New people: Read this, say hi.

[GameDreamer]

Welcome! I'm new here too. I guess this means we can be new together.

[Murderstorm]

Howdy ya'll,

I've been listening to the podcast for awhile, finally decided I might as well check out the forums. It looks like a good group of folks here and I thought could get in on some entertaining conversations.

As for a little personal info on me, I'm a stay at home dad raising a two year old son. Hopefully this means in a couple years I'll have an excuse to spend more money on gaming hardware and titles... also if I still happen to have WoW sucking life from me I'll train my kid to be a gold farmer. I'm primarily a PC gamer... well, pretty much exclusively. I have a 360 sitting under my desk still in the box never opened. It's been there for two months.

[Shakesbeard]

Howdy ya'll,

I've been listening to the podcast for awhile, finally decided I might as well check out the forums. It looks like a good group of folks here and I thought could get in on some entertaining conversations.

As for a little personal info on me, I'm a stay at home dad raising a two year old son. Hopefully this means in a couple years I'll have an excuse to spend more money on gaming hardware and titles... also if I still happen to have WoW sucking life from me I'll train my kid to be a gold farmer. I'm primarily a PC gamer... well, pretty much exclusively. I have a 360 sitting under my desk still in the box never opened. It's been there for two months.

WoW is for losers come play the M$ EXBawks with the rest of us XBros.

[Chris]

Welcome, new folks. Thanks for coming over!

[Murderstorm]

WoW is for losers come play the M$ EXBawks with the rest of us XBros.

Just to clear it up I didn't mean to come off like a fanboy or something. I actually really wanted the 360 but by the time I got it I was in the middle of like three other PC titles and I just haven't gotten around to buying any games for it.

As for WoW being for losers... according to my father-in-law I'm a loser, so I might as well be a totally geared out loser.

[Shakesbeard]

Just to clear it up I didn't mean to come off like a fanboy or something. I actually really wanted the 360 but by the time I got it I was in the middle of like three other PC titles and I just haven't gotten around to buying any games for it.

As for WoW being for losers... according to my father-in-law I'm a loser, so I might as well be a totally geared out loser.

Just yankin' your chain ol' bean.

I'm personally slowly working my way into the realm of pc gaming, it's a rocky road...

[Chris]

Just yankin' your chain ol' bean.

I'm personally slowly working my way into the realm of pc gaming, it's a rocky road...

Unlike some PC enthusiasts I am willing to admit that PC gaming is a massive fucking pain in the ass to start getting into, and it's not going to be purely smooth sailing even after you start.

But the great advantage it has is that it offers far more additional variety--both in game experiences as well as obviously input method and other technical areas--than any single added console. By that, I mean that if you already have a console, adding PC to the mix will create far broader options than adding another console to the mix, especially these days as the consoles have become increasingly similar to one another.

I am quite jazzed on PC gaming at the moment, more than I have been in years. Steam really is one of the best things to happen to gamers in a long, long time. It really highlights the breadth of the platform in a centralized, accessible way that nobody has previously been able to achieve.

[Psych]

Wednesday I finally finished my entire backlog of Idle Thumbs podcasts I missed. So I figured now is the time to sign up for the forum.

Unlike some PC enthusiasts I am willing to admit that PC gaming is a massive fucking pain in the ass to start getting into, and it's not going to be purely smooth sailing even after you start.

But the great advantage it has is that it offers far more additional variety--both in game experiences as well as obviously input method and other technical areas--than any single added console. By that, I mean that if you already have a console, adding PC to the mix will create far broader options than adding another console to the mix, especially these days as the consoles have become increasingly similar to one another.

I don't want to come off as a suck up, but I've noticed that the most insightful Video game podcasts are done by PC gamers. I suspect there is something in either the variety of PC gaming (or its being a massive pain in the ass) that makes PC gamers more articulate and intelligent...

...more good looking too.

[Murderstorm]

Unlike some PC enthusiasts I am willing to admit that PC gaming is a massive fucking pain in the ass to start getting into, and it's not going to be purely smooth sailing even after you start.

I've never really viewed it as a pain in the ass to get into, but perhaps that's because I've always primarily been a PC gamer. Although now that I think of it I can understand the frustration of someone who just wants to sit down and play a game having to take into account system specs, graphics cards, bug fixes, patches...

Honestly part of the appeal of PC gaming for myself is the hobby aspect of it. If something doesn't work, I get to fix it, if I want to change something or think something should be done a different way, there is probably a mod for it. Not to mention community aspects of taking screenshots, FRAPSing videos... so on and so forth. Also WASD+mouse rules.

I don't want to come off as a suck up, but I've noticed that the most insightful Video game podcasts are done by PC gamers. I suspect there is something in either the variety of PC gaming (or its being a massive pain in the ass) that makes PC gamers more articulate and intelligent....

If I were to speculate wildly as to why it might come across this way I'd say that it probably has something to do with the previously mentioned investment in gaming that a PC requires. Not only with hardware but with software. Years of being required to get the most out of a PC game you've purchased tends to make you look into things more, where as with a console you can simply return it to Blockbuster and rent something else. Possibly just one of the factors.

[Cheetohands]

Hi. I like Cheetos and video games.

[Chris]

What about hands?

[Cheetohands]

What about hands?

I like Star Wars.

[GameDreamer]

I like Star Wars.

"You won't be playing this game with a Star Wars in your hand!"

[James]

Honestly part of the appeal of PC gaming for myself is the hobby aspect of it.

That's definitely very rewarding, but as with many hobbies it's also kind of intimidating to somebody who's not yet confident at it. It's great that you can do things yourself, and get them just how you want them, and get your hands dirty, and so on, but when you put together your PC and it doesn't work, and you're not sure why it doesn't work, you might start to have suspicions that it's something you did, and nightmare visions of the horrendous damage you've done, and the associated money that's been wasted.

In my childhood my PC was pretty much always my primary gaming system, but I only ever got a couple of replacements, and did significant upgrades to my existing systems even less. I didn't have much money, and I couldn't reasonably expect my parents to buy me a new system every birthday or Christmas. Eventually it seemed that the only way for me to continue gaming was to take the console route. With time, my PC became horrendously outdated, and I didn't do anything about it because I was getting along fine with consoles. The most I did was bring it up to a state where it could just about manage Half-Life 2 and Episode One.

With time, though, my interest in PC gaming was rekindled, until the release of the Orange Box inspired me to get a new PC (the idea of playing that on console seemed wrong). I went with a pre-built one because I didn't want there to be a chance of my fucking it up. That arrived, and worked OK for a while, although not quite as well as I was hoping for. Then, part way through re-playing Episode One it died. I probably should have returned it, but I'm kind of an idiot, and I'm not sure whether it was still under warranty, anyway. Anyway, at that point I had entered an extended inter-job period, so the prospect of all that money being wasted was quite depressing, and the whole affair kind of put me off PC gaming. It seemed too cruel and unpredictable for me to bear. Yes, in retrospect that does sound ridiculous and melodramatic.

Then, a few months ago, having had a job again for about a year, I decided it was time to give things another go. Since I now knew that I couldn't necessarily trust others to get it right, I decided I'd probably be more satisfied and generally happy about the whole thing if I built it myself. Which I did. And it didn't work. Well it did, but it crashed as soon as it tried to run anything in 3D. And that, again, was quite depressing, and I made half-hearted attempts at sorting it out, but I wasn't really sure where to start, and I was paranoid about making things worse. I also kind of avoided thinking about the matter in general, because the whole situation was so miserable. Then it stopped even booting. After a while, though, I decided that this whole affair was ridiculous, so I took it to the PC shop down the road to see if they could work it out. They took a look, and it turned out the processor fan wasn't mounted properly, which is obviously bad news. But they sorted that out, and returned it to me, and it booted, but it still wouldn't run 3D stuff. So I took it back, and they very kindly took another look for no additional cost. It turns out there was some sort of conflict between the RAM and the graphics card or something, and the two solutions were either to take one stick out or to reduce the clock speed of the RAM. They did the latter, and now it works fine, and I'm very happy with it. The processor fan thing, incidentally, happened during my half-hearted attempt to fix the original problem, so my paranoia wasn't entirely misplaced. All the components seem to have gotten so obscenely large since I last had my hands in a PC. It's really difficult to get anything done in there without taking it all out and starting again; something I very much don't want to do.

This is a long and boring story, but the point is that even for someone who used to be primarily into PC gaming, and helped build his first PC as a child, the whole thing can be quite forbidding. The risk of things not working are higher, there's the chance that what you've bought won't support what you want to play on the settings you want to play it (I'm never sure quite how far the recommended specs will let you push things), and the investment you're making is greater. I'll readily admit that my defeatist attitude played a large part in putting me off for all that time, but I would also contend that I probably have an initial level of interest that people without a history of PC gaming don't. They might not be as generally pathetic as I am, but they might not be willing to put up with the potential problems simply because it doesn't seem like a worthwhile use of their time and money, when there are alternatives.

I don't know, I'm making a rather sweeping generalization there. I guess my point is that it takes time and experience for that stuff to evolve from disheartening catastrophes to mere facets of a hobby. It would probably help to have a more experienced friend to help you out, but unfortunately I'm probably the most PC-knowledgeable of my friends, so when I get stuck I'm kind of buggered.

Having a relatively powerful PC that works is great, and PC gaming in general excites me more than console gaming, but there can be significant hurdles in getting there, and I'm not sure what the best way to convince people it's worthwhile is.

[JoanneCadaver]

hi. been in the steam group for a long time. I don't like interacting with random people in online games

[Nevsky]

Love-hate PCs spiel

Great write-up, James. Even though my experiences aren't exactly in line with yours, the reasons behind why I'm currently not a PC gamer are quite similar. I was primarily a PC gamer until the N64 generation, and even then I still played mostly PC games until university, when I downgraded to a laptop for convenience.

Then I got in with the Gamecube, Wii, 360, and I never really felt the need to go back to the PC. And now it's incredibly daunting, from a price, space and choice issue. Listening to the Thumbs podcast doesn't help, because it's getting me thinking about PC games again - I'd love to give Anno a try, as a recent example - and my laptop groans when I play Spelunky, dammit.

And there's nothing worse than loading up a game, then finding it glitching, stuttering, or crashing. That feeling of inadequacy is made even worse when it happens with New Star Soccer 4.

[Horticulture Tycoon]

I can distinctly remember the moment I got into PC gaming, and that was when I saw the X-Wing box in a store somewhere. I was just walking past and I had to stop and say "Whoa, what is THAT?" All I knew was that it wasn't available on console, and that I wanted it.

I can also distinctly remember the moment I got officially fed up with PC gaming. It was about an hour later, when X-Wing wouldn't work and I had to blindly fiddle with the autoexec and config.sys in a vain attempt to get the thing to work. My 13-year-old computer-illiterate mind basically had no understanding of what I was doing, I was just randomly following suggestions given to me by the manual's troubleshooting page. Unfortunately I had no conception of what a bootdisk was, so by the end of the afternoon I had permanently altered the family computer's autoexec file, rendering it unusable. I was not popular in my house that day.

Anyway, after formatting the drive and some more fiddling, I finally got it to work, and it was a blast. And X-Wing came with an issue of LucasArts Adventurer (remember that?), which was what got me interested in LucasArts' adventure catalog. But man, what a pain in the ass. From then on, unless I was really dying to play a PC game, I would invariably skip it because of the hassle it would inevitably bring.

I did get into PC gaming again in college, partially because at that point playing video games online was still a novelty that the consoles couldn't offer. Also because I was mooching off of my roommate's computer, and he was the one who had to deal with the hassle of installing the games. That definitely helped.

[Psych]

Well it's not like those PC problems will haunt us much further, don't you guys remember GDC, cloud computing will have replaced high end PCs by the end of the year!

...I don't even know if I'm being sarcastic.

[James]

I've heard that the sheer physics of long-distance networking means that it'll never be as responsive as some people are hoping. That's not to say it won't be playable, and I'm certainly not especially picky about having the highest possible framerate and so on, but it seems to me that that latency will make it forever a budget alternative to local processing. But if it increases the market for PC games, that can only be a good thing. And perhaps I'm wrong; perhaps it'll be one of those shifts to a slightly inferior (according to one measure, anyway) but considerably more convenient technology, like analogue to digital, or CRT to LCD (in terms of contrast ratio), and so on, where people are more interested in the numerous benefits than the few losses.

I wonder how much it will cost, too. Theoretically there has to be pretty much one PC's worth of stuff for everyone playing at any one time. Presumably they can cut a bit on the assumption that at no point will every subscriber be playing at once, and perhaps there are some savings that can be made due to economies of scale (although the scale isn't that great, since the server stations have to be localized to reduce latency), but the required hardware would still be considerable, so it makes me wonder whether it'll be accordingly expensive.

I don't know, it's all been said before, and I'm no expert.

[Psych]

What I wonder is why we didn't hear anything about the cloud during E3, it seemed so big and important at GDC but a few months later it was nowhere to be seen, and no one seemed to notice or care.

[Chris]

What I wonder is why we didn't hear anything about the cloud during E3, it seemed so big and important at GDC but a few months later it was nowhere to be seen, and no one seemed to notice or care.

Well, GDC is the audience they need to prove it to. Consumer hype is nice, but it's not as important as trade awareness until you're ready to actually start selling the thing.

Edit: although this is probably straying slightly too far off topic

[Jake]

Welcome to the Idle Forums! Please say hi and discuss the cloud in this thread.

The internet taught me that in Super Mario Bros 1, the cloud and the bush are the same sprite with a palette swap.

[Chris]

Welcome to the Idle Forums! Please say hi and discuss the cloud in this thread.

The internet taught me that in Super Mario Bros 1, the cloud and the bush are the same sprite with a palette swap.

That blew my mind when I learned it

[miffy495]

I'm pretty sure everyone who learned that lost a part of their childhood. You can't unsee it now. Damn you for pointing that out to me, Toblix!

[toblix]

WTF! I didn't point it out! I was as shocked and awed as the rest of you when whoever pointed it out pointed it out.

I think it was Erkki!