Once again PC gaming has failed me :(

[TehCookie]

See if cracking it helps. I have a game that blackscreens and crashes if I run it through Steam, but it runs just fine without it.

I was going to mention how laughably deluded PC elitist are against anything negative about PC, but it seems they have already arrived.

well you have to understand that instead of asking for advice/help from the pc crowd he just uses his time to tell us how it has failed him "again" and how much better his console is than our rusty old pc.

When you have games fail several times it starts to piss you off. 3 of my 7 Steam games don't work, PC games failing are not uncommon.[small][sub][sub]Leaving out my DRM free games that run fine.[/sub][/sub][/small] My PS3 always works and therefore I think it's a better system. So what's your issue with different opinions?

 

[Brotha Desmond]

So I did, and after 17 hours of downloading (can't afford better internet) I eagerly press the play button and am greeted by....

You could have afforded better internet if you didn't pay a ludicrous sum of money on that computer.

 

[Xanadu84]

All technology has a failure chance. X Boxes RRoD, computers get screwed up, phones break, that is a part of technology. It is not limited to PC gaming. That is part of life. It happens with relative infrequency, however. And that's why going from one failure to, "PC Gaming sucks" is ludicrous. Personally, I have over 300 PC games, and I have had 1 game not work. And I didn't try to fix it very hard because it was a $2.50 steam deal. If you're frustrated, fair enough, but don't drop blatant flame bait.

Besides, in the long run, your paying less for games anyways. If you can't play one game, your still ahead of the curve. PC games sacrifice some simplicity for infinate flexibility. Id say that that is a good trade, but thats why I play on PC. If you don't like the hiccups and don't don't care about the advantages, well thats probably why you play console. Thats fine. But don't use it as an opportunity to lecture other people on how they are wrong in there preference.

 

[Waaghpowa]

My Xbox red ringed twice, PS3 died once. I have over 300 games on steam alone, not once have I not been able to get any of them to run.

Guess consoles have failed me again.

 

[TotalerKrieger]

Ok, I am not familiar with the game or most of your hardware specs, so I would suggest going to systemrequirementslab .com and making sure that your PC meets all requirements.

I would also go into steam and "check the integrity of local cache". You said it took you 17 hours to dl your game (I grew up in a rural area, so I feel your pain), such a long dl time can cause data irregularities in my experience.

If the steam forums are no help, try asking for help on the tomshardware .com forums, they have some really bright people who are quite happy to help.

I really doubt you are going to get much help with such a title & commentary on PC gaming. Gaming on PC requires patience..a lot of patience...every PC gamer has their `war story`, still most find the PC to be the best gaming platform for them. It can be satisfying to figure out how to fix any problems which arise and it gets a lot easier as you learn more. If you really cannot tolerate anything other than `instant plug and play every time`, I would honestly look into selling your PC while it is still worth a good amount. I hope you don`t though, we need more PC gamers around here.

 

[frobalt]

sound like a standard

you only state that one of the several games you listed had some hick ups. recap:

Personally I prefer the PICNIC (Problem In Chair, Not In Computer) acronym that a formed colleague mentioned to me, purely cos it's an actual word.


Anyway, as people have said, just cos 1 game is bad doesn't mean all games are. If anything, a game being a bad port is a problem with those particular developers, not PC gaming in general.

Personally, I don't see why PCs and consoles are 2 separate things. Why not just have consoles be medium-specced PCs and have developers aim to get their games working for the most recent one?

After all, you've been able to use your game pad for the PC games, you might as well have just been playing a console.

 

[Murrdox]

I find it really amusing that you're blaming the entire PC game industry instead of the developer who made the port. Yeah, not every PC game is crafted perfectly. I wanted to bash my PC to pieces trying to get Bio shock 2 to work. Then I finally fixed the problem, which was another piece of software on my computer that was conflicting the Games For Windows Live.

You've wasted a perfectly good thread bitching when you could be asking for help.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

I just want to say if you want help there is a sub forum for that and since you're not there I assume you aren't looking for help. So that just leaves I'm not sure what. Other than point out you have a 6/7 success rate of things working as far as software goes which never works 100% of the time despite what people think and the "reliable consoles" that had a 8/25 success rate. I mean my launch xbox 360 lasted until the Slim came out with zero problems that must mean they all did right?

 

[Christopher Fisher]

Well the honest to goodness fact is that Sleeping Dogs is not a good port. Not as good as people would like it to be. So yeah, it's likely that it will cause problems on some peoples PCs. Pity it had to be yours.

And that flame bait line? Nawt kewl.

Well that was one of the dumbest things I've read all day.

 

[Christopher Fisher]

I just bought a wired xbox 360 controller yesterday for my PC and I was surprised that it worked right away with no configuration necessary. Worked on Batman: AC, GTA 4, Just Cause 2, Saints Row: The Third (which actually gets me great FPS on my desktop on the highest settings, I guess it wasn't such a bad port after all), and Section 8: Prejudice.

Then I saw Sleeping Dogs was on sale. And I thought to myself "Hey! I played the demo of this on my laptop (which ran very well by the way just on medium settings) which is a HELL of a lot weaker than the desktop I just built! With my new controller I can not see why I shouldn't buy it now!"

So I did, and after 17 hours of downloading (can't afford better internet) I eagerly press the play button and am greeted by....

a black screen.

I checked my task manager to see if the game was working, and lo and behold it wasn't. It was not responding. So I end the process and try again after 5 minutes just to make sure my system just wasn't being slow (sometimes it does on the first time I run a game). I got the same result.

So I made sure my drivers were up to date, verified integrity of the game cache, and then tried again. Nope, still same result.

So I tried running it as administrator.

Nope.

Running it without Desktop Composition (I saw on a forum that that worked).

Nope.

Trying to put it in windowed mode so I could change the refresh rate (which is also apparently a problem).

Nope. Doesn't respond once that screen hits or even before.

So I went to the steam forums and Sleeping Dogs forums and saw only 2 other people having this problem. And NO ONE had a solution. I even went to an official wiki for Sleeping Dogs bugfixes and it says that the black screen on boot was an unresolved problem (unless you had an Nvidia GTX 570, which I don't have).

So once again. PC gaming has shown just how it makes people want to punch a baby seal. And as you can see from above, it can't be me at fault because I gave it hours of chances to find a solution. But the thing is I shouldn't HAVE to find a solution. The product I paid for should just WORK as intended.

And I know I can run it because I have:
Intel Pentium G860 3.0 ghz (dual core I know but exceeds minimum requirements).
Radeon HD 7750 1 gb GDDR5
8 gb Gskill 1066mhz Ram
Windows 7 64-bit

Try running it with steam in offline mode. You could also update flash player...don't remember if sleeping dogs uses something like flash to do the cutscenes. Last resort would be to reinstall the game.

 

[Insanity72]

Here, let me google that for you.

http://bit.ly/UVelws

 

[Christopher Fisher]

In my opinion, console and PC gaming are two different things that are good for different things. For example, I find PC gaming is better for things like strategy and creation games where you need precision and speed. Hell, if I hadn't played Battle for Middle Earth, I wouldn't play games now.
On the other hand, I prefer consoles for games when I control a character in third or first person. I've tried ME3 and Battlefield on PC and just couldn't find it fun, because using the mouse as a pointer is so hard.

So plug a 360 pad into your PC. Problem solved. You may want to also get a better mouse with a higher sensitivity, as the only reason I could someone having a hardtime using a mouse/kb in a 1st/3rd person shooter is if it's a really crappy, unresponsive mouse.

 

[Snotnarok]

One of the other good things about consoles unlike PC gaming is the fact that you don't have to worry about bad porting or poor performance.

For example, I want to play Fable on my xbox. I have the disk ready to go, put it in the console, and everything works perfectly. Im good to go.

Then there's Fable: The Lost Chapters for the PC. I get it from Steam and decide to download it. The downloading doesnt take long because of my most of the time great Internet and super special awesome PC gaming Desktop. Once thats finished, I start to play it, and then it takes me to a screen that says (video and audio hardware error) or something like that. It didn't play any of the cutscnes and every time I try to play, the lip sync was off and the voices most of the time didn't work. And even if it did work, the voices would whisper.

So I do everything that I can to fix it and troubleshoot it. I look on forums, I look for guidance,cand still TO DO THIS DAY, I can't get fable the lost chapters to work on my PC gaming machine that is able to play Crisis 1 and 2 ON NEAR MAX SETTINGS!

This is why I don't blame people for liking consoles over PC gaming. Because PC Gaming is a freaking ***** to deal with. I mean just look at what PC Gaming has to deal with:

PC Gaming:

-Hopefully the port is not that bad.
-hopefully my computer can handle playing the game.
-Hopefully this game doesn't crash on me for the 100th time.
-Hopefully if this game for some reason doesn't work for me, hopefully I can get some answers from various forums or something.

Consoles:
-no worrying about bad ports, or the possibility of the console not being able to handle it, or troubleshooting the game, it 95% if not 100% works all the freaking time with very little to no problems.

Down side for consoles? Graphically capability...yeah like people REALLY give a crap about these days. Oh and controller options. That I understand. Even though some people like the OP just can't stand to use the keyboard/mouse instead of a controller but the PC has that option over it so thats true.

Point being, I feel for the OP, PC Gaming is either great one day or horrible the next day. While consoles are consistency pretty good.

That's not true about consoles at all, there's bad ports from console to console even to this day. Even Skyrim suffers from being on console, my friend decided to show me the game on 360 and the load times between getting to the game, quick traveling were around 1 minute or so. Then there's the PS3 version which also has it's share of problems as well as no dlc currently.

Assassins Creed 1 was practically black and white and had a really choppy framerate on PS3 while the 360 version was smooth as can be and had more color.

Battlefield 3 on 360 basically required a texture pack install online to make the game look decent.

Batman Arkam City has framerate trouble on the WiiU and apparently has a lot of minor issues.

There's an entire site dedicated to head to head comparisons on console versions dedicated to every detail from screen tearing to average/max/min FPS, texture quality.

PC at least you can adjust something to make the game run better, sure it can be a hassle sometimes but in my opinion the positives outweigh the negatives, not just gaming but then again not everyone works a lot on the PC like I do.

 

[Vigormortis]

3) Get a NVIDIA-based Graphics card, ATI cannot into drivers and you will encounter problems therefor.

I hear the opposite just as often. In fact, I've only had a few issues with my AMD GPUs but have had many many more with the nVidia GPUs I've owned over the years.

I suppose personal experience will vary, eh? :/

Though, one thing I'd add to your list:

'Clean out your heat sinks and fans every few months.'

The dust and pet hair can build up quickly, sometimes.

 

[VALOCARAPTOR]

might be the pentium proccessor, you cheaped out on that

 

[Frostbite3789]

Consoles:
-no worrying about bad ports, or the possibility of the console not being able to handle it, or troubleshooting the game, it 95% if not 100% works all the freaking time with very little to no problems.

You never tried to play a Bethesda game on a PS3 did you? I did. I kind of hate Bethesda now. That and their shady DLC practices.

 

[EvilMaggot]

you did remember to install the software that follows the controller right ? O_O

 

[Mauler]

Heh... I've got the same problem... then i downloaded crack,crackfix form a some site(google it) and it worked like a charm...(running on windows 7) And no PC gaming isn't a p**p on a stick it's how it is and because u tripped ower a wrong kinda mistakes you don't just go to crie and rant on forums but DO trie something( Got working Gothic 3(on pc i dont hawe consoles(actualley TV also(it broke 2 years ago(im broke cand afford new one))))after HALF A YEAR AND I dont complain to someone who can't/won't make it better)...

 

[katsabas]

The console is built for one reason and reason alone: play games. I always thought it handles that pretty well until I saw FOC on PS3 at about 40 FPS and then at PC at 60+ FPS. If a machine can't do right the one thing it was meant to do, then for me, it ceases to occupy any kind of space.

Consoles now, for me at least, fit right into this. I am saying they are inferior and are not worth owning just for the exclusives for one and secondly having to pay north of 60 euros for one fucking game is beyond stupid.

 

[SpAc3man]

Sorry but the occasional bad/ignorant case does not justify your whining post. Give it to me and I would have got it running or at least given you a legitimate reason why it didn't work for you. I guarantee it.

My PC has served me for nearly four years now and I have never ever had an issue getting a game to run apart from a game from the early 90's that was 16 bit and ran on Windows 3.1. Didn't play nice with my 64 bit OS so I had to use DOS Box to run it. The horror.