"Jury-Rigging" a game

[Spudgun Man]

After recently embarking on a bit of a Fallout marathon going from 1 through to New Vegas I've once again hit my old stumbling block, Fallout Tactics.

While it's not the best of games, ignoring cannon, largely unfinished and buggy to all hell, I really have tried hard to enjoy it, and while I can see that there's a good game in there I just can't seem to coax the bastard out.

Finally after a bit of searching I've found a mod that claims it fixes many of the bugs and the game in general to make it more bearable. So I'm willing to give it a go.

I was interested to see if any other fellow Escapists have ever embarked on their own personal journeys of trying to fix a game they have faith in by turning to second parties to make it more playable.

 

[Vern5]

Man, I actually can't remember a time when I have NOT "jury-rigged" my games.

I've been using an old laptop (about 5 years old now) for all of my school and gaming purposes. So far, I've been able to run a long series of games on it, including every Fallout and Elder Scrolls game as well as Far Cry 2, STALKER 1, and a series of other less graphics intensive games.

Unfortunately, my laptop really is a piece of junk so I've been playing every game I've ever owned at some of the lowest settings possible. Until I came across mods! I've invested several years into searching for various performance enhancing mods for all sorts of games. Many of them cut out extraneous pieces of data, streamline calculations, or just lower the system requirements while maintaining an illusion of of High Quality graphics. The modding scene is insane. I've even had to create my own workarounds from time to time.

This is probably why I look down on other PC gamers who complain about certain games and their technical difficulties without even looking for outside solutions; I just scoff and think "You should really learn to fix those problems like I did" For example, I remember reading some whining post somewhere about how the Dark Souls PC port was poorly optimized. Several other posters told him to stop whining because there were already a host of mods designed to fix such problems.