265: Punching the Baby Seal of PC Gaming

[PapaGamer]

Two years ago I had a choice between building a new gaming rig or buying a HDTV & PS3. I bought the HDTV and PS3 and never fire up my PC for gaming any more except for retro sessions of Age of Mythology. I'm not even tempted by Steam sales...

 

[Abnaxus]

"You pay this much money for a car, the shit's supposed to work."
But you need TO KNOW how to drive that shit, if you don`t take care of your PC it will crash eventually

 

[ItsAPaul]

So OP is terrible with computers and is blaming the publishers? I would never get a console these days; PC versions are always better for less money.

PS - The gaming rig $ amount argument doesn't work since you need a PC and buying last month's video card and doubling the ram doesn't cost that much assuming you don't go to Best Buy.

 

[cerebus23]

and you need to have your oil changed every few months, and you need to have the car inspected, and if something breaks down more often than not your paying a dealer to fix it for tons of cash over what it actually costs. and you need to buy insurance and state stickers and license plates, and put gas into the thing every few days. and then there is the chance you may get a lemon car and have endless problems with it.

pc you get a box you plug in, you get free updates to your os, drivers, free mods and other cool stuff for games. if you bought it you got a free tech support for a period of time. you got a endless resource known as the internet to trouble shoot problems if any arise on your own. you got numerous forums where people spend their personal time to give sound tech advice, you got any number of free sites to optimize and tweak games to get better performance.

google itself is a wonderful thing you know how many issues can be fixed soon after a quick google search?

i got to say if you do not know how to basically maintain and trouble shoot a pc or take the time to educate yourself to some degree. like updating your bios, os, directx, maybe checking some hardware forums to see what drivers people recommend for certain games or gaming in general, cleaning out your pc case on occasion, you should not have bought a pc in the first place since 90% of issues are user error and apparently your problem is so prevelant that you just say f it pcs suck.

funny how many of us play crysis, starcraft 2, batman aa, total war, arma 2, eve online, nba2k, mlb2k avp, and on and on with nary a problem, and if there is a problem it usually takes maybe a driver update to solve and for the real tricky ones it might require a bit of searching and asking for advice.

trolls should not be allowed to write articles.

 

[Buizel91]

a hahaha, a 360 that hasn't RROD'd at least once? Yeah PC gaming has its problems, and consoles have the same damn problems (crashes, buggy games, patches, DLC) plus the problem of a walled as garden. they're like the macs of gaming, and glossing over their flaws while bringing up the same flaws in PC games (hell you've even gotta install console games these days) is disingenuous at best.

*Goes on Xbox...Play's Red Faction*...im sorry install what game exactly?

PC games get patched as well you know? and you know about expansions right? Exactly the same principle for DLC it adds new content to the current game...but ooh look on consoles i do not INSTALL it.

Also their have been many buggy games for PC or have you not played Modern Warfare 2?

Seriously i like the fact that many people see Building PC's as a hobby, i really do, but i think it's time that everyone agree's that most people in this day and age do not have the resources, time or even skill to make a Gaming PC...which is why consoles suit most of the market.

Most people by Games to have fun, and not work to play it, some people just have to accept that and move on.

 

[Buizel91]

Thirty seconds into the brew-time on your coffee-maker the device instead sprays hot java on your balls, searing them to the corduroy. You don't like that? Not a fan?

I made the mistake of taking a large gulp of water whilst reading this. What little water not on my laptop screen is still lodged in my nose. and it huuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrrtttttsssssssss.

Try that...but with coke..i assure you, it hurts even more =P

 

[Chipperz]

I hear you, man. I upgraded my graphics card last year and ALREADY new games are getting too good for it.

Thank Christ DC Universe Online comes out later this year, meaning even MMORPGs aren't PC exclusives any more...

 

[marblemadness]

To all of the people telling him how to fix it: Did you not get the point of the article? If he has a working PC, with decent specs, a game should run. He shouldn't HAVE to do all this troubleshooting and I agree fully.

With the exception of Fallout 3, I've never had an Xbox 360 game crash on me.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Software>drivers>DX and API software>hardware.(DX used to give me grief as part of it was bad and its hard to refresh it at times, tho these days if it dose not want to work right I just install the newest drivers and it tends to fix whatever issue I have)

But sadly mainstream PC gaming has trouble with supporting 3-5 year old hardware because they re to lazy to do a decent port.... I mean if fans could make Bioshock work on shader 2 and not shader 3 why in the hell could the devs not support it?(or was it shader 2.X and 2.X I dunnno I forget LOL)

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

To all of the people telling him how to fix it: Did you not get the point of the article? If he has a working PC, with decent specs, a game should run. He shouldn't HAVE to do all this troubleshooting and I agree fully.

With the exception of Fallout 3, I've never had an Xbox 360 game crash on me.

You would be surprised how windose can cock up on itself and you have to reinstall bits of it to get full functionality back. Sound drivers if they go bad can cause crashes just as bad video drivers can and sometimes the game is just not meant to be run on max settings,Dark messiah tends to crash on max settings it can't cache the video ram buffer or something right and locks up this leads to a ahrd crash that can and will most of the time damage your game and drivers.

If a game dose not wont to run right dial the graphics back some and switch to DX 9 and not 10 or vice verse,not all games are going to work at 100%.

 

[tmujir955]

No draconian DRM that demands I be online at all times and sacrifice a bleating goat

See, this is your problem. You're only sacrificing one goat. The machine god demands more! That baby seal you're thinking about punching? Sacrifice it instead! I think there's something about keeping your computer inside a pentagram at all times, with a water cooling system filled entirely with a virgin's blood, too.

I also have issues with PC gaming. I can't afford to upgrade a desktop on a regular basis (or even to buy one), so I'm stuck with a basic laptop that can't run COD 4, even at the lowest settings, without it jumping about more than the camera in a Bourne film.
The Steam sale, on the face of things, looked like it would fix this.
"Loads of slightly older games, at lower prices? Some of these should run on my wheezing construct of the ancients", I thought to myself. £20 of games, 4 days of download time, and a number of computer crashes that could best be represented in standard form later, and I have not one single game that will run on my PC without the aforementioned Cloverfield-level jerkiness. This is even after the specs supposedly match up, too.
I think I may be out of the PC gaming field until I find a couple of grand lying in the street for a decent gaming rig... Back to the xbox, I guess - there's definitely something to be said for the simplicity of gaming on consoles.

I bought Team Fortress 2 on Steam.

I tried to play it on my average laptop which I bought in 2009.

It lagged like hell.

I tried to play it on an average PC I bought in 2003.

It works better on the PC than the laptop. So stay away from laptops for gaming.

 

[Daedalus1942]

Well, there's your problem right there...
Your computer's a Dell... does anymore really need to be said?

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

Is it me or there's starting to be a Propaganda Campaign against PC gaming ?

 

[TOGSolid]

Not to be offensive but 90% of the time people's bad experiences of PC gaming are their own fault

This This This This This This This times a fucking thousand. The first words out of my mouth whenever somebody comes to me with a computer problem are always "what did you break?" Why? Because 99/100 times it's a PEBCAC error and while they vehemently deny at first, once I start digging I always find out it's something the person did to their own pc that caused the problem.

The problem with PCs isn't the PC, it's the person sitting in the damn chair.

 

[Fearzone]

The irony is this: first person shooters which run much better with a mouse and keyboard are dominating consoles right now, whereas turn-based stratagy games which should control just fine with a console controller, you find most of those on the PC.

Anyway, gameplay for most console games is pretty brain dead, by and large, so for that reason I have to put up with the PC. I welcome MMOs, working RTSs, and turn-based stratagy games for the console--I'll be more than happy to give each of those a try.

As someone who had to either (a) turn shaders from ultra down to high, or (b) turn off SLI altogether, in order to get the cutscenes from StarCraft 2 to play properly (I chose the second one), I can sympathize with some of the points here; nVidia says they are working on the fix. But in the end, the problems mentioned here are overstated and while they contain kernels of truth, PC gaming isn't anywhere near this bad.

 

[aldowyn]

On that last "until Civ V comes out" line... Does that mean you finished Starcraft II already?

More on topic: I very, very rarely have trouble with my PC. I've had compatibility issues with older games, but most of the time they still work, and my worst experience with PC gaming is my fault (I accidentally uninstalled ME1, and my save file, when I meant to uninstall ME2. Long story). Any other issues I've had are not caused by the game themselves, but by an online service tacked on by the publisher. (Windows Live, and whatever EA calls it's service, I'm talking about you!)

I must admit I have had NO problems with my (newest...) 360, at all. And complete zip on ANYTHING Nintendo has made. (dusty cartridges and a messed up cord don't count. Oh, and neither does a busted hinge.) My PS2 is also reliable when it comes to games. (Movies, that's a different story...)

 

[FloodOne]

Wow, I had a really hard time reading that. Anti-PC gaming statements like this sure are infuriating. People talk about how the PC market is dying (which couldn't be farther from the truth), and here we have so-called writers basically talking down on the whole experience, when it's most likely due to user error? I mean, a number of factors can cause the problems you've explained. And most of them usually have to do with ignorance on the users part.

It's funny, because all of those games listed, I have had zero issues with. Crysis especially. What am I doing differently? Honestly, probably not much. Just simple things, such as keeping my PC free of dust, making sure I don't bottleneck my system with one amazing part and one ancient one (which I'd almost be willing to bet one of these two things is yer problem), ect.

Honestly, it's ignorant posting like this that I thought I was avoiding by reading the escapist. It amazes me that this was even published. Shit like this is only going to give the wrong perception of PC gamers to people who don't know better, and a market that is already struggling in the console age doesn't need crap like this tainting it's image. In short, and I'm sure I speak for all PC gamers when I say this: Fuck PC gaming? No, sir, fuck you.

Maybe if it were easier for the "regular" consumer to plug and play, maybe the PC market wouldn't be struggling.

I don't want to read an owner's manual to play a damn video game. I never had trouble playing Mario on my NES, Final Fantasy on my ps1 or GTA IV on my 360. But I can't get games like Civ 2 to run on this piece of junk I call a desktop.

Maybe the problem is user error? What a load of pretentious, elitist, snobbery. You can keep your PC gaming, I'll be busy playing 20 different titles a year on a platform that actually fucking works every time I boot it up.