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

[Movitz]

Saints fuckin' Row 2. I liked the Third one, and since everyone was saying "The second one was waay better" I thought I might give it a try.

It was basically unplayable. I don't really know how to describe the problem, but I had something to do with the game overheating because of some miss with the coding, so it started to "lagg" like you wouldn't believe.

Which sucks, 'cause from what little I played it seemed like a fun game, and you could customize your character in more ways than in Saints row 3.

 

[Dalisclock]

Back in the day it was a chore to get video games to run right. Anyone who understands the term "boot disk" knows exactly what I'm talking about. If you don't, consider yourself lucky.

I started playing Mirrors Edge a couple years back and got stuck at one point on level 2 or so where I couldn't proceed due to breaking class causing a massive amount of slowdown and I couldn't make a vital wall-run/jump to proceed. Mind you, at the time, I had a somewhat modern computer and the game had already been out for a good couple of years. I tried playing it again recently and it worked this time.

I never finished AC:Revelations. I was about 8 hours into the game and had a mostly full leveled group of assasins. Then one day Uplay(which is required to play) doesn't let me log on. After trying a bunch of other things, I uninstalled and reinstalled Uplay. Somehow all my saves were lost along with it. I was so pissed that I didn't bother trying to replay the game. I just watched the ending cutscenes and the remaining Altair bits on Youtube so I could see how the story ended.

 

[porous_shield]

It took me a while to figure out how to get Thief 2 to work properly since movies would not play and the game would randomly crash but I managed to figure it out with help of the internet. Burnout Paradise crashed on me every second time I tried to run it. I managed to beat it but those crashes on start up were very annoying and I never did figure out what caused them.

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.

Games have warning about not working on laptops because they have, in general, worse hardware than on desktops. There is nothing inherent to laptops that would prevent the game running.

 

[Supernova1138]

Saints fuckin' Row 2. I liked the Third one, and since everyone was saying "The second one was waay better" I thought I might give it a try.

It was basically unplayable. I don't really know how to describe the problem, but I had something to do with the game overheating because of some miss with the coding, so it started to "lagg" like you wouldn't believe.

Which sucks, 'cause from what little I played it seemed like a fun game, and you could customize your character in more ways than in Saints row 3.

Saint's Row 2 is a legendarily bad PC port, probably even worse than the GTA IV port, virtually everyone had problems with it because the developer the port was farmed out to was massively incompetent and basically copied and pasted the Xbox 360 version onto PC without ironing out any of the issues that would bring about. It's only playable with third party mods that fix the game's numerous bugs and performance issues.

I personally haven't run into games that outright don't work, though some of them, particularly older ones may need some tweaking to run with newer OSes. It probably helps that I don't buy a huge number of games on Day One, and by the time I get to playing them, most of the issues have been fixed.

 

[Altorin]

Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm taught me exactly how powerful my laptop is. Its power falls within the gap between Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm.

waste of 40 dollars is what that was.

 

[Nazulu]

Oh yeah, many times, and it was back when I still didn't know jack about all the different possible errors, and they all fucking happened in the one year! The first one I remember was Red Alert, and it took me a week before I could get it to work perfectly. Fucking divers and direct X issues, And a whole lot of other shit

Still prefer gaming on the computer though. It always feels more... complete.

 

[Roxas1359]

Yep, and those would be Lego Island 1,2 and Legoland. Thing is, those games don't work really at all on modern computers. They are not supported by DOSBox or Virtual PC, and worst of all they are 32-Bit games but with 16-bit installers...never understood that logic at all.

 

[RedBackDragon]

I Bought Tropico 4 on disc when it was released but i dident have internet so the game wouldent let me install it

 

[SillySam]

Honestly, that hasn't happened to me for quite some time
Or the problems were easily fixed, so they didn't cause enough of a headache for me to remember

If you're having problems with PC games, PC Gaming Wiki [http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home] is good place to start looking for solutions

 

[Troublesome Lagomorph]

Jade Empire. First it wouldn't keep saves, now it doesn't launch at all.
Edit:

Honestly, that hasn't happened to me for quite some time
Or the problems were easily fixed, so they didn't cause enough of a headache for me to remember

If you're having problems with PC games, PC Gaming Wiki [http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home] is good place to start looking for solutions

You, sir, are a lifesaver.

 

[Vausch]

Dead Rising 2 and Off the Record will not work for me right now. Games for Windows Live has been completely unable to work since I had to reinstall my games.

I long await the day GFWL dies. 5 more months, my PC gaming bretheren.

 

[Snotnarok]

Call of Duty: Black Ops I got it because I figured my brother and friend would continue the trend of playing after MW2, well turns out the inital launch was so crap that core 2 duo processors were unplayable at any setting, and it took them a while to fix it. By the time I could play it I dicked around with some bot matches and nothing more as my brother and friend didn't wind up getting it, so in the end it was just not meant to be I guess.

Dirt 1 as well has compat issues with WIN7 so I couldn't play it, I'm sure there was something that could be done to fix it but I didn't make the effort, I got Win8 and it worked! ...Then I upgraded to Win8.1 and now it doesn't. Boo.

 

[cmac1]

I don't know if this helps anyone, but fallout 3 had some issues with quad core processors. If you open your fallout.ini file located in the user\my documents\my games\fallout 3 and find the line:

bUseThreadedAI=0
Change it to:
bUseThreadedAI=1
Add another line after that and insert:
iNumHWThreads=2

That will limit fallout to only two cores. This helped me when the game froze every few minutes.

 

[razer17]

On my PC, though, the only game I've come across so far is Dragon Age Origins, which first used to crash when trying to create a female character. Fixed that issue, but now it still crashes every few minutes, so I've kind of given up on it.

There are ways to keep DA:O from crashing quite so often, although it will still likely crash after a couple hours, and if not, a memory leak will eventually force the game to seize up and stop altogether. But even with these problems, the game's completely worth it if for no other reason than to see character interaction like when

Spoiler

you visit the dwarf city of Orzammar and if you stretch out the faction quests and play them against each other, Leliana eventually wisens up to your manipulations, which gains her approval.

[/quote]

I will look into fixing it at some point, but I have so many games in my backlog that I'm not going to do it just yet. However, I have played DA:O before, on my 360, so I'm not missing out on too much, just wanted to replay it, mostly for the characters and story.

 

[Karadalis]

Sword of the stars 2, some Lord of the rings battlefield alike (wouldnt even install... it would just crash at the install screen) Eventually i found a work around for the lord of the rings game and sword of the stars 2 got patched up.. but it took months so i still think it counts.

Other games where able to start... but basicly unplayable due to bugs, do these count as unplayable too if you crash all 10 minutes?

 

[Lunar Templar]

dose GFWL count? cause I had some games i could play cause of that. Still have one I can't play ...

Other then that, I bought the new Strider remake only to be greeted by a 'requires Direct X 11' message :/ I don't have a Direct X 11 compatible graphics card :/

 

[The]

Well, I bought Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and it doesn't seem to be running.

 

[Jeroenr]

i know that we give Microsoft a lot of flack every time they 'recommit' to PC gaming. But DirectX is/was probably the greatest gift that M$ could probably give the PC gaming community. I remember prior to directX the dance everyone played just trying to make sure that the new game we bought was compatible with our hardware. Competing graphic and audio standards made everything confusing. You're sound card (remember those??) wasn't a soundblaster? Good luck trying to get this new game to run. Hmm, this release only has GLIDE support. Well, that means only a voodoo card would be compatible.

Demos for games weren't just about seeing if the game was fun to play, but about testing if the game could run on your system. Even if it wasn't a power issue, having the wrong drivers could derail the entire experience. Making sure you had the right ini and dll files installed.. God, it was awful.

Ever since DirectX became the standard for video and audio, that worry has gone away. Now, i only need to check to see if my rig is powerful enough to run on my desired settings. I don't have to worry about compatibility.


Thank you Microsoft (i'm not joking)

Yeah, and every game you had to set the IRQ and DMA.
I knew them by heart back then.
I did own a 3DFX voodoo 2 card at some point, that did make things a little easier.
Things did indeed got beter when DirectX came, But it still remaint a bit fiddly until win 98.


nowaday i have plenty of pc power and memory, so if things don't run usually the game it self is at fault.

 

[raeior]

Yeah, and every game you had to set the IRQ and DMA.

Ugh! Yeah that was a greaaat fun every time. Also editing your config.sys to get the last few bits of free RAM you needed to get that new game running. Or fun error messages like not enough HIMEM...good times.
There were several DOS games I couldn't run due to various problems. Mainly ones from the Dark Eye Northland Trilogy and one game called The Druid Circle (or something like that). Later on I was never able to get Orion Burger to work which was on Win95 I think.
But in the times of DOSBOX all of this has gotten much much better so I'm now replaying some of those games.

Later on the main source of problems were various copy protection systems, mostly Starforce and to a lesser degree Securom. The Fall - Last Days of Gaia used Starforce and produced a bluescreen while booting Windows every single time after I installed the game. That was really awesome, especially because the game was cracked shortly after release. You really feel valued as a customer this way! At some point they released a patch for Starforce that fixed this, but if you weren't able to get back to a working system...tough luck. X3 Reunion had the same problems with Starforce and only started working after they released a official patch that removed it (could also have been X3 Terran Conflict, I'm not sure which of the two). Overlord 2 also had some problems due to Securom which were fixed with a Securom patch afaik.

Fallout 3 was slow as hell until I installed a user generated patch that removed GFWL. The mouse was barely usable in the main menu and the game itself crashed and generally ran extremely sluggish.

Dark Souls was already mentioned which was practically unplayable on PC before dsfix and mousefix.

Oh well, I still love PC gaming and most of the problems I had in the post DOS era were due to copy protection (which never kept anyone from copying the games in question) or additional software like GFWL.

 

[Stu35]

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

Indeed.

It tends not to be as much of a problem these days, but I recall many, many an evening spent trying to get something new to work on my PC. Occasionally this would end with complete failure. Most recent one I can remember (I say 'recent') was Medal of Honor: Airborne. Simply couldn't make it go.

However, I did play it on the XBox and ultimately decided that I was better off.


Truth is, part of the thing I enjoy about PC gaming is the challenge of fucking around with hardware/software. That said, if I buy a game I want to play the fucking game.


Incidentally, off the back of this thread, I've decided to go find my copy of Operation Flashpoint (the original, with the Resistance add-on), and play the shit out of it again. I'd forgotten how much I missed it.