Gaming on the PC

[TheMightyEthan]

 

This is a thread for just super-general discussion of PC gaming. What kind of BS do we put ourselves through to be able to game on God's platform?

 

I posted the comic above because it's a very apt description of my personal habits, and an illustration of a a good part of the reason why I largely abandoned PC gaming for about 2 years (until Starcraft II dragged me back, damn you Blizzard).

 

There's also a nice passage in the "news" portion of today's PA too:

 

  Tycho said:

Gabriel's PC is, like sixteen million others, essentially a WoW console that he also uses to hammer on the occasional beta. He's got a fairly bad-ass major label Laptop, a real battering ram, and when it didn't run something as he thought it should have he fell ass over teakettle into the darkest corners of the living Internet trying to get his CrossFire configuration spun up properly. And he did. Eventually. Very eventually.

 

His experience felt so universal to me, both as an enthusiast and in my former life as a techpriest, that it felt like an image (perhaps in the .jpeg format) was in order. When I hate my machines, I "hate" them with the quotation marks firmly attached. It's like fighting with a sibling; we scrap, but our union is in the blood. This isn't true for Gabriel, who only started playing games on computers because I made him, and who I suspect may secretly resent me for it. Not that I could blame him, necessarily. There are people who wish to invest their leisure time engaged in leisure, not preparing for leisure, or engaging in pre-leisure rituals, or playing with lemurs. Apparently, I require abuse and leisure in equal measure.

 

Everybody's got a thing.

Discuss.

[Yantelope]

PC Gaming is always a bittersweet mess of a mind game. On the one hand I've got a system that's clearly outperforming my consoles. It has better resolution, more effects, anti-aliasing and so on so that even though the underlying games are the same the fidelity is noticably higher on a PC. The underlying issus is that if I can't get a steady 60FPS with every single setting maxed out I feel like I'm missing out, like my pc is somehow not performing as well as it should. I guess the problem I have is not how good it looks but worrying that it's not looking as good as it possibly can.