PC gaming

I really feel like Jerry Holkins was spot on in his post he made about PC gaming (I removed some parts for context):
"I don't think you can have any perspective on this industry unless you've spent time with PCs. You need to know that when Insomniac [developing Resistance 2 for the Playstation 3] is talking about how they're going to have sixty players, and squads, and so forth, that Battlefield 2 had sixty four players, and squads, and maps for specific playercounts in two-thousand five. In 1999, I played a game of Tribes with a hundred and twenty-eight players over a modem. If you want to look into a Goddamned crystal ball, spend some time with a tooled-up personal computer.

It's the best, period. And you pay for it. Age of Conan and Mass Effect both have massive review caveats about needing substantial horsepower, but let's be serious: you always need more machine. Every review could include such language - it's always better to have more.

As an adult of stable (if bizarre) employment, though, I have money to spend on things that I enjoy. What I don't have any of is time to resolve ultra-rare DVI incompatibilities with SLI setups where the motherboard is an nForce etcetera. I maintain this hardware because I need to know what's coming - because I want access to a global community of independents, auteurs, and freaks who are this medium's genetic future. I'll never be able to divest myself of the intense nostalgia I have for this platform. I can't be without it."

There is no denying that PC gaming is in a weird state these days. The release of Windows Vista didn't help things either, what with bullshit like Alan Wake being playable ONLY on a Vista machine, it's a fine example of what not to do when you are trying to sell something on the PC. Many developers cite piracy has a large culprit for poor sales. Knowing what you're doing on the platform is generally the biggest hurdle though, for example, my friend recently gave up trying to game on his PC and decided he would rather not spend his cash on upgrading his computer, that it was better to buy a X-box 360. Now that I think about it, a few months back another friend of mine came to that same conclusion…

You really can't blame them either, as Jerry Holkins put it "if a person wants to play videogames in their spare time and not perform mechanical surgery on their equipment, that doesn't make them an idiot. It makes them a pragmatist."

These things aside, Valves Steam service has been doing a fine job keeping PC gaming alive. It has made gaming considerably easier, it auto-updates your games to the latest version, it will very soon auto-update your Drivers, and it will store your saved games and keyboard/mouse settings if you access your account on another computer. And honestly, simply being able to buy your games online is absolutely awesome (it's something that I hope we see in the next generation of consoles).

The biggest selling point when gaming on the PC has always been choice. You can do what you want with the software you buy, adding other peoples content to your games (sometimes better than the original content that ships with the game), or using whatever hardware you wish. If I want to use a trackball instead of a normal mouse nothing will stop me, if I want analog movement in my first person shooters I can choose to use a 360 controller, if a friend comes over and HATES to use my trackball or 360 controller I can plug in a normal mouse and they will be right at home.

That’s why things like Alan Wake only being playable on Vista are such stupid moves to make. It's completely counterproductive to what the platform stands for. I choose to game on Windows XP because it's been out for a long time and its stable, it works well in the gaming environment. I very recently bought a Video Card that Vista could take advantage of to pump out visuals that XP simply can't, however, trying to FORCE me to buy a new OS to play one game is not going to cut it when the game could easily work with XP. The only reason people are buying Vista right now is because computers are selling with it on them, which is fine! That's the way it should be. But trying to push people into Vista when current games work perfectly fine (and actually work BETTER) on the previous version is just fucking stupid!

Even with all of this stupidity, I find that gaming on the PC is the most enjoyable experience for gaming compared to the other consoles I own. Games like Age of Conan, Stalker, and Crysis make it all worth it. And with mods like Black Mesa and Portal: The Flash Version, games being made by people that are making no profit from them, simply because of the love of games, remind you that this is the ultimate platform, even if its popularity is waning here in the west.