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

[RariShyZealot]

Got Crysis 2 in a humble bundle. Can't play it due to graphics.

I was also unable to play my Paraworld Copy for a while due to it not supporting Windows 7, but I found a fix for it.


Now I just have to find a way past those filthy lying dinosaur-riding ninja pirates...

 

[hermes]

All the time. Nearly 90% of my steam library are games that won't work on my current PC due to requirements or compatibility issues, and I promise to get back to them "when I get a better computer"...

 

[mirage202]

Only once. Stormrise.

I bought it on a Steam sale when I had a Vista machine yet never got around to playing until after upgrading to Win7. Didn't work at all. Tried a couple more times over a week or so then gave up and haven't tried since.

 

[Jeroenr]

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.

Like i said in my first post in this topic, MEMmaker did help a lot.

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.

owh..., forgot about the copy protections.
Wasn't Starforce a full blown rootkit?

But honestly, i didn't buy much of the games i played back then, ironically you had (have) far less copy protection problems on pirated games.

Now a days i use Steam mostly, and that has a really user friendly DRM.

 

[raeior]

owh..., forgot about the copy protections.
Wasn't Starforce a full blown rootkit?

Well most of the copy protection systems are rootkits to avoid detection by tools used to pirate stuff but Starforce was really nasty. Also their developer (some russion company) spread links to torrent sites for one game after their developer said "Well we don't need no copy protection (especially Starforce) we just make good games and that will be enough" but I'm not sure which game it was. Galactic Civilizations 2 maybe. Was quite a PR desaster with the Starforce company going "Oh it was just to show you what happens if you don't use our stuff we obviously didn't mean to encourage anyone to pirate the game from this link we prominently posted!".

There was also this really good PR move where they offered you some money if you were willing to travel to Russia and could prove that their copy protection caused damage to hard- or software provided by them and only by them. Of course you had to come to them first and pay the money for the flight or whatever yourself. Obviously nobody was willing to do this so they used this as a proof that their system was obviously perfectly fine and all those complaints about it where by evil pirates. There were even reports of Starforce destroying hardware like CD or DVD drives by tampering with the firmware or something I can't quite remember.

But honestly, i didn't buy much of the games i played back then, ironically you had (have) far less copy protection problems on pirated games.

This! After that I boycotted any game using Starforce which luckily were becoming fewer by the time.

 

[Robert Marrs]

Yes but its rare. I work with computers so I can usually figure it out but not always. The first Max Payne will not launch on my pc even with compatibility modes. Dark Forces 2 I can't even get working in a virtual Windows 98. Those are both older games though so its excusable. I have had other problems getting newer games to work but eventually they get figured out.

 

[Amir Kondori]

I cannot remember ever having a game not work, but I always look up what OS the game requires and other system requirements. I have had a couple games require a little googling to overcome known issues, but never, to the best of my memory, had a game that I just couldn't play.

 

[Robert Marrs]

Yes, well, sort of. I redownloaded Crysis and Crysis Warhead again because I upgraded my rig to have a better graphics card, more RAM and a better CPU since I first played it on my first build, but when I tried to play it, it had a black screen and eventually crashed. I'm sure that there is a fix somewhere but I couldn't be bothered, so I just deleted it and moved on. Hell, there are probably a load of games that I own that don't work, but none in my recent memory.

Probably the same problem I was having with those. They don't like 64-bit operating systems. http://help.ea.com/en/article/crysis-warhead-black-screen-error-fix/

That should help for warhead there is a similar update for the other crysis but I am too lazy to look for the link right now. Just follow the directions and you should be up an running. Just make sure you always launch from that 64-bit shortcut in the future.

 

[Th37thTrump3t]

Most PC gamers have done this at least once in their life, and if not then they haven't been a PC gamer for long.

OT: I bought Doom 3: BFG and found out the hard way that the game doesn't play very well with ATI GPUs. When I had my Radeon HD:5870 it flat out refused to run. Would crash at the splash screen right before it started. When I upgraded to my 7950, I was able to get to the main menu but I would have to load a multiplayer game in order for the campaign to move past the beginning cutscene. Such an arbitrary fix but it worked.

I have a few other games with similar stories attached to them. They reside in a category in my Steam library labelled "Broken." Every time I update my GPU drivers I will go through them and see if they work.

Maybe it's a sign that I should start going for Nvidia cards, but they really can't beat ATI's bang/buck ratio...

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I've got some steam games that won't run on my current computer, but I bought anyway because they were cheap, or part of a bundle, or what have you. I figure I'll be getting a new gaming desktop at some point in the next few years, and the games won't be going anywhere in the meantime. The trick is getting a job that pays well enough for me to move out of my parents house and support myself. Once I pull that off, well, let's just say I'm pretty good at saving up for something I want.

Also the first time I bought Morrowind, it absolutely would not run on my computer. I managed to talk the clerk at EB games into taking it back, since it was used to begin with and I really couldn't do anything with it. My (family's) computer at the time was theoretically within the minimum requirements, but for whatever reason I got a black screen when I tried to play it. I think it may have been a driver issue, but I couldn't figure it out at the time. I wound up getting it again years later, on a more powerful computer capable of doing quite a bit more with it than that one could have even if I could have coaxed it into running on it.

 

[putowtin]

Civ V is currently crashing a bit, but apart from that... nope!

 

[O maestre]

I did something ridiculously stupid but not that damaging. there was this radio/DVD store that was going out of business and they had one last sale. So I bought a bunch of games, not realising that some of them had been used. Long story short, I had a bought a lot of MMO's and naturally there was no valid play time included dumb dumb dumb dumb! Besides those online titles I snagged such great titles like a 90's game about Ebola and a VHS called "Tv-Fireplace" whit 4 hour footage of a fireplace... It wasn't a total loss I got some good PS2 titles as well.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

This is going to sound dumb, but Half-Life: Opposing Force.

Now, I'd played PC games before, but I'd never owned any. I'd been a console and handheld gamer up to that point. So when I finally decided to get into PC gaming I wanted to play something big and popular. At the time, Half-Life was all the rage. So I went down to Best Buy, walked into the PC game section for the first time, and was confronted by two boxes... Half-Life: Game of the Year Edition and Half-Life: Opposing Force. I had no concept of expansion packs, so in my ignorant 11-year-old mind my choice came down to 'dorky looking guy in an orange tin can' or 'badass looking soldier.' I went with 'badass looking soldier.'

Needless to say, I was back at Best Buy the next day to buy Half-Life: Game of the Year Edition.

 

[LordLundar]

Nah, that's just dual channel, a minor performance boost. Wouldn't affect the volume of RAM.

There are some versions of windows that limit usable RAM, such as starter edition and 32bit versions. But it's usually 3.1-3.4gb in my experience. Also some motherboards have Memory mapping, which will decrease or increase displayed RAM size.

The amount isn't static. The cap on 32 bit systems is 4GB on board memory total. This means that video card memory and other sources are higher priority than system RAM. A really beefy video card on a 32-bit OS will actually lower performance because the system can't utilize on board RAM due to the card.

Not saying that wa the case, but it's a possibility.

owh..., forgot about the copy protections.
Wasn't Starforce a full blown rootkit?

Well most of the copy protection systems are rootkits to avoid detection by tools used to pirate stuff but Starforce was really nasty. Also their developer (some russion company) spread links to torrent sites for one game after their developer said "Well we don't need no copy protection (especially Starforce) we just make good games and that will be enough" but I'm not sure which game it was. Galactic Civilizations 2 maybe. Was quite a PR desaster with the Starforce company going "Oh it was just to show you what happens if you don't use our stuff we obviously didn't mean to encourage anyone to pirate the game from this link we prominently posted!".

There was also this really good PR move where they offered you some money if you were willing to travel to Russia and could prove that their copy protection caused damage to hard- or software provided by them and only by them. Of course you had to come to them first and pay the money for the flight or whatever yourself. Obviously nobody was willing to do this so they used this as a proof that their system was obviously perfectly fine and all those complaints about it where by evil pirates. There were even reports of Starforce destroying hardware like CD or DVD drives by tampering with the firmware or something I can't quite remember.

The first example was Stardock Entertainment with Galactic Civilizations 2 and that terribly backfired because more people only pirated it to try it out then bought the game. It wound up being one of Stardock's biggest sellers until Sins of a Solar Empire was released.

The second example, hoo boy do I remember that. To clarify, optical burners have set operational speeds that accommodates to minimum and maximum limits of the drive motors. Standard practice really. They also have particular chipset configurations that identify themselves as writable hardware. The Starforce DRM would detect this identification and would issue commands to the computer to slow the drive down to well below the minimum limits in step down procedures. This would cause the drive motors to burn out and physically damage the drive to the point of not operating. The really insidious part is that because the commands were done intermittently it was difficult to trace to the DRM as detectable problems would occur well past the point Starforce was installed. It was an evil system and I'm glad it's nonexistent now.

Back on topic, No, I can't say I've had any issues at the time of purchase. I've had a few issues down the road when I upgrade though but that's because the hardware or OS Kernel would be more advanced that the game was expecting and essentially crap itself. Then again, I usually do considerable research prior to purchasing a game. I rarely just snatch one up without checking it out first and the rare cases I do it's because I actually have prior experience with the dev and know what to expect.

 

[Bribase]

Absolutely. Sometimes because of a shitty port, sometimes stability issues and sometimes because my ailing mchine can't handle it.

To this day Just Cause 2 Crashes after a few minutes of play. I couldn't find a fix despite it being extremely old by now.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was such an awful port that one crash lead to another. The controls became impossible to bind and the mouse movement was terrible. It was a real shame, despite having boring gameplay I anticipated some excellent voice acting and world building.

I remember that S.T.A.L.K.E.R hadn't a hope in hell of being played on my laptop at the time. It was just out and even without the terrible framerate I was getting, it was horribly unstable and awkward to play. It's lucky that I gave it another try when I built a decent desktop rig; it's now one of my favourite games of all time.

 

[Longstreet]

last one i can remember is that i could get the sound working in Rocksmith 2014.

Turns out i had to turn off 7.1 in my headset, it really didnt like that. problem is i keep forgetting to turn it back on for normal games.

9 out of 10 times though a game installs, and plays, just fine.

 

[aozgolo]

Currently I do not, but it has happened, and almost every time it's been The Elder Scrolls.

When I first bought Morrowind, I had an onboard video card, I won't say it wouldn't run it... but I got BSOD on average every 30 minutes of playtime, and despite that still put innumerable amount of hours into the game before finally buying a video card.

My love of Morrowind made me purchase Oblivion Collector's Edition, a game that due to it's requirement for a rather beefy video card with a minimum Pixel Shader 2.0 left me unable to play this game I had been salivating for, for about 6 months or so at which time I built a new PC.

Then of course came Skyrim, I had thought I was prepared this time, I exceeded all the system requirements, except for one main thing. The internet connection. I ended up living out in the sticks in my Grandpa's old farmhouse, a good 15 miles from the nearest town, where the only internet available was dial-up, no big deal I thought, it was a single player game. Alas it's dependence on Steam as the only PC Platform required me to install a service that simply put will NOT work under any circumstances on dial-up, simply hanging to the point of locking up every time I tried to launch it. I couldn't even get my game activated and Steam updated far enough to allow me access to the vaulted "offline mode". So once again I had to wait 6 months until I finally rejoined civilization and moved back to a town with broadband. I was a bit sore at steam for that whole mess, I've since mostly gotten over it.

 

[DrOswald]

I have never had a problem I was not able to solve and I almost never have problems to begin with. But I think that this is an unfair standard. Until one year ago I was an IT guy (for 6 years) and now I am a professional programmer. I know a great deal about computer software and hardware and I am always strict with myself about performing preventative maintenance (I reinstall windows every 6 months or so, for example.)

In addition, I want to note that I think it is perfectly reasonable for yo to not want to deal with the additional effort required to PC game. Too often PC gamers get down on people for not liking our hobby, and that is silly.

 

[lolcatize]

Doesn't happen very often, but yeah. More likely that some kind of DRM or software that goes along with the game is the actual issue in my experience. It's why I won't buy games on PC unless they use Steamworks or are DRM free.

Kinda weird, bought FC3 and yet Uplay didnt really screw anything up not even once.

 

[PoolCleaningRobot]

Most recently would be my GoG copy of Miasmata which runs like like crap even though I made all the graphical settings as low as they would go. I first assumed my 2009 laptop was finally running out of steam so I booted up a different hiking simulator (Skyrim) and it ran just fine. Not exactly 1080p ultimate graphics, but fine. I guess that's the difference between a game that was made by a studio with a few dozen people and an indi game made by 2 brothers. Another would be my Steam copy of Soul Reaver which won't run. I could try a cobbled together fan patch but I don't care seeing as my ps1 copy works fine on my ps3, ps1, and pc through emulation. Another reason I won't fully abandon consoles for pc anytime soon. Luckily, GoG's installers have otherwise been kind to me and I was able to run most of my GoG games on Linux through Wine after I accidentally wiped my hard drive