It’s 3 in the morning, do you know where your sleep is?
… ’cause I sure don’t know where’s mine. So here’s some thoughts instead:
I’ve never really been a PC gamer.
Many of my friends can regal us with great tales of Mech Warrior battles, or Tie Fighter strategies, but me? Nope. Console all the way, baby. NES to now.
Firstly, I grew up with a Mac. I believe it was a Centris 650, or, 68040 something, running… Mac OS 7? I was neither a computer smart nor adventurous kid at all. If the damn thing worked, that was good enough for me. I never attempted to crack open a computer and learn about things like RAM or graphic drives; at the rate we we’re going, it just didn’t seem necessary.
The notion of running Mac OS 8 one day was exciting, but it didn’t work out to well for us, as the printer stopped taking orders, so my dad changed us back to 7.
As far as computer entertainment went, my sister and I had the Kids Pix art program to mess around with, and a bevy of Lucas Arts adventure titles that we’d play so often, we could practically quote the whole game, alternative dialogs and all (if “It’s the door to Trixy’s trailer” means anything to you, you know what I’m talking about).
The most visually advanced game we ever owned would have to have been Rebel Assault II, the live action arcady Star Wars game (tell you more about that some other time… damn Mynocks).
It would be years before a Windows based computer came into our household. One day, my dad decided he needed a PC for his job, and we saw the opportunity to FINALLY play more recent Lucas Arts adventure games, like Monkey Island 3, 4, and Grim Fandango. No point in trying to see if this IBM laptop could handle shooters and such, the video game consoles we’re handling that just fine, from Goldeneye, to Halo.
But now, after all these years of just using PCs for point and click adventures, I finally feel I’ve been missing out on something. Not necessarily the PC exclusive games/genres, for there are plenty console games I have yet to try and probably never will and have accepted this fact; but more of the customability of PC games.
See, I was a huge fan of customization in games; from the simplest aspects of changing a character’s name in RPGs, to creating new wrestlers, designing stickers for cars or building maps for first person shooters. It seemed such a novelty in games, and it was. On the console that is.
"Kustomization" (waka-waka)
But on the PC, people had been modding games since they we’re released. Going into the code and changing textures, and weapon abilities, and sounds. People we’re creating their own armies in RTS titles. Hell, the closest I got to doing anything like that was changing the sounds the WarCraft 2 characters made when they were killed to burps and farts (it was the height of hilarity at the time).
And now, here I am. In an era where people claim PC gaming is dying, and yet I still see so much potential for experiences I’ve yet to have. I want to command massive armies with a left click, I want the precision of the mouse for the coveted head shot, I want to feel I can do more with a game than just playing it; CHANGING it. I want what people are so eager to preserve in this console focused industry.
But first, I gotta crack this PC open, and learn about RAM and graphics drives… cause this thing runs Portal like shit.
- S
