The general gaming thread

[Koz]

Day of Defeat: Source. All on PC.

That! My all time favorite multi-player!
Oblivion, Fallout 3, Rome Total War and Napoleon Total War.
All of them have great community mods are what make them great.

Which I had a computer capable of playing Crysis... One day...

Only ever used my PS3 as a media server.

[CaptainRaiden]

You can call me a semi-serious PC Gamer. I try to play whenever I have free time, but lately haven't been able to play much. Got myself a good setup about a year and a half ago.

Intel Core 2 Quad 2.6 Ghz
4 GB DDR3 RAM
ASUS P5QL/EPU Motherboard
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1 GB GDDR5

Played these games over the past year or so:

Crysis (Almost maxed out)
Half-Life 2 and the two episodes AGAIN (just love them).
COD: Modern Warfare 1 & 2
GTA IV - Runs beautifully on the Quad.
GTA IV: Episodes from Liberty City
rFactor with the F1-RFT mod
Race 07 and Race ON
GTR2
NFS Shift (Crap)
Assassin's Creed II
Dragon Age: Origins
MASS EFFECT 2! - One of THE absolute best gaming experiences I've had.
Singularity
Splinter Cell: Conviction
Mafia 2

Now playing F1 2010. Planning to get COD: Black Ops when it comes out. Don't wanna risk buying Medal of Honor with all the crap I've been hearing about it.

[CaptainRaiden]

Sadly some of the NFS versions were silly ones like NFS underground which were all to do with tuning and drifting and other such boring crap. I quite liked most wanted as there was no drifting and the police chases were just stupidly crazy Very hard to get away with them when you're doing 100mph and the police 4wd's are doing a similar speed and hitting you head on and there's a helicopter flying with you!!!!

I'd have to disagree. I didn't like Most Wanted or Carbon with the police chases or any of the Burnout games with wrecking your car etc. All that useless stuff just gets in the way of pure racing. So, even though Underground was as arcadey as it can get, the racing part was fun. Precisely why I liked the career mode in NFS: High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed. Played those two games to death.

Been a sim convert in the last 5 or 6 years, just can't see myself going back, although having said that, arcade racers are still quite good if you want to relax and have some less serious fun. I just hope they don't try to find a "balance" and create more disastrous games like NFS Shift.

[MrJan]

Always hated the idea of PC gaming, needing to check specs and upgrade this and that all the time. Far easier to have consoles and know that the games you buy will work as intended.

Got PS2, PS3 and 360 but seem to spend most of my time playing FIFA10 and MW2 on the PS3. PS2 is reserved for ocassional attempts at RBR or We Love Katamari and the 360 is for DiRT2 (love the sound of that 6R4), F1 2010 and recently NHL08.

Don't seem to have as much time for gaming any more though, I'm very much in the casual vein of pick up and play for an hour or so and then put the game back down for weeks. This makes full race weekends at 20% length on F1 fairly difficult to get through

[MrJan]

I'd have to disagree. I didn't like Most Wanted or Carbon with the police chases or any of the Burnout games with wrecking your car etc. All that useless stuff just gets in the way of pure racing. So, even though Underground was as arcadey as it can get, the racing part was fun. Precisely why I liked the career mode in NFS: High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed. Played those two games to death.

I loved NFS:Most Wanted when I was at uni. I spent weeks thrashing around in a Gallardo trying to get a chase up to over 30 minutes and then escape. Didn't take to Carbon or Undercover and Pro Street was a massive pile of ****.

I quite like the tuning/drifting stuff though, NFS has never been a sim so it's nice to have something different, if everything was like GT5 then the world would be boring as ****

[CaptainRaiden]

Always hated the idea of PC gaming, needing to check specs and upgrade this and that all the time. Far easier to have consoles and know that the games you buy will work as intended.

But that's the fun part of it. Upgrading is a constantly interesting process. You sell off the older parts and add newer stuff and see the PC get better every day, to a point where they blow any console out of the planet with MUCH better FPS and higher resolution. (I mean what's with games locked at 30 FPS on PS3?!). Once you buy a console, that's it, you're stuck with it until the next generation comes. There's no upgrade.

On top of that, I absolutely hate how first person shooters and RPG games play on the console. You get much better crosshair aiming with a mouse compared to those sticks on the gamepad, same again with strategy and RPG games. Sure, if you want to make those games needlessly challenging, consoles are the way to go.

Then there's the whole modding community. I mean I was playing an F1 mod for rFactor long before F1 2010 ever came. You get hundreds of mods for every game. There are more than 30 mods for F1 2010 already, from realistic sunlight to a different onboard camera view etc. PC gaming is limitless. Yeah, it can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but it's worth it.

[MrJan]

Constantly upgrading irritates me like you wouldn't believe. Like I say, I'm a casual gamer, I don't want to spend my time pissing about with the internals or playing about with mods, I just want to pick up the game and play. That's why consoles are much better for me, I can buy one and then 5 years later get the next gen.

PCs are only better than consoles if you are willing to spend out all the time, I'm not happy doing that so there is no way that I'd actually have better FPS (although I probably wouldn't notice anyway).

And aiming with mouse is another thing that annoys me. Moving around with analog sticks feels more intuitive for me, the movements are more realistic and I can't see how you could consider them to be challenging.

But most of all I just want to sit back on the sofa and play, not be confined to having to find somewhere to have the mouse. Unless you spend most of your free time playing games I really can't see the benefit of spending out on a PC.

[Mark]

I do like NFS, it seems to run so much faster than exporting via GPFS and it's included in the standard distributions too! Of course it doesn't provide failover in the same way but perhaps clustered NFS could do that.

[CaptainRaiden]

Constantly upgrading irritates me like you wouldn't believe. Like I say, I'm a casual gamer, I don't want to spend my time pissing about with the internals or playing about with mods, I just want to pick up the game and play. That's why consoles are much better for me, I can buy one and then 5 years later get the next gen.

More like 10 years for the next gen. And if the latest rumor is to be believed, because of the recession, both Sony and Microsoft are gonna delay their next gen consoles by a few years.

And aiming with mouse is another thing that annoys me. Moving around with analog sticks feels more intuitive for me, the movements are more realistic and I can't see how you could consider them to be challenging.

Ha! Blasphemy! Ask any serious FPS fan, and you'll get the answer that a mouse and keyboard is the way to go. And this is why many of the first person shooter games used to be PC exclusive, ex. Counter Strike, Half Life 2, Crysis etc. The mouse provides faster, more accurate aiming (if you have a good mouse, higher dpi, at least 2000), that translates into more kill. The scroll wheel provides for faster switching between weapons. So, overall the gameplay becomes easier.

But well, the PC gaming industry, sadly, is on a decline firstly because of stupid piracy, and secondly because consoles have found a way to make aiming easier in shooters, and made the whole gaming experience easier for the average user. And because it's hard to pirate console games, all game developers are now sucking up to the consoles.

But most of all I just want to sit back on the sofa and play, not be confined to having to find somewhere to have the mouse. Unless you spend most of your free time playing games I really can't see the benefit of spending out on a PC.

Ever heard of wireless keyboard and mouse? Not only this, both PS3 and X360 controllers work on the PC. So, I have multiple options. If I wanna stick next to the monitor and play first person shooter games better, or lay back on the couch and just put on a mindless arcade racer. Can't do this with consoles, they're more one dimensional.

[Daniel]

Wtf's the deal with people whining about having to upgrade all the time? This is simply not the case. My pc is as I bought it in Jan 2008 other than one hard drive which is about 7 years old. You DO NOT need to upgrade all the time. It's just not TRUE.