Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello!

In that other thread, I bought myself a new computer, but I've just realised that I've bought a new computer. It's top-of-a-range... not -this- range, but top of a couple of years ago range: Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 2.5GHz, MSI NX7950GT Graphics Card 512MB, 4GB memory.

I've also realised that I have no idea what's cool and good in the world of PC games, and what kind of games I'd be able to play on that computer. My mind is still stuck in 'Wow. With this computer, I can play Deus Ex on full everything, and with my 500gb hard drive, I'll be able to have more than five saves at once!'

What's good in PC games, and what kind of games am I looking at? (Valve games don't count because they can run perfectly fine on a tin of beans.)

I like games without aliens in, I suppose.

For a real time strategy get Company of Heroes, it's cheap and utterly brilliant. Also why not get Left 4 Dead which will look very sweet on that rig. Empire Total War is supposed to be pretty good, and has age of sail ships and you can recreate Waterloo and other battles.

Also worth buying Freespace, Freespace 2 off COG (linked elsewhere on this forum) and updating the graphics with the mods found here: http://www.hard-light.net/ It's brilliant space shooter fun.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R patched with the Clear Sky add-on is supposed to be pretty exciting too, if still a little ragged, and very beautiful. You may also want Fallout 3.

Definitely get Steam on there (you can play Left4Dead with proper controls!), there are loads of great games to be had, many of them for really not much cash at all. (OutRun 2006 Coast2Coast is under a tenner and positively glorious with a 360 pad, a lot better than the recent (and not much cheaper) 360 XBLA arcade release in fact, since OR2006 C2C is a full game and not a cutdown arcadeified version.)

Don't forget the joys of emulation either, modern PCs can now run nearly all games at pretty much full speed, even via the clunky abomination that is MAME, so whereas a few years ago it was a 5FPS slideshow on the 3D stuff, now it's 30FPS+ (and there's still the massive back catalogue of 'other' emulation as well, of course).

See also, Visual Pinball + Visual PINMAME, recreating pretty much every pinball you've ever played and/or can remember in glorious detail - strictly PC only this one. (It helps if you love pinball, of course.)

Burnout Paradise is superb on the PC, it was superb on the 360/PS3 as well, I know, but if you've not played any of them yet, the PC is the best platform to get it on. (Apart from for multiplayer.)

Beyond that there's not a great deal that the consoles don't do as well or better these days, there's World of Warcraft if you really fancy a time-sink of epic proportions (I got nine solid months out of it, which were very enjoyable but I was sort of glad to see the back of it), and a huge amount of old fun to be had through the likes of Good Old Games.

Personally I've always had an absurd soft spot for Max Payne 2, try playing through that again with everything completely maxed out

As a rule, first/third person shooters belong on the PC, as do real time strategy games, beyond that you're in 360/PS3 territory. (There are many exceptions to the rules though, GTA4 is a travesty on the PC where it should be the best version by a country mile, whereas Criterion have made the PC the platform of choice for Burnout Paradise - so mileage will vary.)

Saw 360 Fallout 3 after having spent a lot of time with the PC version first, and was rather taken aback.

It's still the same great game but the 360 does struggle with it somewhat, even at its crappified resolution.

(Also, of course, FPS games absolutely can't be controlled properly with a pad and demand keyboard + mouse.)

Steam can lick a socket.

But do get Galactic Civilisations 2, Mount and Blade, Medieval Total Like OMG Totally War, and Civ 4. Also Portal. And save up for Starcraft 2, possibly.

I've been playing Fallout 3 mods for ages now and they rock.

Sounds like you will need to update that graphics card if you want to go down the FO3 route however, or enemies will be appearing right in front of you (I've played it on my other system with a 1650pro radeon in it.. wasn't very good tbh).

A semi decent graphics card can be had for between 80 and 120 quid, your cpu and ram are more than capable as is.

Also consider -

Crysis Warhead (you'll need a good video card tho, 9800GT ought to do it).

Pure (I've got it on PC and it's good).

BOP (as has been said, excellent game).

Grid (just to see what it can do).

Why didn't you say so you asshole? talk about unsociable lately or what

Oh. You'll also be the envy of all your console playing friends when you get Trials 2 : Second Edition.

Simply because it's spectacular fun.

http://www.redlynxtrials.com/MediaDownloads.action

There y'are. No excuses. A nice lovely DRM free demo that can be activated with a serial nice and simple.

You can use a XB360 controller on it too. Really is tremendous fun.

STALKER (the 1st one).

I hope your computer can come with dynamic lightning, because the game is gorgeous

Steam can indeed lick a socket; this is my main dev computer, so no Internet.

I've already done Fallout 3 on the Eckerbox, but I didn't know there were any decent mods out yet...

I really want to like STALKER, but it's a bit shit, really. It fits the bill of 'a game with guns where you shoot blokes and they die in a realistic amount of time' (as long as you have a decent gun), but I've already played all the good bits. :(


My graphics card is semi-decent! <Mr. frowny face />

i quite like the look of zeno clash, pity my computer struggles to play minesweeper.

Yeah what is not semi decent about a 7950?

Did you read it wrong or something?

Yeah, Valve and their bloody stupid reliable, dependable, sensibly priced distribution platform - the bastards.

A 7950 isn't semi decent. Now a days it's entry level look on the net open a few word docs. An 8800gt and up is semi decent if you want to get any of the games reccomended running properly.

A 7950 is about on par with the 1650 pro radeon (512mb) that I have and it won't entertain Fallout 3. Well, it will, but you'll have Yao Guai appear right in front of you and maul all of your body parts before you even know what happened because the draw distances will make it impossible.

80 quid may seem like a lot of money. But when you consider that it's about the price of 2 360 games and will open up a good 5 games you cannot even play on a console, and then another 5 that will take their console counterparts down a dark alley and give them a good kicking it's not so bad.

Any way, it was only a reccomendation The rest of the PC (4gb ram, 2.5ghz c2d & 500gb hdd) are all pretty much current. So I would lay out that lil bit extra and make the graphics current

It's funny how many people whine about Steam. Even funnier that when you compare it to it's closest competition (m$loive !) it totally kicks the shit out of it.

Sensibly priced? Only for very old stuff, new stuff is more expensive to rent on Steam than buy in a shop.

Random example, GTA4 - still £27 on steam, £17.50 for a proper copy from Amazon.

I see. Let's not do this all again, eh?

Because the PC games have anisotropic filtering, right?

It's funny, I own a decent gaming PC, and yet I don't see these games that give console games 'a good kicking'. (Also, £40 pounds for a 360 game, seriously?)

Given the specs he's buying, I don't think Mr D really expects the games to run at full resolution etc, I think, like most sensible people, that doesn't matter overly much to him. The graphics card is good enough for purpose (Indeed, it is arguably more suitable than a better one if you're coding any kind of graphics stuff)

Let's not do what again?

I realise such talk is INSTA-STU-BAN at WoS, does the same diktat apply here as well? (I honestly don't know, since I only read a small percentage of threads here, and isn't place like, y'know, excellent and stuff?)

Nah, but every PC thread does have a tendency to turn into "PCs are teh rubbish/acebest and consoles are teh suxx0r/brilliantness!"

And you'll note it usually comes from the console fanboys.

Games are games, I love them all. I wouldn't be gamecist toward any platform. A good game is a good game.

We've done this before. And last time I decided it wasn't worth arguing over because quite frankly I felt outnumbered like I did in the school playground when I had a spectrum and other kids all had the C64.

So I will just itterate my point.

I own a PC. It wasn't cheap because I wanted good quality hardware. Speed wasn't so much a factor, I just wanted top shelf components. Reason being I had just been let down by cheaper inferior components. As a bonus I am able to run pretty much any game that's been released for the PC and I like them.

If you wanted to get really technical I could sit here and list the specs of the hardware running inside of modern game consoles and break them down one by one. My PC would come out on top every single time. More ram, faster cpu, more cores, more shade processors, more clock rate ETC.

But what's the point? surely it would be easier to just avoid a thread which doesn't concern you and leave it to the people it does?

I mean, I haven't gone around rubbishing every thread that concerns a console game have I?

I'm a big fan of my consoles and my PC, no slavish fanboyism for either - but I honestly do believe that as platforms they have their strengths and weaknesses, and FPS games (specifically the controls) are right up at the top of the list IMO.

I'd love to see a versus match on L4D between a 360 team and a PC team..... I flat out refuse to believe that game can be controlled as well using a pad as it can a keyboard and mouse.

Yeah, let's keep this about the PC games and not devolve into the whole 'what's best for gaming' thing. I mean, it is possible to own a PC and a console, right?

Also, if you love submarines and tension and dynamic campaigns and shitting yourself when the pings get closer, get Silent Hunter 3. Patched up and with loads of mods including a wartime radio mod (includes great Nazi pop hits!) and fiendish AI, it's really atmospheric. I challenge you not to shout "ALARM!" Das Boot style when you swing your periscope around a clock a destroyer churning full speed at you when you had previously been distracted by the tempting targets of distant oil tankers.

The thing is, you seem to think these things matter, but yet (as I pointed out with the anisotropic filtering) you didn't know what they actually did, it was just a case of "it's better because the numbers are bigger".
And here you're saying "spend 80 pounds extra on that".

Premium graphics cards just aren't worth the money. (says the man who pretty much always has one... and yet it's usually unplugged in favour of an older one)

Knowing exactly what they do is a bit geeky even for me. The bottom line is I can see what they do.

For example when I play GOW using Vista (DX10) against playing it on XP (DX9) I can clearly see the difference. I have a rough idea of what's causing it (dynamic shadows etc) but I'm not about to sit here and study it. As an example I can watch a Golf GTI go down the road, then watch a Impreza WRX. The Impreza will obviously be faster and I don't need to study the facts on why it's faster (but if I did it would be because of a bigger engine, more horses etc).

I already explained why I think it's a good idea to spend extra for a better graphics card. IE - in the real world away from boring facts I have played a couple of the games suggested on ATI's equivalent of the card he has. And I know first hand that the games suggested won't work very well on it.

If you like I can go to Tomshardware and find a group test on graphics cards, clock speeds, shade processors ETC ETC and make this all technical and boring, or I can simplify it all by saying "I've ran X game on X card and it runs like dog toffee".

As for premium graphics cards not being worth the money.

I totally agree. That's why I didn't say "you have to get a GTX295.. whilst you're there get a triple SLI board and get 3 and spend 2 grand".

Infact, what I did do was offer up an entry level card that will run all of the games suggested in this thread.

In 3 months time I will get a GTX 260. When it comes down to around 100 pounds. I've never ever bought cutting edge graphics cards and I'm not about to start now.

Sigh. I'll keep this short as we've done it to death before, and frankly, it's dull.

I've played hundreds of hours of FPS games using both keyboard/mouse and a joypad, and I can honestly say they both work fine. It seems that the people most vociferous about how shit a pad is for FPSes are people who've never tried it or those who tried playing Halo for five mins at a mate's house.

Saying let's have a team of mousers against padders is a bit disingenuous as of course the PC brigade would win; playing FPS games on a PC is a lot more about super-quick twitch mechanics and pinpoint accuracy. I was never any good when I was a PC gamer for these very reasons.

Everyone is playing with the same 'handicap' online, so where's the problem? I've certainly enjoyed shooters (and gaming in general) since leaving the never-ending PC graphics arms race.

Well we're a bit screwed as the OP has said the PC won't be connected to the internet, which shags a large number of modernish games to a greater or lesser degree, even if it's just auto-updating and patching and suchlike.

I can't really imagine a usable games PC not being connected to the internet in this day and age. (And I wouldn't install/play games on a dev machine anyway.)

Well do forgive me, I've never done it before so I don't find it that dull.

Generally speaking I ignore things that I find dull.

Oh, I'm not having a go at you personally - I know you're not exactly a regular around here. It's just annoying seeing the mantra 'wasd good; pad bad', when it's incredibly subjective.

I expect our opinions are so diametrically opposed that it's not worth us falling out over, though.

The thing is a keyboard and mouse (gaming spec ones) are better than a pad.

Again I could go into it all technically (btw if I need anything answered from a technical standpoint and could be arsed I would go on google) but DPI and HZ of a mouse (a good one, say a Razer) will outperform any joypad and offer the kb/mouse user a clear advantage (especially when playing online combat games like L4D).

I won't agree on Fallout 3, because there really was no need to be any good at aiming and accuracy wasn't worth a toffee (because it was terrible and best left to VATS) but on a game like Counter Strike or L4D you really wouldn't stand a chance against someone with a high DPI HZ mouse. You'd have your head taken off before you even realised what had happened.

I prefer ESDF to WASD if I'm honest.

Except that you're playing against people who are also using a pad (on a console at least). While I agree that using a pad for an FPS on a PC would be a losing proposition, if you're all using a pad then everything's fine - it doesn't make one worse or better than the other, it just makes for a slightly different play style. One which I personally happen to prefer.

Well I thought that with Gamesforwindowslive you could compete against XB owners?

At least I thought that was the general idea.. Bit of a waste of time otherwise.. Mind you, GFWL is a total big waste of time. And to think the fuckers used to charge for it when Steam was already available.

I think that's rather the point - nobody actually does use GFWL for cross-platform gaming.

Aye because they all hate windows as it is....

Forced updates and games that inconvenience paying customers more than pirates with online activation can very much fuck off. I'm sure their service is fine for people who aren't bothered about these things, but not for me.

And what the hell is "m$loive"?

M$ Live. It's basically what xbox owners pay for every month but PC owners don't even want for free.

All of the steam games I have I play in offline mode.

Feteo.

Nice try dimmers, nice try.

Oddly enough all of the GFWL games I own legally and was foolish enough to buy into. And oddly all of them run like a tap in the desert stuck one inch into the sand. IE - they're shit and they don't.

Infact I own about three pirated games. One of them being fallout 3 which I actually went ahead and bought a copy of (PS3 and then gave it away) out of guilt.

It's because of stuff like GFWL and DRMs etc that I download 'evaluation copies' of before hand. For a good reason, most of them are shite console ports.

Man, I remember the years of me being a PC gamer, 1995-2007. Long barren deserts of fun and expensive PC upgrading. If I hadn't bought an Xbox I would never have known about gay men choking on bacon and the associated Meatloaf references, gay men having intercourse with a colostomy wound, women putting poo in their handbags.. it would have been terrible.

PC gaming is only expensive if you own a PC soley to play games on. I don't. I watch DVDs, graphic design (photoshop) play emulators (fruit machines, old consoles etc) watch Divx, listen to music (PC is plugged into a good hi fi system) send emails, browse the net.. Honestly I could go on all day.

Playing games (as I see it) is a bonus brought about by the fact I optioned to spend 108 quid last July on a Geforce 9800GT.

This July I will no doubt purchase a 260GTX when it comes down to about a ton (atm it's around 130) and then next July... ETC.

As I see it a games console new will run you 300 quid and has a shelf life of about 4 years.

The good part about PC gaming now is that it's no longer dependant as much on your CPU or the ammount of ram you have, so it's clearly an option if you want to keep buying the latest graphics card, or whether you want to do what I do (stop dreaming and get something that's functional).

I seriously see console gaming as an expensive luxury. A PC is essential to me for all kinds of reasons where as a console is a gaming toy that you use for one purpose only and nothing else.

...which you can't do without first activating them online, and you can't do unless you have the latest version. If you don't like the changes a game update has made, tough shit. You've lost the game you paid for and there's nothing you can do about it.

Also I have a 360 and have spent this much money on live: none. Although having said that, I would probably play online a bit if it were free, but then I've had a PC for ten years and have probably only played online half a dozen times. But meh, let's no tget into the PC Vs Console thing; it's just embarassing all round.

But by definition if you're downloading the game through Steam in the first place, you're online and it's activated, thereafter you can play it offline to your heart's content.

Any PC game you go and buy in a shop these days effectively has to be 'activated' anyway, since the first thing you need to do is check for patches and/or updates after you've installed it.

Indeed, pretty much any 360 game you go and buy will have an update available for it, so again your 360 needs to be online so you can 'activate' it - i.e. get the update.

I really don't see what the big deal with Steam is and its reliance on an internet connection on a 'one time only' basis, a few years ago when Half Life 2 came out the argument against it was just about vaguely valid in a crappy stupid sort of way, but in the year 2009, it's specious at best and downright idiotic at worst - how many people don't have their consoles and PCs connected to an always on internet connection?

As for automatic game updates, I genuinely can't think of a single time in the history of gaming whereby I've ever not wanted to be running the latest version of a game, the fact that my Steam client automatically looks after patching and updating my entire Steam games collection (and that's quite a lot of games) is a major plus. I also like the way I can have all the games installed on as many PCs as I want (a laptop for when I'm away from home for example), I don't need to have discs to hand to play them, the only restriction being that I can only be logged in once at any given time and playing the games, which is fine, 'cause there's only one of me.

On top of all that, the Steam Community works brilliantly (I find its management of friends, joining games, sending messages, tracking achievements etc is actually better than XBox Live), Steam itself gives access to a massive back catalogue of games as well as all the new juicy stuff, and in my experience at least, it's entirely stable, reliable, and never goes wrong.

I'm sure it's not perfect of course, I'm sure some people have had all kinds of problems with it, but I've been using Steam pretty much since it was first released, and it's never given me any issues whatsoever - so on that basis, I have no reason to dislike it or be suspicious of it.

Or if Value goes under no matter how much people bleat that laid off employees will magically spend their time for free using equipment they probably won't have access to removing protection valve probably don't have the rights to remove to no personal benefit.

Once you have the game downloaded you can back any steam game up into a setup file. And, as long has you have the steam setup files you do not need any internet connection.

Case in point. Echo (a mate of mine from another forum) sent me HL2 as a gift when my wife fucked off with all my games. He'd bought the orange box but already had HL2..

Once it was installed I simply went into the options, decided to back it up and I now have it on a DVD (its about 3gb IIRC). On the same DVD I have steam and I can completely install and run both offline without ever being on the net (I didn't even have the net for 8 months after getting home).

I believe that's because that copy of Steam had been signed in online at least once as you. If you'd had to reformat the PC it wouldn't work. If it did then piracy of steam games would be as simple as sending someone a DVD and I don't believe that's true.

But you could increasingly make the same argument about any gaming system, what guarantees are there that Microsoft will continue to support online functionality for 360 games one year after launch, or three years, or five years? What's to say they won't implement a dashboard update that means a 360 won't play anything at all unless it's connected to the net every six months in an effort to 'combat piracy and terrorism'?

Companies turning off game servers are nothing new, EA have been doing it for years.

Arguably Steam is different in that folks such as yourself contend that you can't play the games at all without Steam being available, but as we've already established, that's largely a load of hairy monkey bollocks.

My understanding is that you can make backups of Steam games anyway, I've seen the option in the client but I admit I've never used it, but as far as I can tell it allows you to make DVD backups of the games you've bought, maybe someone's gone into that side of things in more depth than me.

Games are increasingly going online and digitally distributed, even the current-gen consoles don't really work properly and fully unless they've got constant (or at least regular) access to the net, so we've basically handed over our 'rights' to play the games we buy forever and uninterrupted - Steam is no worse than any other system, and arguably a lot better in fact, witness the horror of migrating everything from one 360 console to another, for example, whereas Steam just lets you install your games as many times as you like on as many PCs you like, AND backup the games to media of your choice as well.

When you downloaded it first, you were online. But you might not be after that, or you might have moved, or you might have a knackered router. Besides which, it's the principle of the thing - I'm a paying customer, and I'm being forced to piss about with internet validation to play a game that requires no internet connectivity. Sod that.




I don't think I've ever bought a game and actually bothered to update it. And even if you do that, you're not forced to.



Again, you're not forced to. In fact I deliberately avoided updating Crackdown for many months because I didn't want all the new advertising shite in it. And if you're not online, the game will not only still work, but it won't even know there's an update. Besides which, I don't care for comparing consoles to PCs - I've bought PC games from non-steam download sources that didn't force updates or activation, and much prefer it.



Fair enough, and I'm not saying everyone should agree with me by any means (although clearly they should, but tch - people, eh?), but I am much happier avoiding steam than using it.

Thing is hardly any games will work offline any way, even if you don't need a net connection.

What if you need a new driver? or a new direct x? or java? or something else?

If you're even thinking of entertaining games on a PC you will need to stay current with latest software and windows updates. Infact, you'd want to do that anyway to ensure you have all of the latest updates and even virus definitions.

Having a PC without virus protection is like inserting your pink bits into a bacon slicer and hoping they won't get chopped off.

And then how are you going to get all the latest mods which are free and which also make PC gaming what it is?