The best reason to own a new PC is to play five-year-old games

ZLoth

ZLoth

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From The Verge:

The best reason to own a new PC is to play five-year-old games
Like wines, fiber supplements, and cast iron pans, some video games get better with age.

I recently upgraded my PC. It’s an expensive and irritating process, so I wanted to justify the money and time. Recent graphic showcases were boring and buggy and instilled an irksome sensation that I’d made a mistake. On a whim, I downloaded a handful of my favorite games from the previous generation. I buried my PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in the back of our apartment’s coat closet in 2013 and have missed my semi-regular dip into my comfort games. In an hour, I had BioShock, Far Cry 2, Bulletstorm, and a handful of other games from before 2010 ready to play.

For the past month, I’ve almost exclusively played games from 2008 and 2009. January’s a notoriously slow time for video game releases. I figured my diversion into the recent past would be just that, and by now, early February, these half-dozen oldies would be deleted from my hard drive to make room for the gargantuan storage space required by some fresh blockbusters, like Evolve or the Battlefield Hardline beta. But as new games approach, I find myself uninterested.
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FULL ARTICLE HERE
 
I wouldn't upgrade my PC just for old games, but to be able to run everything else I do extremely smooth while I game it up.
 
I don't typically go that far back but my Steam backlog has plenty of games from years ago that play really well on my older gen setup. Plus I get the benefit of paying $9.99 or less for AAA titles when they go on sale. At that point whatever hardware I have should be able to max it out.
 
I can TOTALLY relate to this....

Just look at my current list of installed games:

Dragon Age: Origins
Grim Dawn
Oblivion
Skyrim
Starcarft 2: HotS
Titan Quest: Immortal Thrones
Torchlight 2
 
lol I don't do that but most my friends do that so I can relate, as mentioned, they usually buy ALL games during a %70 or more sale
 
But what does it have to do with a new PC? You can play 5 year old games smoothly with a 3 year old PC just as well.
 
horrorshow said:
I can TOTALLY relate to this....

Just look at my current list of installed games:

Dragon Age: Origins
Grim Dawn
Oblivion
Skyrim
Starcarft 2: HotS
Titan Quest: Immortal Thrones
Torchlight 2
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DA:O, DA;I (only at all recent title), Civ5, and Skyrim represent most of my gaming in the last half dozen years. Star Citizen will be the next thing once that is it.
 
People still play Dark Age of Camelot and WOW so no big surprise lets say your PC isn't good enough at the time but always wanted to try it at Max settings.

The best games Age like fine Wine or beer.
 
I agree. If my system could handle it I would be playing new games on PC like farcry 4 and dying light... But it's just a laptop, although it does run slightly older games very very well. Well I should say that my system definitly can play the brand new games, but not at high settings and since I own a PS4 its not worth it. Id rather deal with using a controller and getting a much better visual experience. Right now I'm playing Tomb Raider, Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, Fallout 3, and Fear 3. Aside from fallout 3 those are all games I've never played until o got them a few weeks ago mainly because I havent had a game worthy PC in years. So it's definitely nice being able to play a bunch of games at very high settings that are just a little older
 
M76 said:
But what does it have to do with a new PC? You can play 5 year old games smoothly with a 3 year old PC just as well.
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Unless it is unoptimized garbage like Civ 5 lol. Heck, even games like Supreme Commander and modded Civ 4 benefit from as much single-core CPU power as possible, both of which still lag on the best PCs available today, though you cannot blame Civ4 since multi-core CPUs were not mainstream yet during its development. But yeah, not many games are so unoptimized and/or so single-core demanding that a 3 year old high-end (not extreme) gaming PC cannot handle them five years after release.
 
Funny, I can do the same thing on my old consoles with no issues to deal with AT ALL.....
 
i haven;t upgraded anything but my video cards since Jan 2009. they are overdue for another upgrade but $$$.....

I was fine until Farcry 4....
 
M76 said:
But what does it have to do with a new PC? You can play 5 year old games smoothly with a 3 year old PC just as well.
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You are going to have to ask the original author. I simply cite where the article came from, quote a relevant section, and link back to the original article.

Having said that, I'm finding that having PC Gaming Wiki is my primary go-to source for fixing some of the issues. The game I'm currently replaying, BioShock, has some fixes that are needed for Windows 7. There is also the handy backup site Widescreen Gaming Forum.
 
M76 said:
But what does it have to do with a new PC? You can play 5 year old games smoothly with a 3 year old PC just as well.
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When I built my PC a few years ago, the intention was that I would have a power-efficient and cost-effective machine. I never played anything on PC from 2007 till then (2012) and I wanted to experience all the older games in their full glory. I had a Radeon HD-7750 at the time and a monitor whose native res was 1440 x 900 so it was more than up to the task.

I could max out any game at that resolution on the games I intended to play. So that could be part of it... I would imagine a GTX-750ti tied to a Core i3 with 8GB of RAM in ITX form would be a killer little gamer. Especially if you're catching up. :)
 
One of the best tools for playing games from 4-5 years ago is Borderless Gaming.
https://github.com/Codeusa/Borderless-Gaming/releases/tag/7.9

It essentially lets you run anything you want in a borderless window, which is killer for games with stuttering and vsync issues...which was a common issue a few years ago.

Once I discovered this program, I've gone back and had really good experiences with games I had shelved due to performance and stutter issues.
 
Been getting very discouraged with these new games coming out. Watch Dogs, Dying Light, Farcry, etc.... WTF is going on? PC is supposed to be the most advanced gaming platform yet, even with the most advanced hardware were getting crappy ports in 2015!!! Makes me not want to upgrade my hardware and just invest into a troubless console like the ps4. :mad:

All this money I've thrown at pc all these years and now I have an expensive media server.... LOL :D
 
I recently upgraded my PC. It’s an expensive and irritating process,
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Upgrading a PC is an Irritating process??
Moderator. Please ban the author of these lines for life.
This is [H] for god sake!
 
The Verge and Polygon really are becoming the standard bearers for people who write about technology and video games but hate everything about them.
 
Terpfen said:
The Verge and Polygon really are becoming the standard bearers for people who write about technology and video games but are clueless regarding everything about them.
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FTFY.

I don't know why people even link to shit-sites like Kotaku, Poligon, the Verge, etc here on [H]. Don't people know better than to give page hits to click-bait bottom of the barrel parasitic sites like those?
 
I do this quite a bit. It's actually kind of nice to play something a bit older, crank all the settings up, and enjoy. Even cooler if there are graphical mods, source ports, etc. to enhance them. Then again, I still play a lot of C64 games (and other older computer/console games). I like playing shiny new games too though. It's just cool to be able to crank settings on something you may not have been able to previously.

I haven't played Crysis since I had a GTX-295. I've actually started getting a bit curious about how it would look these days with a nicely tweaked config file. May try it sometime.
 
SPARTAN VI said:
Re-read what you quoted.

It's no surprise they suck.. one of their founders (Brian Crecente) came from another cesspit, Kotaku.
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Crecente is actually kind of OK.

If I had to identify a singular problem with Polygon, it's Ben Kuchera. A secondary, but possibly larger, problem would be Vox Media in general.
 
How about we list the best games of 5 years go vs. 2014.

Dunno about you guys but 2014 was a terrible year for games. The only game from 2014 i have interest in would be shovel knight. Which i haven't bothered to buy.

2015 has to be better!
 
Terpfen said:
Crecente is actually kind of OK.

If I had to identify a singular problem with Polygon, it's Ben Kuchera. A secondary, but possibly larger, problem would be Vox Media in general.
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Crecente used Kotaku like his personal blog. His last article I saw was about his latest macbook vinyl stickers. He's not doing video game journalism any favors.
 
I still enjoy playing the older stuff, things like The Witcher 1 with everything maxed out still looks very good today.
 
RogueTrip said:
The only game from 2014 i have interest in would be shovel knight. Which i haven't bothered to buy.!
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You should DEFINITELY bother! Excellent game! I'm about to play it through again actually.
 
Arct1c0n said:
Funny, I can do the same thing on my old consoles with no issues to deal with AT ALL.....
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The issue being lack of graphical fidelity, acceptable framerate, and mods? Do you really think PCs are that complicated?
 
GOG.com has Warner Bros DRM free games on their website now. You guys would love to play some F.E.A.R with DSR / VSR enabled. ;)
 
cageymaru said:
GOG.com has Warner Bros DRM free games on their website now. You guys would love to play some F.E.A.R with DSR / VSR enabled. ;)
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Nice!

Yeah, I actually started playing F.E.A.R. again about a month ago for the first time since I had 6800GT SLI. :D Looks nice! (not exactly like a current game, but still very nice)
 
problem is, its been a while since there has been a new PC game which reallllly pushes the boundaries of what the horsepower in a modern PC can do. It used to be an everyday occurrence. But like other posters have said, we just get "improved" ports, but nothing designed(rarely) soley to show what a modern PC can do versus "outdated" consoles.
 
It feels like the author literally clicked "Random" on XKCD and decided to write a post about the firs gaming-related comic he could find:

cutting_edge.png
 
horrorshow said:
I can TOTALLY relate to this....

Just look at my current list of installed games:

Dragon Age: Origins
Grim Dawn
Oblivion
Skyrim
Starcarft 2: HotS
Titan Quest: Immortal Thrones
Torchlight 2
Click to expand...


Man, playing Oblivion and Dragon Age: Origins on a new rig is so worth doing!
 
I built my first gaming pc in winter of 2013 and have steadily bought many older pc games. I have a blast putting the mods on and at a fraction of a cost playing great games. Everyone always mentions DA: Origins. Looks like I'm finally going to load that one.
 
I totally get what the OP is saying. For years I had at best a mediocre PC and could usually only run games at med or low settings. When I was finally able to build a true high end gaming machine I didn't even buy a new game for the longest time since I replayed almost everything I already owned just to be able to play them maxed out. There were even a couple of games I did not originally care for that became some of my favorites because of the difference in game playability and higher quality graphics.
 
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