By Carcas

There was an age, not too long ago, when things made sense. Men were men, women were women, and dogs only rarely spoke outside of television commercials. As I grew old enough to legally buy cigarettes, my belief that the age of sense was coming to an end grew. By the time I was old enough to buy my own alcohol, I was fairly certain that age had ended.

One of the first casualties I had noticed was the box. The box was a simple device, a rectangle in three dimensions. When it was hollowed out, it had the remarkable ability to hold things within, protecting them to some degree by whatever material they were made of. Cardboard to varying thickness was astoundingly popular.

Many things came in boxes, further demonstrating their utility and function. Their outside was usually painted or held in a veneer of brightly color paper. One of the things I liked to see within the grand box, was games. In such a case, they usually came in a size of about nine inches in height by five and a half inches in width, with a thickness of usually just under one inch.

Such a size held an eight and a half by five and a half inch manual with cunning utility. Likewise it held the old five and a quarter inch disks snuggly (yes, while square in shape, they were a disk, but that is another rant). They were usually broken into two parts, a lid and a bottom, which separated and united easily for convenient storage. They were all basically of one size, fitting neatly into a bookshelf or another, larger box.

Over time, however, disks as accepted medium grew to become circular again. That was when all heck broke loose. The gem case (another box of sorts) was widely used for their storage. Yet others saw things such as envelopes of paper or plastic and a variety of other less feasible ideas. Why in an age when the gem case is so common and relatively inexpensive, would one try to store and ship disks in an envelope made of plastic shrink wrap is well beyond me. Really, if it is that big of a deal, I can go over to my friends' houses and steal a few, granted they may be cracked or have that annoying twelve-spoke wheel that holds the CD so securely that you need to break either the disk or the spokes to get it out.

Honestly, I do not think it would be that hard to not ship it loose, or in a plastic baggie like it was something the packaging company was worried about getting out. Then again, maybe they know something we do not, as I have seen more than a few games as of late which should have come with a pooper-scooper to remove from my system.