Have you ever bought a game on PC and not been able to play it?

[EHKOS]

Oh yeah, mostly from games with an 16-bit installer. I think Red Faction had that problem, as well as Blood: One Whole Unit. Some group made a custom RF launcher, and you can probably code a new installer or extract the files yourself. I however am terrible at coding, and there really aren't any tutorials on how to extract files from an installation file and where to put which in which directory. Not to mention the registry values. It's funny how I know what's wrong and theoretically know how to fix those types of things without actually being able to.

EDIT: Oh and I think it was Halo that couldn't detect any RAM due to age issues. I can't remember the exact cause, but it was pretty interesting being told you don't have enough RAM to play the first Halo when you're sitting there with 8 gigs.

 

[ccggenius12]

Poker Night at the Inventory 2. Steam said it might not work with integrated nVidea cards. I gambled and lost.

 

[Whateveralot]

I bought Dark Souls on PC. It was a great mistake. It's not unplayable per se, it's just unbearable to play because of broken controls.

 

[StriderShinryu]

I'm not sure I've ever run into a game that I couldn't play at all, but I've definitely come across numerous games that just don't run properly. Sometimes it's performance issues, sometimes it's input problems, sometimes it's audio, etc.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

.

With that said I like some PC gaming but at the same time totally despise having a broken game and not knowing how to fix it and then having to drag myself from forum to forum to look for a suitable fix, I dislike having to need help for something that shouldn't be broken and something I shouldn't need to fix in the first place.

and you always get some douche bag on them forums saying "post your specs" and then not posting again for the whole thread

Oh I say hell no to that, everytime and if not most the answer is always going to be "well ya see you dun goofed and didn't buy the x6t91 model of hardware etc" rather than oh it's the games fault.

Star Wars Battlefront II doesn't work for me even though a friend who has at least 5-6 year older hardware can run it and a friend with at least 2 years old hardware can run it and all I get is a boot back to the desktop after trying to start a match online, LAN or offline =/ and there doesn't seem to even be a logical conclusion let alone fix for that type of problem, it drives me up the wall that I can play that game on PS2 with nada problemos but on PC it is the problem and frustrating as it is I'm having none of it and will leave it uninstalled until my next eventual build comes by.

But yeah usual "post your specs" replies will either put me fof completely or annoy me since it heavily implies the "it's all your fault for buying shit tier hardware" vibe, even if they aren't trying to imply it still feels the same.

curious, can you play the single player campaign game types at all, or is it only when you try to start a multiplayer match of some sort? (just trying to help, battlefront II is one of my all time favorite games ^_^ )

 

[mrdude2010]

Usually I can find some way to fix it. The only exception was a wineskin version of KOTOR 2. I got it to work once, and every time after that it wouldn't open.

 

[frizzlebyte]

SNIP

Yep. Off the top of my head comes Homeworld 2. There's a bug that causes savegames loaded up with processors over, I think, 800 Ghz to have serious lag issues that makes the game horrendous to try and play.

I've never seen a fix for it, so that's one reason I'm excited to see Gearbox remake the games for modern systems.

 

[Stryc9]

Yeah, I've had it happen. Now I build by PCs and it doesn't happen anymore. I've also bought games I knew I wouldn't be able to play at the time because it was a good deal and was hoping to be able to upgrade eventually.

 

[Lord Doomhammer]

Yes, several separate occasions, several different reasons, and several different outcomes.
Commence dump:

First occasion was years ago when I had an off the shelf HP laptop. Fine for general computing and normal applications like Microsoft Office, not fine for more demanding videogames. Since then I've gone through several different laptops each an order of magnitude above the predecessor finally culminating in my current gaming PC tower with a pair of SLI 780 graphics cards. Suffice to say the games I tried to get for my original laptop wouldn't really run. Now however, that is no longer a problem. So on a PC it is very possible to get a game that you can't play because your computer can't run it. Since I've rectified that.

Second occasion, bad code. I got Halo 2 for Windows Vista, this is a game that was ported EXCLUSIVELY to Vista, they even went so far as to break the game so it could not be installed on Windows XP. Suffice to say it didn't want to install on any of my newer computers. However I have since created a work around to allow it to be installed onto any Windows 8/8.1 machine. Simply copy the files from the DVD onto the HDD/SSD, then install from the copy on the HDD to another location on the HDD, the trick is by installing it from an internal HDD you bypass the install permission system and allow the install to finish. So yes, BAD CODE (or purposefully broken code)can cause a PC game to not work, but (most) PC gamers are clever and there is usually a work around available (sometimes from The PC gaming help wiki [http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home]).

The final scenario I've encountered is to do with EA (yup...). This is because EA tied an EA account to my Xbox LIVE account. And then my Xbox account got hacked, with it my EA account. And they were then able to get access to some of the CD keys. One of them was for Battlefield Bad Company 2. They then decided to not rectify the situation by either giving me a new CD KEY or something. There is good reason that PC gamers fucking hate EA. I still can't play this game, and there is nothing Valve (steam), or I can do about it because EA refuses to help.

 

[00slash00]

I used to back when I was a child and ignorant of how PCs worked. I thought of them as consoles with keyboards for a controller, in the sense that the idea that a game may not be able to run on my current hardware, never crossed my mind. Since then...well I still don't look at PC requirements but that's because I upgrade my computer any time I realize I can no longer run a game on max settings. The only time I recently had an issue was when I bought Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Even with the unofficial patch, crashing was so consistent that I don't even try to play it anymore. Serves me right for buying an older game through Steam, instead of GOG. If anyone else has a solution to the game crashing within the first minutes, I'd love to hear it. I had a similar problem with KOTOR and spend hours scouring Google for an answer. I found one eventually but then ended up hating KOTOR, so it probably wasn't worth the effort

 

[likalaruku]

Yeah...Go to Half Priced Books...Take a chance on some Win XP games...Some don't want to run on Windows 7.

 

[Joccaren]

Diablo III thanks to server load issues, as most MMO games have on the first few days. Once Blizzard sorted its shit out and spun up more servers, no problem.

Beyond the obvious publisher being lazy and having a shitty launch issues, no, not one issue in the 15 or so years of gaming I've done. Closest would be trying to install a game from 10 years back on a modern computer, which of course ran into a couple of issues, but nothing that "Compatibility mode" couldn't fix.

Probably helps that I've always had a pretty good computer, and upgrade it every 5 years or so [Though these days I'm just going incremental upgrades every year as opposed to a full revamp every 5]. Honestly had more problems with console games than PC games, usually due to the damn things overheating.

 

[TelHybrid]

I bought Max Payne 1 & 2 a few months back. I can't run them on my laptop due to incompatibility with my graphics card. I think the latest AMD drivers are the problem, but rolling back is futile as the oldest drivers the card supports are still too new for it.

I was just glad I only wasted about £1 each on them.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

curious, can you play the single player campaign game types at all, or is it only when you try to start a multiplayer match of some sort? (just trying to help, battlefront II is one of my all time favorite games ^_^ )

It happens right as I click to begin the match (online/offline/even LAN with friends) after selecting my maps and then it crashes back to the desktop, like I said I've got a friend rocking 5 year old hardware that's able to run the game fine and a friend who's sporting at least 2 years hardware with a GTX 680 in his while I have a 660TI PE in mine.

The one type solution that seems to be going around the internet is having to have a mic plugged in or disabling it but me and my friends don't really do that and that can't be an issue for me if it's not with them, the logic in the solution to a problem I can't have doesn't make sense to me.

 

[Ikasury]

SIMS 3!!!

they had a sale on steam so i grabbed as much of that thing as possible... only to find out after buying and installing all that shenanigans, the damn thing crashes FOR NO REASON right after i load a world... i remake a new one, play for a good while, turn it off, try to play again the next day only for it to CRASH FOR NO REASON soon as the world loads... i can't even get attatched to my sims because i get to only play with them once, so i've got all this sims stuff on my steam account and can't really use it -.- lame~

and trust, i've looked up every which way to 'fix' this and squat... rawr~

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

curious, can you play the single player campaign game types at all, or is it only when you try to start a multiplayer match of some sort? (just trying to help, battlefront II is one of my all time favorite games ^_^ )

It happens right as I click to begin the match (online/offline/even LAN with friends) after selecting my maps and then it crashes back to the desktop, like I said I've got a friend rocking 5 year old hardware that's able to run the game fine and a friend who's sporting at least 2 years hardware with a GTX 680 in his while I have a 660TI PE in mine.

The one type solution that seems to be going around the internet is having to have a mic plugged in or disabling it but me and my friends don't really do that and that can't be an issue for me if it's not with them, the logic in the solution to a problem I can't have doesn't make sense to me.

hmm odd...i've had some goofy solutions to things before that made games run flawlessly, and i'm assuming this is the case here. have you tried disabling your CPU cores down to 2 when playing the game? have you ran the game in admin mode, have you ran it in windowed mode (these are all stupid requests, but seriously, each of them has gotten a game to work for me flawlessly.)

 

[TristanBelmont]

Star Wars Battlefront II continues to not function properly on Steam. It has been on there for over two years and countless people have sent in requests for Valve to fix whatever is preventing us from doing the shootbangs and the lightsabre chops and such, but to date they haven't given much of a response.

 

[Imre Csete]

I've bought a Star Wars game collection couple of years ago (mainly for KotOR and Republic Commando), but Jedi Outcast won't accept the disc and is not starting. I've played that game to death ages ago, so I did't really dig in to find solutions, but that's the only one.

Alpha Protocol had some stupid issues thanks to the godawful DRM, good thing I save crucial patches for games, since its official mirror site is gone now. Hooray for long term planning, eh Sega?

 

[Master_of_Oldskool]

Had problems with the original Fallout games, probably due to the paradox of my laptop being both too new and too shitty to handle it. It usually crashed before I could even leave the starting cave, and in that time the graphics were glitched all to fuck.

Oddly, I'm not having any problems running Planescape: Torment, which was released around the same time, has about the same level of graphics, and I'm like 99.9% sure is actually on the same engine.

I'unno, I'm as close to computer-illiterate as it's possible to be for someone my age.

 

[DementedSheep]

Yes, most of the time I've been able to fix it or find a patch. I'm not that tech savvy but fortunately the internet exist. Couldn't fix thief 3 though. It was my own fault since it dose actually have a warning about not working on laptops but I didn't check the requirements first.