The worst moments in PC gaming

muttonchop wrote:
mcdonis wrote:

MOO 3 is yet another one that nearly drove me to drink

I came here to post this. MOO3 will always be my biggest personal gaming disappointment.

Forgot about this. This is also my personal gaming disappointment. Although not being able to run Ultima 9 back in the day comes close.

Buying the original Unreal and discovering it was not compatible with Cyrix processors or Voodoo Rush graphics cards. My system had both. My first experience with "gotta wait for the patch".

You need 600k of free conventional memory to run this game.

Scratched wrote:

A multiboot to a gaming OS when it's perfectly able to do it in a generic multitasking OS? If you're not talking about the technical side, but that you can't resist hitting alt-tab to run another program, that's not really the game's fault.

I am talking about the technical side. The alt-tab was a quick nod to the obvious benefits of the multi-tasking OS remaining accessible. But now games have to coexist with whatever resource hogging TSRs the user has running in the OS. Instead of inherently bringing to bear the full power of the hardware we lovingly enshrine in our LED-encrusted temples we now have to do exhaustive research on which services of our generic multitasking overlords we can lobotomize without bringing down the whole system.
I'm not talking about stuff like Peggle, I'm talking about the bleeding edge. Squeezing every last bit out of the available pool and making it dance.
Most importantly, I'm talking about the sense of awe when you took a blinking cursor, slipped in a little piece of plastic, restarted the machine, and suddenly you were in Space.
Now we flip through worlds as if they were postcards.
"Wish you were here."

So basically. I'm old and things were better when I was young. But even that is just a facet of my gripe.
I think games would be in a better place if we hadn't become so reliant on the Microsoft environment as a shortcut for developers.

Another vote for MOO3. Spreadsheets are not an entertaining game mechanic (to me, at least).

Oooooh, got one that a lot of old-school GWJers might remember...

The patch that ruined Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising. Novalogic got rid of sniper rifle variable scope ranges, reduced the overall damage dealt and accidentally introduced game crippling lag when there were more than 4 players on a server. It took them 3 months to fix that lag and by then most of us had moved on to Battlefield, UT and other games.

Aaron D. wrote:

For me it was the release of the original Xbox.

Up to that point, PC gaming smoked consoles in both complexity and feature sets.

Then Xbox launched with increasing additions to the platform that included demos, patches, custom soundtracks, DLC, online, Western-developer focus and more.

Suddenly I found that the console platform had reached a parity with what PC gamers had been enjoying for years. All on a closed system that required no hardware/software tweaking.

It marked the beginning of my drift away from PC gaming.

I'm not sure that's a "worst moment in PC gaming" as much as a "best moment in console gaming", unless it's some kind of zero-sum game. And unless you regret choosing to forgo PCs in favour of consoles, I can't see why it's a bad thing.

It was the exact same thing for me, but the real cause for the switch was what I consider to be the worst moment in PC gaming: the stupid escalating price of video cards. To get my computer ready for Half-Life 2 I could have bought either of nVidia's or ATI's new cards, either of which would have cost twice as much as an Xbox. So I bought an Xbox instead.

LockAndLoad wrote:

Jurassic Park Trespasser

Kingpin

Trying to configure those damn Diamond Monster Voodoo 2 SLI cards

X-Com 3 : Apocalypse

Star Trek : Bridge Commander

Descent To Undermountain

Daggerfall original release

Fallout New Vegas (so buggy it crashed GiantBomb's Xbox 12 times. it was unplayable for me on PC)

Really, I could just say in general -- one of gaming's worst 'moments' is when it became the norm to release shoddy, unfinished games and then get the public to beta test it for free, then patch it later. Shame on gamers (me included) for putting up with this sh*t.

Atras wrote:

I would actually go back to when just to get basic functionality you had to monkey with how much RAM you had allocated to the low-level computer function and how much would be available to the program you wanted to run. I remember having to make an entire menu system in my config.sys file so that I could boot my computer with the right settings for what I wanted to do. Computer is running, and I want to play Quest for Glory? OK, but if I want to play TIE Fighter after that I need to reboot and pick option 2 (Games), then 5 (TIE Fighter). That way I could have both sound and my joystick.

Between technical improvements like graphics, memory, operating systems and modernizations that allow things like on-line voice chat, giant downloads and marketplaces, it has been all uphill since those days.

I had forgotten how bad that sucked. On the bright side when you rebooted a dos system it could do it in under 8 seconds.

ubrakto wrote:

EA buying Origin. Over and done.

Good night Wing Commander where ever you are

Sniff....

and westwood and frogcity and.....

LockAndLoad wrote:

Kingpin

not feeling you there.

Most wrote:
LockAndLoad wrote:

Kingpin

not feeling you there.

It was a broken, incomplete game that rode the wave of the post-Columbine school shooting media blitz as an ad campaign. They used that tragedy repeatedly as a marketing tool. I turned away at least 30 young kids that tried to buy it without parental permission (the game store I worked at required parental permission for certain titles).

Not individual, but the comatose death of adventure games was painful.

LockAndLoad wrote:

Oooooh, got one that a lot of old-school GWJers might remember...

The patch that ruined Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising. Novalogic got rid of sniper rifle variable scope ranges, reduced the overall damage dealt and accidentally introduced game crippling lag when there were more than 4 players on a server. It took them 3 months to fix that lag and by then most of us had moved on to Battlefield, UT and other games.

Hah, this. Think I stumbled on to GWJ via playing Joint Ops, though I can't remember now. I defintely played with everyone a few times back in the day. That was fun, back with Swampy Air.....ah memories. I remember the nerd rage on that patch. Pretty much killed the game.

Rezzy wrote:

I am talking about the technical side. The alt-tab was a quick nod to the obvious benefits of the multi-tasking OS remaining accessible. But now games have to coexist with whatever resource hogging TSRs the user has running in the OS. Instead of inherently bringing to bear the full power of the hardware we lovingly enshrine in our LED-encrusted temples we now have to do exhaustive research on which services of our generic multitasking overlords we can lobotomize without bringing down the whole system.

So basically. I'm old and things were better when I was young. But even that is just a facet of my gripe.
I think games would be in a better place if we hadn't become so reliant on the Microsoft environment as a shortcut for developers.

Okay, even though more and more people are running 64 bit operating systems capable of looking at obscene amounts of memory, and developers are putting out 32 bit apps restricted to a ceiling of 2GB memory, and hamstrung by making cross platform games with consoles that have a tenth of the memory my system has, plus the cost of making assets to fill more than 2GB of memory is only going to be more expensive (I've seen some very pretty games using small amounts of memory). Once those problems are remedied, I'll take your point on having a single-task, down to the metal OS (if you ignore for the moment that Windows has been getting smaller, and continues to do so for Win8).

There's bigger fish to fry.

Daikatana. Above all else, there was Daikatana.

Spore was pretty damned disappointing.

Scratched wrote:

There's bigger fish to fry.

So my opinion is wrong because your perception is different? Understood. Correcting my world-view... crap. Now purple smells like sh*t. Restoring to previously known good... Missing Colors.dll Please insert original OS install disk in drive A: and Press Enter.

For me it was the cancellation of Fallout 3 and destruction of Black Isle.

Not a moment, but the death of joystick-based space sims was painful. Wing Commander, Starlancer, and the Freespace games are some of my all-time favorites, but the genre died a quiet death.

Duffman wrote:

That was fun, back with Swampy Air.....ah memories.

Complete 180 from the topic but I remember one time Swampy was flying a cargo chopper in JO and we managed to get two of those dune buggy looking vehicles stuck on the geometry. We did a drop behind enemy lines with them and really messed with the enemy. He would also make these incredibly low altitude river skims in Battlefield Vietnam. Ah, good times.

Concave wrote:

Spore was pretty damned disappointing.

Spore wasn't bad. My kids still like to play the cell and creature levels. And the creature/content creator tools definitely lived up to the hype. It just Molynieux'd and was overpromised with features.

Oooh, I thought of another one: The Star Wars Galaxies reboot. I never played it, but as an avid MMO player just hearing about that story made a part of me die a little inside.

..aaand then there's the whole 1Up staff megapurge, and Jeff Gerstmaan's "we're not firing you" firing Gamespot for his honest Kane & Lynch review....

imbiginjapan wrote:

The creation and subsequent brilliantly executed support of the Games For Windows Live system.

This get my vote. As part of the Microsoft vision of the connected home it looked great in demos but they took too long to get it going. Then all these better services came out.

evilseed wrote:
imbiginjapan wrote:

The creation and subsequent brilliantly executed support of the Games For Windows Live system.

This get my vote. As part of the Microsoft vision of the connected home it looked great in demos but they took too long to get it going. Then all these better services came out.

GFWL is just the most visible example of MS's apathy towards PC gaming. There's plenty of things that are a good idea executed poorly.

The Internet.

No, really. Prior to that, when a game was released, it had to work. Now, release and patchpatchpatchpatchpatchpatch is the name of the game.

Wizardy, did it have any patches? MoO2. How many patches? Well, 2. Master of Magic, it _had_ to be patched, and thanks to gaming magazines bundling and the BBS networks, it was barely possible. And after that, all downhill. Currently I pretty much am not going to buy a newly released game until I see how it works for the PC gaming community. Fallout 3 anyone? MoO3?

I miss the days that Atras laments. Back then I knew every file on my hard drive (All 20 megs of it) and what they did, how to manipulate them to make exactly what I wanted to happen on boot.

Gravey:

Good point.

I was approaching the topic from a perspective of, "What killed PC gaming for you personally?" more than anything ('cause I'm narcissistic like that).

The moment we went from having bad console ports of good PC games to bad PC ports of good console games.

Aaron D. wrote:

Gravey:

Good point.

I was approaching the topic from a perspective of, "What killed PC gaming for you personally?" more than anything.

Yeah, that's how I thought you meant it, and as I said that was pretty much my experience as well: I can get all this, easier and cheaper.

In addition to high parts prices, which from what I hear has leveled off significantly in the last few years, I have to agree that another worst moment and a monumental blunder is GFWL. PC gaming has so much going for it, and it's such a wasted opportunity. Steam is awesome and all, but with the success of XBL and Microsoft's position as, you know, the maker of the primary gaming OS, they were in the catbird seat for unifying the front of PC gaming as a juggernaut platform. Instead, they seemed to do everything in their considerable power to sabotage, squander, and otherwise completely blow it year after year.

The cancellation of Project Jefferson (Baldur's Gate III).

Gravey wrote:

Steam is awesome and all, but with the success of XBL and Microsoft's position as, you know, the maker of the primary gaming OS, they were in the catbird seat for unifying the front of PC gaming as a juggernaut platform. Instead, they seemed to do everything in their considerable power to sabotage, squander, and otherwise completely blow it year after year.

If there's one gaming-related Microsoft initiative that I wish had succeeded, it would be the Windows Experience Index. The idea was that you could boil system requirements and all of that down to a single number on the box. It didn't really catch on for a variety of reasons.