Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Why I Gave Up on PC Gaming.

So, with my Xbox sold and only by DS to feed my gaming addiction, today I felt like playing something a little 'deeper' that Mario.

I went over to my shelf and dusted off my copy of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It's been years since I've played this game, and I really enjoyed it the first time round, so I decided to pop it in and play it again.

After spending half an hour swapping the four DVD's that come with the game, I get right to the very end of the installer and the game asks me to insert disc 4. Disc 4 is already in the machine, it's just finished copying files from it...but no matter what I do, it won't accept that the disc is in the drive.

So I take it out, clean it...still nothing. I try inserting the other three discs in case it thinks one of the others is disc four...but no luck. The game failed on the installer.

I should also point out that my desktop is still running Windows XP. It's not like I'm even trying to install on a newer, unsupported OS.

So I look at the minimum requirements and see that my Netbook should be more than capable of running this game...the only problem is my Netbook doesn't have a DVD or CD drive.

So, then I get to spend another forty minutes ripping disc images from my install discs, copying them to an external drive, before setting up a virtual drive on the netbook and installing the game that way.

The game then installs on my netbook without a hitch.

Let me make this clear. Trying to install this game using the original discs on a computer running a supported operating system doesn't work. Installing this game from ripped images of the discs from an external USB drive through a virtual DVD drive onto a system running an unsupported operating system works flawlessly.

Then the game doesn't run. I try to start it, it acts like it's working for a few seconds, then absolutely nothing happens.

So, now I get to trawl the internet for updates and patches that may make the game work. I find the latest patch, install it and the game suddenly starts to respond.

The only problem is that it 'responds' by telling me it's detected a virtual drive...therefore I must be a pirate trying to steal this game.

So then I get to go back online, search through some pretty shady websites in order to find a no-CD crack to run the game that I legally own on my netbook.

After two hours of dicking around, I finally get the game up and running.

It's so slow it's totally playable. Again, this is an old game. My netbook doesn't just meet the minimum requirements, it blows the recommended system requirements clean out of the water.

I have twice the recommended processor speed, twice the video memory and four times the recommended system memory...this, however, gets me roughly one frame every four seconds.

You know what's a lot easier than all this? Putting a disc into a console and turning it on.

3 comments:

Evan 08 said...

Oh hell yeah... BTW, did you try using your ripped files to install the game on your PC?

Paulius said...

Yep, and it didn't work.

In the end, I copied the ripped images to an external USB drive, then I used my netbook to install the game to that same external drive...and I'm running the game from there on my desktop.

There's something to be said for games to be developed, tested and then released for the same hardware.

I REALLY miss my Xbox.

Unknown said...

I prefer PC gaming for the ability to have a far more complex control system. For example, Sacred 2 and Dragon Age run far more fluidly and you needn't pause nearly as much than their console counterparts. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Consoles and also miss my XBox dearly. However I do dislike how I can't take my old Diablo 1 CD and just install it on my computer.

Instead if I wanted to do that, I would have to go buy a computer made before 2000 so that it was slow enough and old enough to run the game?

Also, SW:ToR I think will add a lot more flavor to the MMO Franchise, I really look forward to it. You should write something about your opinion on that, if you haven't already.