Witnessesing the best and worst of the PC all in one week.
By DaemonBlack 4 Comments
I've play 95% of my games on consoles and have for pretty much my whole life. I've always had a crappy desktop or laptop that could only run old games i.e. Diablo 2 and Age of Empires 2 (which are awesome). But this last summer I came into some money and decided to get a decent desktop for once in my life. I got it, I was stoked and played a few games here an there.
This last week I stumbled on some article about the best Oblivion mods. I played the hell out of some Oblivion on 360 and enjoyed it immensely, but these mods sounded incredible. Tougher enemies, new spells, new monsters, etc. So I get the steam version and load it up with some of these mods and my mind was blown. It took a game that I previously thought I had seen all there was to see in and made it a completely fresh new experience. I couldn't help but feel like I've wasted all this time on the console playing the vanilla games over and over again. I ended up sinking about 80 great hours in Oblivion again when I realized another of my favorite games had heavy mod support. Fallout 3.
Again I get Fallout 3 through steam and after my Oblivion experience I thought I knew all there was to know about game modding. I decided to install all the mods I wanted all at once, cause why the hell not. Not a great idea. It crashes on startup and now I have to go through the process of deleting them one by one to figure out which one is messed up. I ended just getting it down to one mod because at this point I just wanted to play. I play about a half hour, its alright but it would be so much better with all those mods. So I decide it would be easiest to just uninstall Fallout 3 and start from scratch and install the mods one at a time. Once it was reinstalled I went to fire up the plain unmodded version and it crashed EVERY single time on startup. I deleted every file that was associated with a mod in the game folder... nothing. I changed the settings....nothing. Changed things in the ini....nope. I reinstalled it again... and again.... notta. I've done every trick in the internet's book it seems to fix the issue and still NOTHING.
So now I'm here with a $29.99 digital paperweight and completely unsure of how I feel about PC gaming. On the one hand, I had a awesome experience with Oblivion and wondered how I could have even played it on the 360. On the other hand, I miss the simplicity of just putting in a disk and having the game work without any extra effort (usually). Now I'm sure that PC gamers would tell me that it's my own damn fault I'm dumb with computers and can't fix it, and they are not wrong. But for me at the end of the day sometimes I just want to play something and not have anything else go wrong. I'm sure I'll come back to the PC at some point though. Although, this whole scenario will definitely have me second guess myself when deciding on platforms in the future.
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