PC Go Home

There was a time when my love of PC gaming was unbreakable.  When the prospect of ricing up my rig to squeeze 10fps more out of Quake 2 was a real treat.  When the challenge of a fatal exception was welcomed as an opportunity to spring into action and pull from my well of knowledge and save the day.  Yes, there was a time… but it’s over.

As far as playing games on a real personal computer goes, I’m just about done. 
This hideous bear of a desktop that sits on the floor by my feet is the loudest, most obnoxious piece of breaking-down BSOD shitasmic electronics I have ever known;  and every PC I’ve either bought or built has, in the end, cost me more life-minutes and caused more tears of frustration than all of the accumulatedhours of pleasure and enjoyment I’ve ever gotten out of them.  Talk about your diminishing returns.

I’m done fixing this shit every week.  I’m done maintaining driver sets just to be sure that I’m getting the best experience I can within my budget.  I’m done manually applying many patches, and then rolling the fuckers back when the last one breaks everything.  I’m done spending THOUSANDS of spacebucks on equipment in order to experience the same thing console owners are experiencing at a fraction of the cost.   I’m done investing all of this time, money and emotional currency on a modern-day money-pit, that seems to decpreciate quicker than a car as it drives off a cliff.

I love gaming because I love playing games.  It really is that simple.  I don’t like PC gaming because of everything that comes with playing the games.  I don’t like gaming because of the prep-work involved, such as video driver updates and key bindings.
I despise that all these years PC gaming have  instilled in me the insipidly rigid behavior of immediately going to the Options screen once a game loads for the very first time. It is that festering turd of ‘macro customization’ that is very familiar to anyone within the PC gaming realm that compells me to insist I know best when it comes to how the game should be presented to me.  Why would I want to change brightness levels and deviate from the default post processing settings BEFORE I’ve seen what the default options look like?  Because I can and becasue I always have, damn you.

I’ll let you in on dirty secret: I did a clean installed of Windows 7 beta on this rig about 4 months ago, and I haven’t installed one game.  Not a single game.  Want to know why?  It’s because its too much fucking hassle, that’s why.

As a gratuitous juxtoposition to that, I can switch on one of my consoles, put in a disc I bought knowing that my experience would be the same as everyone else who bought the game, strap on the headset that I know everyone else playing the game owns, and just play.  If there’s a game update, I am notified immediately and the patch is installed.  Within 30 seconds I’m back in the game with the update applied.  To play online with people, I just access the multiplayer option within the game, and I am placed into the multiplayer space seamlessly, talking with all the other folks in there within 30 seconds.

That I can have a much richer gaming experience on my couch, staring at  in a 42″ 1080p widescreen TV in 5.1 digital surround sound; and that I can have it at a much lower cost of entry is absolutely laughable.

PC gaming isn’t a “real man’s” solution to gaming any more.  I can prove my technical expertise in ways other than crying over SATA cables and spilling droplets of lacerated finger-blood onto an ASUS fucking northbridge.  No, real men actually go out hunting and shoot real animals with real guns.  Real men don’t give two extremely manly shits about games, actually.  But playing games on PC’s is an excersise in frustration and a complete waste of time and money.

So, PC, go home.  Your time in the limelight was resplendent, and represented everything that was good about the growing popularty of video gaming, expecially online gaming.  I was there in its heyday:  I played DooM, Rise of the Triad, Heretic and UFO.  I downloaded and played QTEST – the online only beta test of Quake.  I played Quake2CTF, Quake3Test, right through to now.  They were good times, but the PC’s lanscape is a wild frontier when it comes to standards and conformity, and that is its downfall.  It has been spread out too thinly to adapt and improve in line with the console gaming experience.

If you want me, I’ll be on XBOX Live which, contrary to popular belief, actually has some decent human beings in there to play with.  I’m one of them, and everyone on my Friends List is the same.  Give it a try, you are in serious danger of questioning your odd devotion to the PC.