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SvennoJ on 10 July 2012
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Slimebeast said:
okr said:
Slimebeast said:

Averaged over the 17 years I've been playing it's more than 50% of the time (although I have to admit that some of this has to do with pirated games).

Didn't you call yourself "a full-blooded PC gamer" in this very thread which is about current growth of PC games sales? All this talk about your love for Age of Empires II, a certain Sierra-Online adventure game and other PC games...and recently all I see from you are these negative comments about PC gaming. It's hard for me to take self-proclaimed, formerly avid PC gamers seriously if they probably only payed for a part of the PC games they ever played and if they sound as if they've never really liked PC gaming.

And there's no way any PC gamer in this world is spending or has been spending more than 50% of their time with solving PC gaming problems. Not under Win 7, not under Win XP, not even under Win 95 or MS-DOS (and those two weren't easy at all - in the early 90s I had to create  separate boot disks for almost every single DOS game, e.g. for Civilization, Dune II, Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, Wing Commander: Privateer or the infamous Star Wars: Rebel Assault - the first game that only worked with a CD-ROM drive and driver - but this certainly didn't take anywhere near 50% of my time).

How am I going to say this without sounding like a hypocrite. One part of me loves PC gaming. Because of the usual reasons - because M&K is the superior control method for many genres, because the ability to customize your hardware, customize your in-game settings and tamper with ini-files, being able to mod games.

Important clarification though: I don't mean that 50% of the time spent with games have been time solving problems, I meant that 50% of all games I've played during these 17 years have involved some kind of problem that I had to solve before I could play the game smoothly, look at SvennoJ's post a few posts above for some good examples of some relatively minor problems that you solve within just a few minutes.

And yeah, that Sierra game that was extra special to me was Conquests of Camelot. Glad you noticed okr.

Oh it sure has become easier. I also still remember having to make seperate versions of autoexec.bat and himem.sys for different games and going into the bios to change wait states on a 486 dx to get better performance. Not to mention the disaster that win 95 was for gaming with early directX.
Yet most of the time I simply don't want to concern myself with graphic settings, ini files, driver and system updates and a nagging feeling that maybe it's time to upgrade the graphics card again. And simply never really knowing how well the game will run on your particular system until after you buy it.
Another reason is that the pc will always have the stigma of work attached to it, greeting me with how many unread emails I have and other shit I still have to do. Maybe that's the main reason. Ever since I started working as a software programmer I have been moving more and more towards console gaming.