The Dark Art of PC Gaming | 8bitbot

There are many reasons console gaming has become so popular over the last ten or so years. Least of which isn?t that the three console giants spending billions of dollars on marketing, exclusivity deals and movie and TV-show tie-ins. Factor in the success of motion and touch gaming with the Wii, Kinect and iDevices and it?s easy to understand why people turn to their living room for their gaming fix.

These are not the only reasons though.

Console games have always been associated with ?trouble-free gaming?. Pop in the disc or cartridge and game away. It wasn?t until the Xbox 360 arrived when patching was introduced and subsequently the PS3 game publishers also adopted the same ?release now, patch later? way of thinking. However, for the most part pop-in-and-play is still very much at the heart of what makes console gaming so attractive to the biggest percentage of users.

2012 on the other hand is widely being described as the last year of the current generation. Nintendo?s Wii-U will be the first of the new generation of consoles to hit store shelves and no doubt Sony and Microsoft will have unveilings for their new consoles within the next six months. But until the time we have PS4s and Xbox 720s in our living rooms gaming enthusiasts like myself with a little extra cash seeking thrills of cutting edge gaming have again started to turn to ye old personal computer.

I bought a new gaming PC about a month or so (admittedly to play that new Blizzard game) but was delighted to see how Valve has almost single-handedly simplified and networked PC gaming with their Steam service. This is not even mentioning the incredible deals that we console gamers have been missing out on.

However, my excitement quickly subsided when I couldn?t get one of the games bought off Steam to work immediately. I was frustrated to learn I had to reinstall the game and do some file editing for it to work. It?s possible that it was just my bad luck but that was just the start of my problems.

The DayZ craze was just about at it?s peak by the time my rig was up and running and after a bit of searching I managed to get copies of the ArmA2 and the expansion needed to get the mod working. Many hours of patches later I ended up in a server, knowing only the basics of what I was supposed to do. A few days went by of me screaming at my PC everytime I broke my legs opening a door, being killed by a hacker or having my character reset for no reason. Yes, the game is very much still in alpha phase and bound to be broken in some ways, but with the amount of hype going around it I was shocked to see exactly?how broken?it was.

Playing League of Legends has also added to my PC rage. The ridiculous frequency of the patches have made me get up from my chair and turn on my PS3 on more than one occasion.

Okay, so maybe I?m being a little overdramatic and using DayZ as an example is a tad unfair. My observation remains true though. Console game developers have had stricter quality control over their games than their PC counterparts for years. It?s been quite a culture shock, and even a little nostalgic, extracting patch archives and deleting config files to get a game working. But without people to hype these kinds of mods and put up with its initial?brokenness there wouldn?t be success stories such as Counter Strike, DOTA and Minecraft.

Am I going to throw in the proverbial towel on PC gaming? Of course not! PC gaming provides the kind of flexibility other platforms can only dream of. Factor in things such as 4-way SLI and overclocked quad-core processors you?re pretty much at the highest point of the technical ladder. However, it?s been a humbling experience this last month. It has made me realize that for better or worse, gaming on PC hasn?t changed that?much from 2005. Now where?s my UE4?

?_____

Johan is a gaming and tech enthusiast from South Africa currently residing in Taiwan. He graduated in 2007 with a bachelors in computer science and has been writing and arguing about games since before the Y2K disaster. You can follow him on the twitters @ twitter.com/jevous

Source: http://www.8bitbot.com/blog/the-dark-art-of-pc-gaming/

xi jinping matt bomer westminster kennel club dog show jeremy lin game winner chocolate covered strawberries shrimp scampi kate upton si cover