I popped over to the store during lunch yesterday to pick up Age of Empires III and it’s left me feeling a little strange. After all, the Xbox 360 comes out in under 20 days now. That’s a non-trivial upgrade, so I should be conserving energies – and money – for it. I’m slated to pop to Fry’s this weekend with Steve: that will result in the purchase of Star Wars Battlefront II and a fist full of DVDs. There is a question about Battlefront II: get the Xbox or PSP version? Or both? I don’t know yet, but my feet itch buying a game for an “older” console days before it’s upgraded, yet I use my Xbox more than I do my PSP right now… either way, why would I bother to pick up a new PC game?

Because it was shiny.

I was on my way to the gym and then to grab some teriyaki… but I had seen an email go by that AoE III standard and special edition was in stock and since I was curious, I stopped in to check it out. It’s supposed to be killer, after all. They had a mountain of standard edition boxes: the new “smaller” sized boxes that Symantec helped pioneer for PC software… a little bit bigger than a VCR tape but much smaller than the old style 8″ x 11″ boxes from the 1990’s. I was just about to pick it up and head to the cashier when I saw “It”.

The special edition box.

It was gold. It was shiny. It implied “limited time offer”. I didn’t stand a chance.

I dropped the standard edition and mindlessly shuffled to the display to snatch a special edition box. I gotta tell ya this: it this edition makes the Halo 2 Special Edition look like crap. There’s a big coffee table style book with art from the game. A “Making Of” disc and a soundtrack CD. Plus a poster, map-thing, players guide, keyboard help cheat sheet – even a demo disc to pass on to a friend. Really impressive collection of stuffs in the huge box.

Yet just the other day, I finally deleted the Halo for PC icon from my quick launch toolbar on my home computer. I recently realized that I haven’t played Halo on my PC all that much anymore. Um, well, in a while. In a long while. Since it was multi-player, I still played it even after getting my first Xbox – the Halo all green special edition Xbox; see a trend here? – because I liked the online game play. After the first beta of the Live-enabled Halo 2 hit I sorta forgot about the PC version. Then I realized that I hadn’t played Halo on the PC since moving to WA.

Oddly enough, I’ve never been a huge console game guy. At least, not since the Atari 2600. I did a small stint with an NES, but I skiped the Super Nintendo, DreamCast, Genesis, etc. collection. And back in the day, the joysticks were somewhat limiting, so game play on a PC was better. Memory module required in your console? Piss off, I have a hard drive. Limited input options? Piss off, I have a keyboard, mouse, joystick, trackball, and/or steering wheel. Then Grand Theft Auto 3 hit the world: it was only available on the PS2 and my view was altered.

The PS2 brought me back into the console gaming world. In fact, their controllers were so advanced that I was initially worried that it would be too complicated to handle. I mean, I grew up on the one button/one stick joystick of Atari and a short dabble of the Fancom D-Pad/A/B – these things were two-hand-required and worked nothing like a keyboard or mouse did. I got used to it over time, but the biggest benefit was that of configuration… well, more specifically, that I didn’t have to worry about configuration.

I’ll not soon forget the multiple calls to EA and Sierra and other gaming companies on Saturday mornings, trying to work through IRQ settings and Memory Aperture BIOS settings for each new game that was released. I think Tribes only required one call; Halo didn’t even need one, but before that it was a nightmare. In fact, it was due to gaming that I kept a rigorous every-six-month upgrade schedule for my hardware: video and memory couldn’t seem to keep up with the demands of the gaming industry. With my PS2 – as well as with my Xbox and Xbox 360 – this problem became moot. Not just for me, but for the gaming companies as well! The console market provides a fixed collection of hardware to target: there’s no configuration required, ever. Drop the disc in and play: simple and low maintenance. I had this entire realization as I was reading the “machine requirements” on the back of this box. wondering just how much video memory I had these days…

Yet, even after nuking my Halo icon this past weekend and practically vowing to never bother with another PC-based game again, there’s still an AoE III box sitting in my den simply because it was shiny. It might be played or it might not. Either way, it was a must-have impulse-driven purchase.

Geeks are so easily pleased – if more women figured this out, we’d be doomed as a breed…