My Life With PC Games (or why I don't play PC games anymore)

It's 1992 and I'm 7 years old. My uncle, who is a pastor of a local church is (ironically) showing me Wolfenstein 3D. It's so bloody and awesome. My favorite part is when I kill Hitler, and his body falls like a popped water balloon into a pile of bones, blood and flesh, with an intact Hitler head lying lifeless atop that heap. I've always wanted to kill Hitler that way.

PC gaming was simple back then. Before purchasing a game you had to answer only a few questions. Is your computer reasonably new? Does it run DOS/Windows? That was about all it took to run just about any computer game at the time. Wolfenstein 3D would give you graphs describing your computer's guts to you, but it all seemed pretty meaningless because it never affected your ability to kill Nazis/Hitler.

Installing the game was a simple, yet tedious process. Insert diskette 1, then 2, then 3, then 4. Boom. The game was installed, you typed in WOLF3D into the command prompt, and you sailed into bliss. That was it.

Things really started to change after that. Diskettes were easy to copy, so each time you started up the game you had to answer some cryptic question, usually about the game manual. "What object is on page 129?" Easy, an oil lamp. Annoying? Yes, especially if you lost the manual. But far from ruining your good time.

Windows 95/98 followed a couple years later and PC gaming was done mainly from there instead of DOS. Computers were getting more complex, so were games, and their technical requirements. You needed to worry about having enough RAM, disk space, processing power, and so forth. Installing games was still simple, if frought with problems. I remember feeling relieved if I was able to just install a game without any problems. Then came the initial bootup.

CRAP.

The sound doesn't work. Why not? My sound card is pretty new. Besides, it's a really popular sound card, so it should be supported. I check the manual, nothing of value. I uninstall and reinstall the game, boot it up. Whew, the sound works, good. I guess I'll never figure out what happened. Whatever, it's working now.

Two weeks pass and I'm having a great time with my game. It's working great, no problems since that sound thing.

CRAP.

The game crashed. Why did the game crash? All I got was an incredibly vague error message, and I couldn't even read it before the whole game disappeared leaving nothing but my clueless and windows desktop. Dammit, I hadn't saved in a while. OK, whatever, PC games crash, it's just what they do. They always have, and they always will, Dan, you know that. This isn't a surprise. I won't get too mad, because it only crashed once. I'll just play it again tomorrow.

Ok, I lost some progress but oh well. I don't mind doing fun things more than once.

CRAP.

It crashed again, at the exact same spot. This isn't good. Fortunately I played it safe and saved a bunch of times along the way. I can get right back into it.

CRAP.

Ok, this is a big problem. There's something seriously wrong here, because I just successfully and incidentally did a rigorous scientific test and the results are that when I reach a certain point, the game crashes. Uhhhh....

Another couple years pass. Video cards aren't called that yet. They're called 3D Acceleration cards. Before, the 3D was unaccelerated, which is really stupid. But, at the time, it's all we knew. We didn't know that you could speed up 3D, making everything prior the equivalent of playing Monopoly by yourself. 3D Accelerator cards aren't that difficult to understand, you either have one or you don't. Some games require one, so you get one for $100. There's a handful of different brands, but they're all effectively the same. They accelerate 3D and that's all you need.

Games are on CD now, and they usually require a code written on the CD case to play. Not too bad, but it felt like a big pain at the time. I get my 3D accelerated and wow. It looks good. Smoother or something. It sucks that I had to buy another computer component to get these results but whatever. I'm even having fewer glitches than before. 3D travelling at higher speeds must make it zip past bugs and glitches.

Another couple years go by. Video cards are starting to get complicated, but relatively straightfoward. Crashes are less frequent. Copy protection is getting more sophisticated and tedious. A regular computer is no longer good enough to play most headlining titles.

Another couple years trickle away and I can't for the life of me figure out which video card is the best one. Why in the hell is the 9600XT better than the 9800? How the blast am I supposed to figure this out? And that's just between one brand, and inside one numbering system. Forget about trying to compare video cards between two brands. I visit websites that benchmark the different video cards. They show me fancy color-coded graphs comparing all the different cards. I have next to no idea what I'm looking at. There's over 30 video cards on this graph, and the next graph of all the same cards looks completely different. OK, nevermind, I'll just buy a PS2.

Another few years. Man, Crysis looks fun and the graphics are remarkable. Assuming I only need to replace my video card and nothing else, it'll cost me close to $500 to get JUST a video card that's powerful enough to play this game at full graphical settings. I already tried to buy a video card once and I ended up confused and crying a lot. In reality, I'm going to need to replace every component of my PC. This will cost me closer to $1000 to play Crysis, and most PC games for the next 2, maybe 3 years, at THE LONGEST. This upgrade, by the way, will only affect gaming, as all other functions of my computer worked perfectly speedy with my current system, and will show no noticeable improvement after throwing $1000 at it. Also, when installing Crysis I'm going to have to deal with an anti-piracy system that's so pervasive and insulting that what I'm really doing is renting the game for $50. This is if I so choose to obey the law.

I could do that. Or...

I could just buy an Xbox360 and a PlayStation 3 totalling several hundred dollars less and have access to hundreds of games that I could never play on my PC. They always work, and I actually OWN the game. I don't have to worry about hardware or upgrading. I don't have to deal with copy protection. I can rent one, or buy a used copy. I can sell it. I can let a friend borrow it easily.

It really seems like an obvious choice.