Be Excellent To Each Other

It's taken me most of tonight to get a game that was nicely gifted to me (ta Mr Dave) up and running. It's still not up and running yet, waiting on a restart, but hopefully soon. Somewhere between the Windows 7 demo and running the full version I've lost all sound too. It's all been fucking faff so far, but I'm determined to get it all sorted.

Anyone know how to fix the sound issue before I trudge the information super highway?

Omfg trollzor wtff1111111

Get a 360.

Along tonights insightful journey I realised the Windows 7 install kept the demo system and user info which I had to get rid of in order to free up the partition I made. Worth mentioning to others who are concerned with disk space.

I've been playing the lovely Child of Eden in-between fannying about with this computational carbuncle.

Third set of updates requiring a restart...

Flash the BIOS?








On second thought, don't.

FFS... It appears that the game in question requires a better graphics card than the one in my laptop. It's fine for StarCraft and other recentish titles but due to the the developers only having limited resources ( on 7 people worked on Magicka) the graphics were never optimised to the same degree as Blizzards games.

Fucking. Wank.

That's PC gaming for you. I had all sorts of issues getting Civ V to work on my new laptop a few weeks ago. I thought things must have changed in the last seven years since I stopped playing PC games, but they really haven't.

I can't see this thread ending well.

It's already ended.

Just ordered a rig.

What sort of issues?

First it wouldn't progress past the intro video - would hang at the very end. I tried all sorts of things before in the end having to hack the config file so it wouldn't load that particular video. It was weird because I didn't have the same problem with the demo. Then it wouldn't let me select anything from the menu, so I uninstalled and reinstalled it. Seems ok now, but it took me about two hours to sort it.

Hmm! The most recent problem I've had with PC games inexplicably "not working" was Football Manager 2011 on the day it came out. It took me a day of faffing to get it to eventually work, including multiple reinstalls and absolutely no help whatsoever from the people on the official FM forums. I even emailed the Steam support people to ask for a refund at one point, because it looked as though it'd never work. "No refunds", they said. I was just about totally disillusioned with Steam and PC gaming again and about to fire up my Xbox when it started working. Stupid PC gaming.

But I have to say, Steam has generally made the whole process a lot more simple, and with fewer problems. I don't think I'll ever get back into PC gaming in the way I was pre-Xbox 360, though. There are too many variables and settings to mess with, which just makes the whole process a game in itself. "Should I have my mouse sensitivity set to 3.2 or 3.3? Hmm, that feels a bit better. No wait, I can't turn as quickly now. What's with this mouse lag? Why am I getting a slight frame rate drop during that bit? Maybe I should turn AA down a notch. Now it looks shit." etc. I'm far too anal about that sort of thing for it not to get in the way of the enjoyment.

These days my PC is for RTSes and PC-exclusives. If anything can be bought on a console, I'll simply buy it on the console. Couldn't care less if they're now massively technologically inferior.

Although to balance that, I installed the FREE Team Fortress 2 and had a great hour or so blasting around that as a medic. So,

The only issues I've had have been with music games for some reason - Audiosurf and um, that one that generates a shoot-em-up based on your music both run poorly for some reason. However, I've bought more PC games in the last year than I've probably ever done. 'Liking' the Steam page is probably a mistake.. I keep buying the daily deals that I see on there.

Steam is pretty awesome and I can't fathom a better way of acquiring new games. Automatic patching, awesome deals, no pissing about with media. Yeah.

360 + LoveFilm

In a last ditch attempt I'm going to reinstall my drivers from my OSX Leopard DVD and see if that fixes it, need to do that for the sound issue anyway.

At the risk of being Captain Obv. does the game not work on Mac steam?

PC only.

T'is XNA based, so no chance.

DavSpaz

Ran the Boot Camp updates, driver updates and Windows 7 updates.

I now have my illuminated keyboard function back but still no fucking sound.

And now for some reason my Steam client won't display items in the store pane but I can download stuff via the Steam website. Magicka still wont run but I did manage to get Alien Swarm working.

Fuck this, fuck this with fire.

And yesterday was no exception. Super Laser Racer for a quid.. yeah, why not. Then GOG punting Wing Commander 1 & 2 for $5.99.. yup.. I'll have that too.