To Silicon Hell and Back

The period after Christmas has traditionally been a bit of an unlucky time for me, as far as general geekery is concerned. In years past, expensive pieces of electronics have suddenly left me for Silicon Heaven, despite my nearly OCD-level of care and attention I give to everything I own. This year was no different: not only did my four-year old 37″ HDTV die a week before Christmas (thankfully after I bested Zelda), but my trusty Radeon 5770 graphics card also bit the dust. While I’m pleased to say that a shiny new 1080p set is on the way (goodbye, savings), I haven’t had as much luck with my PC. To cut a long story short, my replacement AMD card died within two days of use. For now, I’m running my machine with an NVIDIA card from 2008, which would normally mean I’d be doomed to games I played years ago. What’s that, my friends? You gifted me Saints Row 3 on Steam? Deux Ex: Human Revolution, too? Why thank you! I’ll just curse at them and look over at my consoles wistfully.

Not so. Although my beefy CPU probably has a lot to do with it, this oddly-long current generation of console gaming has made it a wonderful time to be a PC gamer. I’ve probably spent about £700 total on both hardware and software over the last four years of PC gaming and, failing ATi cards aside, every configuration I’ve put together destroys a PS3 and Xbox 360 in terms of performance and visual quality. Even running this three-year-old graphics setup, I’m able to play the likes of Skyrim – ironically with a PS3 or 360 controller, should I so choose – at “Low” to “Medium” image quality at decent frame-rates, or in other-words on par with console versions.

The current situation reminds me a lot of a reader’s letter I skimmed over in an issue of PC Gamer UK magazine, from way back in 1999. In it, the reader proposed that all PC games should have a “crap mode”, a scaled-down version of the game everyone could run. This was during a time when the hardware manufacturers of the day were really pushing foward the platform so that only those with big pockets could really play the latest games, so it made a lot of sense. While PC elitists would disagree with me, I’d argue that our current situation is better: not only do we get arguably superior versions of games without spending too much on hardware, but console fans get optimised versions of games as well. And with Free to Play and digital distribution driving prices down, most software can be grabbed for bargain prices: in my case, I bought Batman: Arkham Asylum, Borderlands, both Dead Spaces and Fable III for less than £10 a piece, relatively soon after launch.

But if you’re running a laptop with weak on-board graphics, as a lot of PC users are, you’ll still be spoiled for choice thanks to the rise of independent games. Yes, I have talked a bit about how much I enjoy indie gaming at Ready-Up, but that’s because it’s getting hard to deny the quality and quantity available; the majority of which will run on a toaster if you prod them enough. Every year, we see games like Cave Story, Dungeons of Dredmor, Terraria and that “Minecraft” thing born on the PC platform, and we usually get enhanced ports of XBLA and PSN hits like Bastion, Super Meat Boy and Limbo on the cheap, too.

So while I look forward to my new, fancy-pants NVIDIA card arriving and once again being able to play The Old Republic at silky smooth frame-rates (with Hydrophobic Filtering enabled, natch), perhaps I can hold off just a little longer. In the meantime, there’s still a hell of a lot of good games to play.