GAMES

A WEBSITE WITH SOME THINGS ON IT.

Game Geek Page.

With DAVE PLYWOOD. (My Quake 3 skin from the old days of PC online play).

PC games. Is there a point? Words from a console convert.

Anyone old enough to remember the early days of PC gaming will know what an utter nightmare it was. Home you would go from the game shop, clutching a little box with floppy discs rattling away inside. You couldn't wait to fire up your new game and enjoy some of the action that was captured on the box. Whether it be Dungeon Keeper, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D or whatever other treasure you'd purchased, it never occurred to you that there was going to be anything but hot gaming action when you got home.

The reality however was a little different.

I don't think I ever got a PC game in those days that ran first time, you see the problem is with PC's is that with all those different processors, sound cards, video cards, drive combinations etc out there, the possible number of different PC hardware permutations is a number larger than the number of atoms in the known universe, and that no game manufacturer can possibly test their game on even a fraction of the possibilities. This inevitably means that they give it a go on the most common hardware, print the 'minimum requirements' on the box and stamp 'job's a good 'un' on the project.

The PC owners of today will never know what we went through. You tried to load your game, it gave lots of error messages. You cried. It complained because it didn't like your sound card, your video card, or your choice of bedroom carpet. You cried some more. You then set about trying to setup some strange stuff (that can only have been invented by Satan) called Interrupts, DMA channels and Input/Output addresses, things that only people in white coats with lots of pens knew about. It really was plug and pray. There was no internet to download patches, get advice from fellow disappointed games, or just look at naked ladies to make yourself feel better.

After 6 hours of tinkering with settings that you knew nothing about, you gave up, went back to the shop and bought a compatible sound card and/or video card. You marched back home with an empty wallet and installed your new hardware. If you were lucky and had got exactly the right flavour of upgrades, the game may actually do you the honour of completing its install.

Now comes the interesting bit, you've sorted all the electronic whinging about your crap hardware by emptying your wallet and selling your soul at the computer shop. You've now tried to make everything as fluffy and oh-so perfect as possible. So the game can't fail to run can it?

Well actually yes. The thing you forget is that the 'minimum spec' they print on the box bears absolutely no reference to the real world. You study this carefully in the shop, and smile smugly, knowing that your PC easily outstrips these paltry requirements and will make mincemeat of the game. In fact it will probably run so fast, you'll need to pull some RAM chips out to slow it down a bit, right? Wrong.

You may think that the slowest thing in the known universe is a 'Little Chef' waiter, but wait till you see how your game runs on your PC. I don't know what machines they develop these games on but I can only assume they somehow have one sent back through time from 15 years in the future. I have never had a game run well on a machine even on 'recommended spec' let alone minimum.

The disappointment of loading Doom and finding that just turning your character on the spot takes place over 10 seconds in frames of a second each time still lives with me today. The mental agony of pressing the fire button and waiting for the noise a full second later was immense. The knowledge that my cutting-edge 386 SX25 (with new sound and video card) wasn't up to the job was too much to bear. Even when a game did run, you couldn't help noticing that in order to do this, it had craftily set all its own settings accordingly. When you checked the setup menu, the slider for 'detail' would be set to 'Lego-bricks', the one for 'screen size' to 'postage stamp' and the one for sound quality to 'crap'. Along with this there would be 'Shadows-OFF, Anti-aliasing-OFF, Clouds-OFF, Colours-3, Enjoyment-OFF. Each one another mental kick in the nuts.

There was only one answer, sell your grand-parents for medical experiments and buy a new PC.

That, basically is the story of PC gaming, even to this day. Every few months a new killer game comes out, you end up upgrading or buying a new machine. In the future when you're buying Halo 9, the minimum spec will be a 25GHz 8-core processor, 28 Terabytes of RAM and an Nvidia X200000000 card. (Due to be replaced after a whole week on sale by the X300000000i). They may as well print the address of the nearest PC World on the box so you can trot straight off there.

Unfortunately PC's aren't cheap so you soon run out of relations to sell for medical experiments, and you have to start selling your own internal organs or do sexual favours for large men with names like Susan.

I bought a new machine for Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 2 and Half-life and would probably be still at it if I hadn't come to my senses. You see, the great thing about consoles is that you can take a game home and know it will work great, straight out of the box, with no need for a degree in computer science or the need to sell your car to buy another video card. The latest NVidia card is about £350. Why? You can buy a whole Xbox 360 and some games for that, and it will work better. The only advantage PC's used to have over consoles was better screen resolution, but now that's gone too, with the newest consoles running at the same or even better resolution. I'm now a console gamer and proud of it. Let your PC's do what they are best at, ordering your shopping and sending images of naked ladies to one another.

Screenshots from the games room, consoles only you note...

GTA 4. I hope there's a branch of Quik-Fit in Liberty City. Excellent game. Some dodgy AI but an amazing achievement.
There's your problem!
Halo 3 (online multiplayer). I don't like the look of these two. Methinks me in for an ass kickin'.
Er, um,.... nice doggy?
"Can you please point that away from my arse, Master Chief"
The beautiful Art-Deco surroundings of Bioshock. A great looking game but it makes me feel like barfing. Bucket on stand-by then. Pass me the industrial-strength sea sickness pills please.
"Help Sir! my leg appears to have melted into the ground!" It's bad enough having the entire German army shooting at you without your limbs mysteriously disappearing into the scenery, still this is a great game. This is Call of Duty 2. Yes I know they're up to about 17 now but I'm a bit slow. This is actually great, with brilliant graphics, atmospheric sound and engaging game-play. Particularly good if you enjoy shooting German people.
DIRT. Excellent driving game that speaks for itself. Yes I know I've stopped. I'm in those virtual bushes having a virtual dump.

The games & DVD room. XBox360,Xbox1,PS2,Camecube,Dreamcast. Picture: 1080 HDTV Projector, Sound: JBL Dolby 5:1. Shown with screen up.
Best Messy Screenshots.
Interior decoration with zombie blood. Not available at B&Q.
"Have you got the wrench?" "No, it's just these trousers are a bit tight" Hmm, I appear to have killed a Victorian school mistress with a pair of fourteen inch Plumber's Stilsons. Bioshock.. Quite good but makes me motion-sick.
What other game lets you walk round a shopping centre wearing a dress, carrying a severed hand and killing zombies with a guitar/sword/chainsaw/hedge trimmer/frying pan/sliced loaf/etc/etc/etc?
From Dr B. Half Life 2. Using the gravity gun to shoot a circular saw blade can get messy.
Half Life again. From DH.
Nice one by my colleague Dr Gibbs. Quake 3 arena online.
....and again.
Oops! Sorry mate, my chainsaw slipped. Doom 3. From CP.
Some angry git in a suit of armour. Quake 1. From M**********r on a 1 to 1 modem game.
The daddy of them all. Doom. Now on Xbox live as a download. Get Doom-dreams again!