What's the greatest length you've gone to just to run a game?
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Find all previous editions of the PCG Q&A here. Some highlights:
– What do we want from Fallout 5?
– What game are you glad you waited to play?
– How many save files do you keep per game?
Thank Gordon we're past the days of needing boot disks and understanding conventional memory and how to free up more of it just to play games on PC. That doesn't mean it's always easy to get games running nowadays, whether because your hardware is south of the minimum requirements, or you want to play an older game that'll only run in a virtual machine or emulator. Maybe you've used a VPN to play an online game that's not available in your territory, or had to revert to a previous that was compatible with your setup. Heck, maybe you rebuilt a 1998 PC just to play Half-Life, or built a tiny PC for playing classic console games.
What's the greatest length you've gone to just to run a game?
Here are our answers, plus some from our forum.
Christopher Livingston, Features Producer: Does buying a whole new PC count? When I started playing The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, it was on a PC that was already several years old in 2006. Oblivion ran and looked great and I was happy as a mudcrab in mud until I made the unfortunate decision to go to my friend's house where he had it on his Xbox 360 and hooked up to his TV. That's when I realized my PC was a potato, my monitor was a postage stamp, and my view distance in the game was maybe 15 feet from my character's face.
I bought a new PC and monitor and it was like playing an entirely different game. Textures had… texture! I could see the spire of Imperial City from anywhere on the map! Sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence.
Andy Chalk, NA News Lead: Like Chris, I've purchased entire PCs (yes, plural) for individual games. It's been a very long time since I last bought a fully prebuilt system, but I sprung for a 486 DX4/100 for Doom, which replaced a 386 SX/25 setup I'd purchased for BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Revenge. Hell, I bought my very first PC to play games on.
The greatest non-financial length I ever went to for a game had to be setting up a network to play multiplayer Doom way back when. I cannot overstate what an absolute pain in the ass it was—buying network cards and cabling that we were never going to use for anything else, crash-coursing IPX network setups, hauling my PC to a friend's place 30 minutes away (don't forget, monitors were a LOT heavier back then), blowing half the night trying to figure out config files and scripts and why this sonofabitch won't work, all so four of us could sit around the kitchen table, get ripped, and blast each other to smithereens until dawn. (It was totally worth it.)
Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor: Discworld Noir came out in 1999 and does not play nice with modern operating systems. I had to emulate Windows 95 with PCem to get it working. It wasn't really worth it in the end, and I wish I'd known Pratchett was less involved with each game as the Discworld series went on before I went to the bother.
But, and I can't believe I'm admitting this, the game I actually jumped through the most hoops to get running is Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation. When I found out the Steam version of this beach volleyball jiggle physics showcase wasn't available outside Asia, the same self-righteous indignation I feel when yet another game is refused classification in Australia made me think finding a way around the restriction was some kind of moral obligation.
Even though I'd never played a Dead or Alive game before, I downloaded a VPN to convince Steam I was in Singapore. That wasn't enough though, and I also had to go into Windows' region settings to change that to Singapore, and then dig down into the system locale settings to change that to English (Singapore) as well so Steam would finally show me the English-language version of this horndog free-to-play gacha nonsense.
In the end I got bored before I even finished all the tutorials. There are so many badly translated menus and explanations of deliberately confusing currencies and tokens to click through, and way easier ways to see boobs. But at least I didn't let the man tell me what to do.