Nerdcore 4 Life

Why, you might ask, am I posting now instead of shredding Bright Wizards like Mexican pork in WAR? Because I woke up at 6 a.m. this morning to fire WAR up and have yet to play for 60 minutes total.  Some of the problems are on Mythic, too many people and not enough servers. I can only get onto European servers and my ping’s bigger than an average mortgage payment. Disappearing/reappearing everyone is less than immersive.

But on the other end of it, I had to upgrade my graphics card to play. I got a decent deal from NewEgg(I love them) on a GeForce 9600 GT made by BFG. It’s not top of the line, but it’s $85 and gets the job done. Like a thai hooker.

Except that it only gets the job done when I can boot up, which is 1 out of 4 times. And that’s if I unplug all my USB devices. And after I figured out to connect the cards power to a 6 pin molex instead of 2 4 pinners with their adapter. That was about 4 hours last night.  Oh, and about every hour or so my screen goes blank and my comp goes all Awakenings anyways.

So in summary, I’ll spend about 10 minutes trying to boot up(cycling the power helps, which means crawling under the desk for the process). Then I’ll spend 15 minutes getting into the game, then within a half hour I’ll either get a connection drop or my screen goes to black with a graphics card failure. So I’m actually spending more time trying to play then actually playing.

And I think that sums up PC gaming in a nutshell.
While I don’t blame Mythic I think this does not bode well for them. I’m probably in the top 10% of gamers in terms of PC knowledge[1] and I don’t even want to play their game anymore. Yesterday I was practically masturbating at the thought of getting into WAR and now I’m wondering if Too Human is better than it’s reviews.

Now as Raph has pointed out, PC gaming isn’t going anywhere. But if you look at what’s selling it’s not the MMOs, RTS, or FPS games. It’s the casual games. Not because people don’t want to play hardcore games on the computer but because they want to play on the computer, not with the computer.  Until either the game makers get wise to this and tone down/standardize system requirements or PC manufactures make hardware stable and compatible enough that everything is truly plug and play[2] I see console games gaining more and more territory.

[1]while admittedly toward the bottom 10% in terms of PC spendage

[2]why on earth do I still have to open up my PC and put components into a standardized slot and hook up extraneous power cables. if I can slide a blade into a server rack I should be able to slide a PCI-E component in from the back of my machine.