Why do we bother?

saintly

saintly

saintly

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26 Sep 2005
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Upgraded to X1900XT, reinstalled windows. Clean install - all games bound to run nice and smooth

Back to Half Life 2 episode 1 and I again find it unplayable due to the looping soundcrash problem. That is the biggest thread in the Steam forums and there is no cure. Great.

Bought Prey today to give me something new to show off my new gfx card and, guess what? Random and frequent crashes every so often ("Prey.exe has encoutnered a problem...". Visit Prey forums, no obvious cure.

My question is - why do we bother using PCs for gaming? How much time is spent troubleshooting rather than playing?
 
Depends really, some people have next to no trouble others seem to have no end of trouble, the problem is pc's have so many different components and driver revisions some just don't like certain combinations and getting it straightened out seems to take a while. :(
 
The answer a lot, but the PC has the best excusives. Games that are worth the trouble of a few hours worth of tweaking.

Deus Ex
Mafia
Farcry
Half Life 1/2
Age Of Empires etc
Baldurs Gate 1/2
Broken Sword
Battlefield
Civ 1-4
GTA (Ok not an exclusive but the way is should be played)

Nothing on consoles comes close this generation imo.
 
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Pretty damn stable machine here, Oblivion drops out but I make sure to save often. No probs with those games you've mentioned.
 
squiffy said:
Pretty damn stable machine here, Oblivion drops out but I make sure to save often. No probs with those games you've mentioned.
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If you have a fast machine random crashes arn't that bad IMO. I mean you can be back in game within a minute.
 
I've had a problem since day 1 with Source games , crashed after about 30 mins of game , No other game had a problem. Today I installed a water cooling setup on CPU , GFX & northbridge & it still happened so I ruled out overheating.

Fiddling about with the WC setup I decided to run Prime95 to cook the water, everything was fine in CPU only, but it crashed when I ran it in RAM (never tried it before). Went into BIOS and increased my CL settings from 2.0 to 2.5 (its meant to be 2.0) and not a single crash since then :).

Looks Like I've had a dodgy stick of Geil Ram for the last 2 years :mad:
 
Hostile17 said:
If you have a fast machine random crashes arn't that bad IMO. I mean you can be back in game within a minute.
Click to expand...

My biggest frustration with crashes is that they always seem to happen when I haven’t saved in ages. Some times, if I am a little of the fence about a game, the thought of having to replay say an hour of play I lost is enough have me looking for something else.

To answer the OP I do find myself looking at the console side more now that my free time is far more limited that it was a few years ago. When I have time for games I want to put in some good playtime rather than worry about finding/downloading huge patches, setting the graphics just right, saving every few minutes in case of crashes etc.
 
Hostile17 said:
If you have a fast machine random crashes arn't that bad IMO. I mean you can be back in game within a minute.
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The appearance of the Windows desktop always spoils my immersion in the game somehow!
 
got a 360 the other day and i am having a blast with it so far, no tweaking just
throw the damn disc in and off you go.

sometimes i know exactly how the OP is feeling, add to this is the price of keeping a high-end pc running :mad:

i probably get more satisfaction on my old ps2 playing winning eleven than any pc game.
 
Yeah but pc games 20/25 pounds, X-Box 30-40 pounds.

Not worth it with the current titles IMO. :)

PC hardware wise I dont think you need to update that often, at least I haven't and can run nearly every game on max settings.
 
Lets all remember...consoles still crash, only when it does there is nothing you can do about it, except endlessly hit the reset and clean the disc.
 
Why do i never have problems with games running?

???

Probably because i'm not pulling my machine apart and fiddling with it every 5 minutes in the pursuit of 2 or 3 extra fps mabye?

;)
 
I tried bf2 modern combat on the 360 and it was painfull on the controler and tbh the game failed to come close too bf2 on the pc.

I have to admit i rarely get problems with pc games only one recently was bf2 on the 1.3 patch but that was the patch not my machine.
 
atpbx said:
Why do i never have problems with games running?

???

Probably because i'm not pulling my machine apart and fiddling with it every 5 minutes in the pursuit of 2 or 3 extra fps mabye?

;)
Click to expand...

Come on, that's 1/2 the fun ;)
 
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