve ever seen.

Won’t be long until we build PC emulators to play all our “classic” games on. If you want a joystick, you’ll have to carve it out of wood and wire it up yourself to play flightsims.

Back in the day it was Egghead (for PC’s, anyway, until that upstart EB came along).

Does Egghead really precede EB? I remember Electronics Boutiques at least as far back as the late '80s. There never seemed to be many Eggheads where I was living, but I remember occasionally going to one in Manhattan around 89/90.

Yeah, and the ‘magic’ died on exactly the same day as every store everywhere stopped letting you return games because they were buggy, wouldn’t run on your system, or just plain sucked. The first time you get horribly burned by taking a chance on a title that looks promising is the last time you feel that wonderous joy in the unknown. After that, it’s more like the trepidation from walking down a garbage-strewn back alley.

You can get spoken to at a Best Buy? I had to corner some guy just to ask him when the best days were to get a 360. Maybe it’s because I’m a “Buzz.”

But, yeah, Fry’s doesn’t even pretend to give a damn about you. That kind of honesty is refreshing. And they’ve dug on-sale titles out of backstock when I’ve asked them to.

Newbee. I remember back when Electronics Boutique was called Games & Gadgets. You could actually have sales people open a game and play it on a pc in the store before you bought it. Games were placed on glass shelves with plenty of room between each box. The stores were clean, professional, and the staff knowledgable. When I started shopping there in 85 they sold Mostly computer software. Mac, Amiga and C64 dominated the shelves but the PC had a tiny section. I believe they may of carried NES games but I could be mistaken.

Egghead Software was founded in 1984. Games & Gadgets was founded in 1977

Last time I bought a pc game, (stubbs the Zombie) I had a hell of a time getting the cleark to get a copy of the shelf and let me buy it. He was sure it didn’t exist. Didn’t even check his computer. If it wasn’t because I wanted it that day and no one else had it, I would of walked.
In my opinion, EB/Gamestops target market are lower class urban who use to get their gaming fix at pawn shops. I haven’t go into an EB/gamestop since buying Stubbs and I’m going to try to avoid doing so.

Target is pretty good as well. I think now if I do buy from a store, its either Target, Toys R Us, or Best Buy. However I think 90% of my purchases will be online now.

Wow. Back in the day that was the reason to go to EB and pay a premium price – they’d have the new releases before anyone else. You could count on the game being there and it costing $50 or whatever the MSRP was.

I imagine it’s only going to get worse since there will be a big marketing push in '07 for the new consoles as they launch. You’re going to have these mall stores with limited space trying to fit in new kiosks and PS3 and Revolution games. Something’s got to give to make room, probably PC games and shelf space for older consoles.

That sounds like an easy sales pitch! IIRC the adlib just did midi, and the early soundblasters were already doing cool wav sounds and whatnot, right?

Man, I still remember my first soundblaster. I fired up Space Quest (3?) and almost fainted.

Edit:

Okay, my first SB was from Sam’s Club, opened the box on christmas morning to find an old printer controller card that some asshole had returned in the SB box. The next day I had it exchanged for a real SB, and then I fainted.

Our CompUSA’s stock is still pretty decent; I guess it helps that most of the store is dedicated to computers in the first place.

No Fry’s in Minnesotaland.

Best Buy is invariably 1-2 weeks late with releases, and their selection is meager. Target is tiny. The assorted EB/GS stores have relegated PC games to about a 4 foot wide, 6 foot tall, tight-packed (no front-facing boxes) shelf. Much to my surprise however, I found X3, Boiling Point, and um…some other niche thing I wasn’t expecting. It wasn’t Space Rangers, but something of that caliber … go figure.

“Man, I still remember my first soundblaster. I fired up Space Quest (3?) and almost fainted.”

I remember my Righteous 3D card and that beautiful click sound it made when it switched to 3D mode.

Getting my first soundblaster was great. I was so used to playing the QFG and Ultima 7 games with bleeps and buzzes. Adding a soundcard was faaaaaaaaaaaantastic.

Two words: Wing Commander.

Heh, I remember my friend getting banned from a game store because he got caught making copies from the 5 1/2 inch game floppies that the salesperson had let him try out before buying. He was ahead of his time.

Oddly, my first 3d graphics card was a total flop. Dad scored me a “Rendition Verite”, apparently an early competitor to the VooDoo 2. It came with Quake on a cd. Til this point, my FPS experience was limited to Wolf3D and Doom.

I hated quake. This new card (or maybe it was my ram limitations who knows) couldn’t push frames at all. I played with all the settings, got nowhere. The framerate was, like, less than one.

I probably just didn’t know what I was doing, being in high school and having no PC gamer friends to speak of. I distinctly remember preferring the fast performance of Doom to Quake. Of course, I was also on dialup and had no multiplayer experiences to lean on.

I didn’t really get into 3d until college, when I had an ATI AIW 128, which had a Rage 128 chip that allowed me to play Half-Life and love it. That’s how I got into 3d gaming. It led me to Counter-Strike, and eventually to MMORPGS.

Before that, I had console games and 2d PC games. Ultima, Sierra adventures, that sort of thing. Also pretty much anything that looked cool at the game store in the mall, Software Etc. I think it was called.

I remember getting kicked out of a funco land for standing and playing legendary wings while my dad was 2 stores down.

The pc section at my eb is barely existant, most of the games they have are either old trade ins, or major advertised games like Civ or Rome.

I remember laughing at the excitement about the Soundblaster. “Ooh, one digital voice. Three more and they’ll catch up with what my Amiga’s had for the past five years.”

I’ve rarely bought PC titles at EB, but at least they did take back the only three PC games I’ve ever returned. (Captain Blood/Amiga, SimCity 3, and the crappy collector’s edition of Half-Life 2.)

Newbee. I remember back when Electronics Boutique was called Games & Gadgets. You could actually have sales people open a game and play it on a pc in the store before you bought it. Games were placed on glass shelves with plenty of room between each box. The stores were clean, professional, and the staff knowledgable. When I started shopping there in 85 they sold Mostly computer software. Mac, Amiga and C64 dominated the shelves but the PC had a tiny section. I believe they may of carried NES games but I could be mistaken.

Never knew that… thanks for the history lesson.

That was back in the day when PCs were new, and didn’t even have graphics. PC games didn’t even really do much until the advent of VGA. I remember that clearly. I had an amiga, and used to rag on this guy with a PC. He worked in a walden software store (bought out by EB). Then one day he shows me this image on his PC and it looked better then my amiga pictures. Impossible!

Then games starting comming out and looked good within a few years the Amiga games were looking worse then PC games. Of course I had better sound, even better then a soundblaster.

I didn’t get into PCs at all until 1994 with the advent of Pentium 75s. I felt like such a traitor too. But doom was so cool, and there was Decent and soon after C&C and warcraft…

Yeah, I’d thrown my lot in with Commodore until the early 90s. For a long time it was way ahead of the curve on graphics and sound. I found it amusing to read in “Masters of Doom” how excited the guys at Id were just to be able to recreate Nintendo-quality side scrolling with Commander Keen. But the writing on the wall started to be apparent around 1990, when I saw F-29 Retaliator running ultra-smooth on a PC at a computer store, and when I saw drool-worthy screenshots for Ultima VI (which was eventually ported to Amiga but I don’t think looked quite as good). Then I went to college and abandoned gaming for several years… by the time I got out, it was PC or nothing.