The title exaggerates, of course. As a strategy gamer, I haven’t many choices and I have been gaming on a PC for as long as I have been gaming seriously.<\/p>\n
But today I had to help a friend with a problem.<\/p>\n
He is a casual gamer. He likes games and plays them quite a bit, but doesn’t read about them, can’t troubleshoot them and asks me for recommendations. The other day he asked if he should buy Rome: Total War<\/i> or Pirates!<\/i> Since he was already committed to buying Imperial Glory<\/i> later this week, I suggested Pirates!<\/i> It’s a different game than Rome<\/i> and Imperial Glory<\/i> and would show PC creativity at its peak.<\/p>\n
Today he IMs me. Pirates<\/i> keeps crashing and he doesn’t know why. “It meets the system requirements”, he says. I have to tell him that listed system requirements are usually no better than a guess and often lowball, but yes, his system should handle Pirates<\/i> just fine.<\/p>\n
So I ask him about his video card. He has no idea. I show him where to find this information and he tells me has Intel integrated graphics. Yes, this is a laptop.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to tell him the bad news (that this could take a long time and still not work) so I tell him to update his drivers. In other words, I find the driver website, point him there and tell him what to do.<\/p>\n
Then I ask if he has patched Pirates! <\/i>He has no idea what I am talking about.<\/p>\n
Don’t be hard on him. He’s a very smart guy. A successful professional, a risk taker who is midcareer change. A real stand-up guy who is a Master of Madden.<\/p>\n
But patching is something that we PC gamers take for granted. So I link him there and talk him through the process.<\/p>\n
He then – understandably – asks how he can get a better video card for his laptop. He’s not ready for that, yet.<\/p>\n
All of this gets me frustrated for him. All these great games out there that require fine-tuning, downloading, updating…all those things that we serious PC gamers just take as a matter of course are flummoxing him.<\/p>\n
If I was smarter I would have asked him more about his computer before recommending anything. Of course, none of this was an issue when I recommended Political Machine<\/i>. But this type of crap is one big reason why PC games will never catch up to consoles in market share. I think that most PC games are better, more enjoyable and deeper. But they are also a pain in the ass to use unless you have been playing them for years.<\/p>\n
This little adventure may have pushed my friend over the edge into buying a gaming desktop, since, through my evangelism, he knows there are lots of great games out there for the computer. But it’s a shame that we had to spend so much time in frustration and IM guessing game hell because he can’t play one of the best games of the last two years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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