Another Stab at PC Gaming

so a couple years ago when i was putting my HTPC together, i was all excited at the idea of running PC games on a 50" DLP display in the living room. i tried out several en vogue games, like doom 3 and call of duty. i was proud of setting everything up to have a great time gaming on the PC, which i hadn't really done since counterstrike in my college freshmen days.

the experiment... kinda worked. the same ol' shit from years past plagued me yet again -- hardware instability. most games despite playing with display settings i'd have random game crashes and all-too-frequent reboots where the graphics card couldn't even show the screen for ten minutes after. one of the few games that didn't cause too many problems was halo, which is really the only one i got even serious at all about. of course it was just a ripped copy, so i just played the single campaign.

well i had decided i'd heard enough good things about a few PC games lately, i'd try out a few again. mind you, i've still got largely unplayed stuff just sitting on the HTPC already, like c&c:generals and doom 3, but i figured i could try out some new stuff. i had heard that you could have endless fun with oblivion, as well as the civilization series. so naturally, i went and grabbed a DVD image of oblivion and some CD images of civilization IV. i was all geared up to try something new...

oblivion's installation instructions popped up in french. i figured there was some kind of language settings i could mess with to change that, but i never found anything. i fumbled through the menus and got things installed. i load up the game and it's the same thing, it's all in french. no language control to be found anywhere. in frustration, i uninstalled the game and threw the useless DVD in the trash.

i figured okay that was just bad luck, let's try out civilization IV. i got it installed, and was instantly reminded of all the shit you have to go through to get a PC game to work properly on a custom HDTV display. i searched forums, tweaked settings, edited .ini files and finally got the game to load up. an hour later, i come to find that the game is unable to run widescreen 1280x720, the highest my DLP TV supports. i'm not gonna play it in a window, it's distracting. so basically, another failed experiment.

so i guess i can try to alleviate these issues my downloading a different oblivion rip and seeing if that one's in english. i could run civilization IV on my office XP box, but i just changed up my office setup so that both macs are using the side by side monitors and i just login to the XP screen whenever i want. the whole appeal was to be able to play on the comfort of a couch with a sweet big display. maybe that's a bad idea for a strategy-type game though, i dunno.

the point is within like a day i remembered why when people ask me if i play games, i make sure i answer "yes, console games."

--j