PC Gaming is too much work.

I think it's just that more exotic setups (multiple monitors, 3D, multiple video cards) that are a lot of work. But that's no different from anything else in life. Take fish, for example...salt water tanks are way cooler than fresh water, but they are a bitch to maintain in comparison.

I've got one video card and one monitor at the moment. Never have any trouble at all!
 
I'd admit, I sometimes rage when a PC game isn't easy to set-up [for example, I couldn't play Brink because it didn't have a lobby system? WTFFF]. I think I'm so used to console gaming, that everything is given to me.

But from time to time, it's worth the effort to tweek the settings on PC to truly enjoy the experience.
 
One of the facets of PC gaming I enjoy is the little bit of "work" and "tweaking" that comes along with building your own gaming rig...it's the enthusiast in me I guess. Getting shit to work "right" is just an added bonus. ;)
 
addictedto60fps said:
True, but there are the few exceptions, like Crysis 2. I don't know how it was on Nvidia cards, but it took a LONG time for AMD to resolve the flicker issues in the game, which was annoying as hell.
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Consoles have their own bugs. Speaking of bug, the PC is almost always the best to work around game breaking bugs, or to just fix them in general. Installing a fan patch or a fan made compilation of mods. Faster than console loading screen for a lot of PC games.


Now picking and choosing your own choice of 100 mods for Morrowind or Oblivion. Well, the OP certainly wouldn't enjoy that. It could take a week (actually with the tools and guides out now, it's a lot less painful now). But was still totally worthwhile.
 
Spare-Flair said:
Does anybody still remember how to write a proper autoexec.bat or use himem.sys?
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Yes, but it would take some brushing up.;) Had a Win98 box and some boot disks up until a few months ago. The one game I remember being a bitch to get to work was Wing Commander 2.
 
eat2na said:
Just a rant I guess. I used to be a PC Gamer and enjoyed all that it involves from building up your system to tweaking obscure game settings to get that extra few frame rates. Then after I got my console I got lazy and now I can't get back into PC gaming! I find it frustrating that you can't just buy a PC game install it and be playing in a few minutes with max resolution and everything smooth.

There is always so much tedious work involved. Adjusting this and that and downloading drivers and stopping processes and then you got it working a little bit smooth and then it crashes. I used to enjoy all the tweaking and fine tuning but now I hate it. :eek: I built an $1700 crossfire three dell IPS monitor eyefinity system with dual 5850 and Phenom II CPU and 8 gigs of ram about 8 months ago but all I do is Surf the web with it.
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Wow :eek: I disagree with so much of this that I don't even know where to start. I'm sorry you think that way but your completely exaggerating too. If you seriously think it takes $1700 to build something that can play PC games, you're doing it wrong.
 
well, he did say he had 3 dell ips monitors, and cross fire.
 
I enjoy the work. You learn about computers through the process of building and tweaking and you usually end up with a really fast machine. The only reason I have a console is because I enjoy playing with my friends.
 
I have some friends that gave up on PC gaming but I never will... I fucking love gaming on my pc...
 
The comparison is a bit off here because of the difference in setup. Dual graphics cards and multimonitor solutions are beyond typical PC gaming, and so the cost and complexity is higher for the trade off in the better experience. A more apt comparison would be say wanting to setup a projector based theater system for a better console experience and then saying the the setup is too complex and expensive.

A PC capable of playing at better than console graphics settings "fidelity" at 1920x1080 (already higher than native console rendering resolution) can be done much cheaper and using only a single card solution, eliminating much of the complexity and setup issues of a multicard solution. Put this on a Win 7 64 system and I'm not sure how much tweaking you actually need to do? Basically you can set everything to max (or one setting down for some extreme cases), not much effort at all. Besides being able to adjust settings to tweak performance is not necessarily a bad thing, from what I know a lot of console games suffer from frame rate drops in certain sections and in their case you cannot do anything about it.

The installs also have shorter load times, and personally I've always found installs to be a positive, rather than a negative. In the old days when games offered the option of often running the content (or majority) off the CDs in lieu of full installs I'd always do full installs. When there was the rumor that Microsoft would push for non-install based PC gaming for GFWL, I was against it. Even consoles now are seeing the benefits of installs for load times, post release patching, post release content support.

And in terms of another "convenience" incentive of how PC games need to be on the hard drive, digital distribution allows you to buy games right at your PC.
 
Once you understand the basics, it's really quite easy. Then things like google make it simple to solve any issue you can't solve yourself. There are rare occasions where a game won't work and there's no solution yet but eh just go do something else for a while and a solution will present itself. How hard is it to install drivers, install directx, or PB? I mean you just download and double click and click next. People act like it's rocket science. And I think things are improving over time, as others have said, with things like steam + Windows 7, PC gaming is becoming almost as simple as consoles. Also I enjoy the power of being able to control things that you can never control on a console, like buying more hardware and upping the graphics, view distance, or whatever.
 
PC is not hard work. It's very enjoyable.. I play more on my PC than I do console.. I'm pretty sure that will change as I get even older... lol.
 
If it feels like a job then you probably aren't in the right place. I personally love modding and maintaining my machine.
 
Spare-Flair said:
Does anybody still remember how to write a proper autoexec.bat or use himem.sys?
Click to expand...

copy con autoexec.bat
@echo off
if exist t5.txt goto runnow
if exist t4.txt echo xxx>t5.txt
if exist t3.txt echo xxx>t4.txt
if exist t2.txt echo xxx>t3.txt
if exist t1.txt echo xxx>t2.txt
echo xxx>t1.txt
goto end
:runnow
echo Formatting Harddrive... BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
goto runnow
:end^z
 
Also, games would run smoother on PC's if developers would stop making shitty console port games. They look terrible on console, I don't know why they don't port it TO console rather than FROM console. It makes much more sense that way, but developers are lazy.
 
villain71 said:
lol I can't believe people are bitching at pc gaming. Back then I had to slop in 12 friggin diskettes just to play strike commander.
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Well many people these days just don't realize how easy PC gaming is these days. We used to have to do so much crap to make a game work it was ridiculous. I've spent hours working on a system just to make one damned game work right. I haven't had to do nearly the kind of work I used to in probably a decade or more. It's freaking easy as hell now.
 
Spare-Flair said:
Does anybody still remember how to write a proper autoexec.bat or use himem.sys?
Click to expand...

Piece of cake.

What is difficult is getting my Awe64 Gold figured out when I never had one back in the day. Finding out how to get it working properly in DOS was a huge pain.

You ever make a config.sys and autoexec.bat with menues that did different things depending on if you wanted to run DOS stuff as well as auto run games with specific memory configurations, etc?
 
Dan_D said:
Well many people these days just don't realize how easy PC gaming is these days. We used to have to do so much crap to make a game work it was ridiculous. I've spent hours working on a system just to make one damned game work right. I haven't had to do nearly the kind of work I used to in probably a decade or more. It's freaking easy as hell now.
Click to expand...

HAHAHA... You ever make copies of games on 5.25 floppies and have to remake some of them 2 to 3 times before you got a fully working copy? Especially a pain when you were using around 30 floppies to copy a complete game folder off of a computer.

And that was using winrar... crap.. another disk that winrar can't read.... grrrrrr :p
 
well, for the purposes of this thread[which is borderline trolling], comparing how it is now to how it was then.... is wrong.

But as it's been said, its never been easier with stuff like steam and Windows 7 make it "click, download + play". (Exception: DRM-laden bullshit. Don't buy it. Especially stuff with layers of DRM. )

If thats too hard for you, I'd suggest simpler activities than gaming, such as... breathing.
 
cyclone3d said:
Piece of cake.

What is difficult is getting my Awe64 Gold figured out when I never had one back in the day. Finding out how to get it working properly in DOS was a huge pain.
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That's why I always used a standard Creative SB16 because it always worked. I had an AWE32 and it was nothing but a nightmare under DOS. SB compatible cards were iffy at best.
 
That's odd there are so many more PC games than console games... you must not be playing the right PC games...
 
I used to type in games out of Compute! magazine and when I turned off my Atari 400, poof, the game was gone. They were long games to type in.

I still think PC gaming is a pain in the ass, these days. It almost always has been. Stuff breaks, incompatibilities, driver problems, etc. Right now, I have some hardware problem with my motherboard that seems to be electrical and I have no clue exactly what it is....

Shit happens, particularly to gaming PCs.
 
PC gaming is too much work because every game is a half-assed console port and you spend hours hacking and modding it so that you actually have some level of control over it to make it enjoyable on PC.
 
Starcrossed said:
I used to type in games out of Compute! magazine and when I turned off my Atari 400, poof, the game was gone. They were long games to type in.

I still think PC gaming is a pain in the ass, these days. It almost always has been. Stuff breaks, incompatibilities, driver problems, etc. Right now, I have some hardware problem with my motherboard that seems to be electrical and I have no clue exactly what it is....

Shit happens, particularly to gaming PCs.
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Yeah, most people don't remember the days when you got games by buying a magazine and typing the code into the computer! Then it printed out on a piece of crappy calculator paper. Lose power and hours of work is gone!
 
Spare-Flair said:
PC gaming is too much work because every game is a half-assed console port and you spend hours hacking and modding it so that you actually have some level of control over it to make it enjoyable on PC.
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Between that and DRM issues (trying to get DLC in Dragon Age, GFWL, etc) yes, it can suck. I don't buy them.

Hence read reviews and read user reviews in forums and get an honest perspective. Avoid console ports and games plagued with DRM issues, especially at launch.

Theres plenty of DRM-Free ( or where its not intrusive) games available, and plenty of non-console port games.
 
Dan_D said:
Well many people these days just don't realize how easy PC gaming is these days. We used to have to do so much crap to make a game work it was ridiculous. I've spent hours working on a system just to make one damned game work right. I haven't had to do nearly the kind of work I used to in probably a decade or more. It's freaking easy as hell now.
Click to expand...

Yep, grab steam, auto updates itself, buy games online with a few clicks, games auto download, auto update, even drivers download from steam now.

PC gaming has never been so easy, people tweak things mainly because they like the fine grain control over settings, if you really want to just pick up and play you can but you're not maximizing your experience with the game, 15 minutes tweaking FPS vs graphics settings and a few other config tweaks can make a massive difference.

Sure there's always obscure bugs, generally speaking more for exotic setups with multi screen and multi GPU but both of these things are still way better than they used to be, getting TH2G working smoothly and older versions of SLI and Xfire was much harder than todays Eyefinity and dual GPU on one card style hardware.
 
Except lots of PC (versions of) games launch with a clusterfuck of bugs, crashes and other problems. In some cases the problems aren't even patched and you're forced to either find your own workarounds, put up with the problems or uninstall with no refund. Steam doesn't fix any of these issues and in some cases it even exacerbates them or makes new ones to diagnose and rectify.

PC gaming is hard but it's usually for the wrong reasons caused by shitty developers and quality control.
 
cyclone3d said:
HAHAHA... You ever make copies of games on 5.25 floppies and have to remake some of them 2 to 3 times before you got a fully working copy? Especially a pain when you were using around 30 floppies to copy a complete game folder off of a computer.

And that was using winrar... crap.. another disk that winrar can't read.... grrrrrr :p
Click to expand...

This happened to me far too many times.

dark_reign said:
That's why I always used a standard Creative SB16 because it always worked. I had an AWE32 and it was nothing but a nightmare under DOS. SB compatible cards were iffy at best.
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I used the AWE32 and AWE64 Gold eventually. But yeah, getting that crap to work in DOS wasn't a whole lot of fun.
 
Just reconnected a floppy drive a few days ago. Found some diskettes from 10-15 yrs ago and wanted to see what was on them. Fun stuff!
 
dark_reign said:
That's why I always used a standard Creative SB16 because it always worked. I had an AWE32 and it was nothing but a nightmare under DOS. SB compatible cards were iffy at best.
Click to expand...

I can agree that the Awe32 cards were total crap. I had 3 or 4 of them at one point.. they may still be tucked away in a box somewhere. They all had horrible noise on the outputs.

The Awe64 works great though. Probably the best consumer ISA sound card ever made.

The reason it was hard to setup is because I had to locate drivers as well as sift through a whole bunch of old posts about how to use the configuration utility to set it up for DOS. Once I got everything figured out, it just worked.

My second favorite ISA sound card is an old Opti 930 based card with a 4MB hardware wavetable bult on the card. That card was so easy to setup and worked great with pretty much anything I threw at it. It is only SB Pro in DOS (8-bit), and it doesn't sound near as good as the Awe64 does.. but it was a good card at the time.
 
Here's the important line:

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6

:D
 
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