Becoming A PC Gamer

It is also home to everybody's favorite video game pundits, the fanboys. Be it Nintendo fanboy, Microsoft fanboy, or Sony fanboy, they will bombard you with tons of reasons why their prefered video game system is "l33t" and why every other systems "si 4 fagots", once again proving how magnificant they are at spelling bees. I've had to endure countless reasons why "Nitnedo si 4 kiddeez" and "M$ is teh sux" and "$ony si l@em". Most of the reasons aren't really reasons at all; it's just a rally cry to make the fanboy look more retarded than usual. It can't be helped, really. These are also the guys that think Dragonball Z is the greatest cartoon on the planet, so their opinions aren't really the award-winning debates that Rush Limbaugh and James Carville are made of, even though most fanboys are as fat as Rush Limbaugh and as ugly as James Carville.

The message I send to every fanboy? Games make the system. No matter what you think, if you are a true video gamer, you need to get it all. X-Box fanboys need to get a PS2 and GCN to get the full gaming effect. Same goes for PS2 and GCN fanboys; they need the competition. Even if the game pool is limited in one system or another, those few great games are worth it, even if you have to wait until each system has "run it's course"; buy it used, cheap, whatever. It is much better to have the great games on every system than to have a few great games and a ton of mediocre games on just one system. Simply put, if you are a true "hardcore gamer", you need it all.

Seeing as how the fanboy banter will never die down, I've taken it upon myself to explore the "other side" of video games: PC Gaming. Computers are used for many things, and one of those things is gaming. Unfortunately, PC gaming has a bad reputation of requiring you to update your computer hardware every five minutes, hence the many people into console gaming. Still, PC gaming is gaming, and I'm all for gaming. Fortunately for me, most of the games I like for the PC don't require the best hardware available. The Command & Conquer series, Doom, and the SimCity titles of the world don't need the most fanciest, expensivest, polygonalist hardware parts currently available. However, I figured I'd give the whole PC gaming experience the full run. After all, I own an NES, a Super NES, Sega Genesis, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Playstation... The list goes on. Since I'm having a tough time finding an Atari 2600, Colecovision, Sega CD, Sega 32x, and Sega Master System, and I'm still waiting for a bigger price drop on the X-Box, I figured on just purchasing a couple of new PC games that I've been interested in and then upgrading the computer when the need arises.

The Games

Above: A PC game screenshot, or a glimpse into the future?

Well, the foundation for any gamer who already owns a computer is, yes, video games. And boy, did I have a hard time figuring out what games I wanted. Most of the games I got were games that didn't need new hardware, so that was easy. Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Civilization III, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, and Call to Power 2 are just some of the games I got that didn't need new hardware to run. They were also pretty inexpensive, ranging from $10 to $15, except Civilization III, which was about $30. However, two games I did get made my computer almost explode. They were Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament 2003. I saw that MTV special "True Life: I'm A Gamer", and the number one thing I learned was that Unreal Tournament 2003 gamers are really unfriendly and bitchy about everything. They are "l33t1sts" in that they are always better than you because they spend over $1,500 just to play that one damn game with no slowdown and with the most highest quality graphics enabled. I'll explain later. Anyway, since those two games didn't run on my computer all too well, I figured I'd learn about hardware upgrading before it is too late. To review, step one is buying inexpensive games, and if they are expensive, haggle until the price goes down or you get thrown out of the store.

The Hardware

This green $350 crap better make my computer travel through time with that price tag.

First, visit GameFAQs or some other PC gaming website and browse through the computer message boards. Most likely, you'll see weird crap like "overclocking" and "ATI 9800 Radeon" and "PC133". These are all the kinds of hardware you'll be researching for years to come just so you can play one game of Doom 3 when it comes out some time in the near future. Yes, every new game out there requires some sort of super computer that is always rendered obsolete right when you pull it out of the box. I had to do extensive research on my computer to find out how to play a game of Return to Castle Wolfenstein without my computer melting like the Wicked Witch of the West Wing. I learned three things: I needed more memory/RAM in my computer, I needed a better video card, and no matter what I buy, it is always crappy in comparison to the guy who spends $500 a day to keep up with the funtastic world of technology. Well, I figured that my top priority would be to make Unreal Tournament 2003 run at the lowest graphical qualities. You'll soon learn that most PC gamers you meet on the internet are what many call "graphics whores" and will make fun of you if your computer slows down when you try to play your game on the higest graphical settings. I grew up in the NES era and NES games are my main moniker, so low detail graphics don't bother me in the slightest. What did I need? More RAM and a better video card. Since I have a limited budget, and by that I mean I'm a cheapskate, I figured I'd comparison shop and check each hardware component for the best of the cheap. Just for the sake of realism, I have a Compaq Presario 4410US. Yes, it is a piece of crap, but it was cheap. I'd rather pay $400 for a computer that covers my basic needs than $1,500 to be the biggest nerd on the block. So all I need to do was up my RAM from the measly 128 MB to the maximum my computer could take, 512 MB. There are zillions of different kinds of memory out there, so it was a relief to me that the kind I needed, SDRAM, was cheaper than whatever other kinds where out there. Unfortunately, I didn't want to spend $90 for two sticks of 256 MB RAM, especially since I'll be left with the 128 MB stick that I apparently can't sell anywhere. So I bought one stick of 256 MB RAM. Result? 384 MB of RAM in my computer. I could use another 256. Anyway, I also needed a video card, more so than I needed RAM. I had some integrated piece of crap in my computer, so I figured I'd buy a cheap, average video card. I ended up getting a Radeon 7000 32 MB video card for $40. Result? Unreal Tournament 2003 runs fine, but if I had one more stick of 256 RAM in there, it probably wouldn't do split-second pauses whenever I wandered into an area with large open skies. Return to Castle Wolfenstein runs perfectly. I know nothing about how this crap works, but so long as it works good, and so long as I didn't pay too much, I'm fine with it.

The Multiplayer

Get in the Zone. AutoZone.

One last thing I wanted to test my computer for was multiplayer capabilities. I learned a long time ago that 56k modems and FPS games do not mix, so I wasn't about ready to test Unreal Tournament 2003 yet. And I wasn't about ready to pay a hefty price for cable or DSL, so that was out of the question. I don't mind LAN games, though, but this was about online gaming. If you didn't know, online gaming is sweeping the nation. According to most X-Box fanboys, the main reason the X-Box is the best is because of online gaming. They didn't take into consideration that only a small fraction of people who use the internet have broadband connections, so the market for that kind of online gaming is limited. In any case, 56k gaming is difficult to do, so I had to find a game that didn't need such a huge connection deal. The game? Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2. I did three test games to see if my computer could handle the ordeal. While it did work great, I lost each game in less than three minutes. Amazing, considering that in every C&C game I've ever played, it takes a considerable amount of time, usually around ten to fifteen minutes, to build enough tanks to blitzkreig the opponent they way I was defeated. In fact, by the third game, I thought I'd try to race the opponent by building a War Factory - the very structure needed to build tanks - as soon as possible, followed by as many tanks as I could make. By the time I finished building my War Factory two minutes into the game, the opponent had already pinpointed my location without scouting and Kirov-bombed my base straight to Hell. I searched the internet for answers to these guy's amazing skills. Sure enough, I learned they were using a cheating program, or trainer or whatever it's called, to give themselves ample amounts of funding, instantaneous building speeds, and revealed the entire map, thus eliminating the need for scouting. To top it all off, most of those opponents called me things like "new be new be" and "lol fagot new be", which actually made me feel better. Not only did they need to cheat to win, but I didn't understand a word they were saying, what with the piss-poor grammar and everything. It made me feel like a winner at life, since I felt more educated than the average computer nerd.

So what have I learned about PC gaming? I learned that everybody on the internet is better than everybody else, that's what. I also learned that it is more expensive to be a PC gamer than a console gamer, and that PC gamers are no more retareded than their fanboy console gaming counterparts. So did I give up on PC gaming? Of course not. I just don't believe I'll be caught up in the whole nerd-infested AOLer nest that is the online gamer. Oh, and shooting Nazi soldiers is more fun than you can imagine.