Jimquisition: The Beautiful Irony of PC Gaming

Zipa

batlh bIHeghjaj.
Dec 19, 2010
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Great episode Jim and well said, quite a number of PC gamers have been saying this for years but are often not heard over the PC gaming master race people who bleat on at people who use consoles.

Also best use of the pen is mightier than the sword ever.
 

V8 Ninja

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May 15, 2010
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Baneat said:
sir.rutthed said:
Error 200 Stream not found. Please fix.
Works just fine.

A: What's that big sword?
B: What's that game that looked like Serious Sam but had a few weapons I haven't seen?
A: As other people have said, Relic.
B: That would be Serious Sam 3: BFE. Croteam decided to add a few more weapons to the mix, specifically a pistol and a sledgehammer. They also decided to add more realistic textures.

OT: Pretty spot on, Jim. PC gaming is more about the abstract, the complicated, and sometimes the wonderfully insane.

EDIT: As for my answer to B, the true ninjas got here before me.
 

Waaghpowa

Needs more Dakka
Apr 13, 2010
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Matthew94 said:
Waaghpowa said:
Yes, Thank GOD for Jim, for saying what many of use PC gamers have been trying to say for years. Now that there's an official video, maybe this will put an end to the silly console vs PC threads.
Are you kidding, this will go right over most of their heads.

I don't mind when someone like consoles more than PC, I get annoyed when they spew BS about PC to try and justify being stuck with consoles.
I edited it to say I know I was being optimistic, but I agree.
 

SenseOfTumour

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Jul 11, 2008
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Just gone in to check the specs of my epic gaming rig...

old style quad core 2.50 Ghz intel.
4gb DDR2 memory.
640GB 7200 HDD
and a Radeon 4830.

The graphics card I pulled from my old machine, I was too poor to shell out for a new one.

apart from that, the whole shebang set me back about £300, and don't listen to the crazy alienware fanatics who say you need to upgrade weekly, sacrificing half your paycheck to your local component store.

Now I happily admit, I think the latest game I'm running on PC is Just Cause 2, but it's flying at 1920x1080 with a bunch of settings up high, on a £300 machine with a 2 year old video card.

On another note, a friend of mine came into some cash and generously bought me a 360 and some games, so I could catch up to this generation, yet guiltily, I believe I've still spent more time on this web flash game, Gemcraft Labyrinth, than all the 360 content I have.

Lastly, please, whatever your opinions of WOW... How successful do you think it would have been if it had needed an i7 processor and a £300 video card. In many cases, being at the cutting edge of graphics technology can seriously limit your game's audience, just look at Crysis. (Oh no, that was piracy wasn't it? yeah, right...) Top tip, if only 200 PCs in the known universe can run your new game, don't cry when you don't sell a million.

To sum up, Blizzard and especially Valve (along with indie devs who can't afford an army of graphics coders), understand that there's a majority of PC gamers who for one, don't really care about technical specs, so long as it looks nice, and secondly, don't have the money to upgrade a PC, if it's that or skip your game, they'll be skipping it. WOW doesn't have 12 million Alienware owners paying them every month.
 

One of Many

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Feb 3, 2010
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I want that chainsword......does anyone know where such a thing might be purchased? Or know someone other then Jim who has one and who you wouldn't mind seeing them mugged?
 

ms_sunlight

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Jun 6, 2011
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What a gaming PC gives you, above all, is versatility. I can play the latest releases then fire up Planescape: Torment; my other half is obsessed with Maxis' A Train and that came out in 1992. I can play Deus Ex and DE:HR on the same machine. Shiny modern stuff, heritage, homebrew, online, casual gaming, episodic adventures, flash, RTS, retro remakes, Steam, emulation, GOG. (Loom is available on Steam, people. LOOM!!!) Choice, people, choice: I loves it I do!
 

Mausthemighty

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Aug 3, 2011
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I agree, graphics are hardly the most important thing about games. I still love to play old classics like Warcraft 2, Red Alert and Baldur's Gate. It's nice to play games fluidly at the highest resolution with a nice framerate, but for me it's more important if the story or the gameplay is good.
 

mrc390

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Jan 31, 2011
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With graphic fidelity stagnating in recent years, the idea you need a multi thousand dollar PC to run fucking counter strike is becoming less and less true.
Last year I built a gaming PC from scratch for ?700 that can run everything on medium-high settings, I have not had to upgrade anything yet.
 

Weaver

Overcaffeinated
Apr 28, 2008
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There are a few false claims in this video, the first being that the source engine is the same engine as it was in 2004.

Valve constantly updates it, they even retroactively added HDR lighting to all of Half Life 2 via patches (which is why it still looks so good). This is like saying that because the Infinity Ward Engine uses the Quake 3 team arena engine called ID Tech 3 (and yes, it does) that it's now a 13 year old engine, despite all the extensions IW made to it. It's a completely fallacious statement and I feel it was wrong of Jim to lie like that.

Additionally, Recettear actually does require a pretty powerful computer because it was optimized like absolute shit.

ALL that being said, I understand the point of this video. PC is driving innovation not through graphics, but through gameplay. I also support trying to get non pc-gamers to try out some of the more unique but easy to run titles.
 

Swifty714

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Jun 1, 2011
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Still, console gaming is cheaper. Not trying to undercut PC gaming and its apparent low standards for most popular games. However, even buying a decent rig, can sometimes cost a lot of money for someone who isn't used to shelling out $300+ dollars just so they can run something on mid to low quality. In that case, I rather just stick with the same console for eight years, then pay $120 dollars for the next console that holds my interest, or the next generation has come out.
 

DustyDrB

Made of ticky tacky
Jan 19, 2010
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Swifty714 said:
Still, console gaming is cheaper. Not trying to undercut PC gaming and its apparent low standards for most popular games.
Oh, well as long as you're not trying to undercut them...
For fuck's sake, man. I'm not even a PC gamer and this bothered me.
 

Jumplion

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Mar 10, 2008
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I was expecting the "irony" of PC gaming would be that whenever someone complains about the graphics/visuals of a certain game being muddy or ugly, people will go off and say "Graphics don't make the game! I could play a game that's nothing but mud so long as it's fun!"

And then, whenever the topic of PC vs. Consoles comes up, the PC crowd almost always goes off saying how pathetic the console's are when it comes to hardware, how they all upscale their games, not true 1080p, how their RAM is so pitiful, how their PC games can run 100+ frames per second, etc....

Generally, that's the biggest irony/hypocrisy I find with PC gaming.
 

Iron Mal

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Jun 4, 2008
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While those are valid arguements and I agree that not all of PC gaming is fixated on the new, shiney super-titles that come out today (the most recent game I have on my PC is The Sims 3) it is still a fairly significant thing and not exactly an arguement that can be easily side-stepped just by saying 'we have stuff that's just as good elsewhere'.

While it isn't nessercarily required of you to upgrade to a super-computer and keep it cutting edge just to play games in general, it would more than likely be fair enough to say that there is going to be a significant amount of cost and effort involved in being able to keep up with the latest releases (and to play them on the graphic settings that counter the arguement of 'why not just get the console version?').

Not all of the best PC games are the dazzling visual-obsessed spectacles that we are treated to today, but the same could be said for consoles too so this point doesn't really nullify or equalise any part of the 'PC vs. Console' debate (no matter what, the overall simplicity of a console will probably always remain unmatched, for the most part it's just plug in and play).