It took a while

Here at Opinions on Entertainment, I’ve made clear where I stand on several forms of media, most notably video games. One of my earliest blogs talked about my experiences with PCSX2, the PS2 emulator. The games listed then compared to what I’ve played recently is significantly different, but to recap, I had some of the 3D Mortal Kombat games, both God of War games for that system, a pair of racing games, and several Naruto games. As of writing this, I’ve been both GoW games twice on normal and hard, beat Midnight Club and progressed as far as I could with NFS: Hot Pursuit 2, unlocked every ending in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance, in Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones I believe I’m a few parkour sessions away from obliterating the Vizier.

For that last part, my exposure to the Prince of Persia series is limited to the PSP ports and the DS game as well as the ham-fisted attempt at a movie adaptation so I can’t definitely speak on what I think on the series as a whole without a well-rounded picture. But between Farah from The Two Thrones, Casca from Berserk, and most recently My Adventures with Superman’s take on Lois Lane, the tan tomboy waifu trough is never empty.

I doubt she fits the bill to a T, but from what I’ve seen in The Two Thrones, I’m beyond impressed.

The aforementioned games above cover only a swath of games I had on the real life PS2 and only the ones I remember sinking as many memory points towards. There are the GTA games that kid me never finished in any capacity, the Mortal Kombat games that I finished many times over spanning several years, all three of the Max Payne games on the consoles that I actually finished backwards compatibility on the Xbox 360, three of the Uncharted games, and so on. Since I started my gaming journey from the young age of four years, I’ve had several consoles and handhelds. The PS1 crawled so my PS2 could eventually sprint for a solid decade on my family’s old TV; the PS3 and Xbox 360 were last minute additions before their successors were made available the same year I picked them up, 2013; the Wii, though a gimmick honestly speaking, was a successful gimmick nonetheless; and due in part to outside expenses and the pandemic, if I wanted either an Xbox Series X or PS5, getting one for a good price was the best joke ever told since Peter Parker asked for advance pay.

And don’t even hedge your bets on Black Friday like I did when I got the Xbox One in 2014. That was a collaborative effort and now that I’m an adult, I’m on my own.

All that cataloguing of video game console history from about 2002 to the present, what about my history with PC games? Before we dive headfirst into that, I want to clarify what that could mean. Compared to console games, from my POV, PC games and their development is several levels more creative than what could be put on a console. Those of us who are old enough to remember, browser games tended to be powered by the magic of Adobe Flash and hosted on such sites like MiniClip, Y8 and Newgrounds. The schlock we convinced ourselves of being video games at the time aren’t all that hot anymore but trust me when I say that those were the groundbreakers that gave us the PC games of today. The same goes for games that came with Windows OSs like 3D Pinball and Minesweeper or even their Google recreations. Speaking of which, they’ve also broken some ground in that field with select Google Doodles.

All that said, including all of these as PC games meets technical definitions, but to me seems a bit like overkill, especially when a bunch of these are either point-and-click or keyboard function with only a few of them allowing for a switch or incorporating both in the settings. They’re also less likely to be counted as PC games by other entertainment-based outlets. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen Sift Heads or Warfare 1917 get announced during my time as a subscriber to Game Informer magazine. So to keep things conservative, browser and operating system-included games will have to get the boot. Sorry, Snake.

It’s probably no secret that computers of most varieties are used in video game development and have been since the first ones were in the conceptual stage as early as 1958.

From there things rose, then fell thanks to E.T.’s boning by Atari, then rose again when Nintendo Man crossed to the U.S. to save us in the 1980s. After all, you need to develop with something and sock puppets don’t really get a lot done. By the early 90s, while Sega and Nintendo were engaged in the most intense session of Punch-Out since Mike Tyson fought Evander Holyfield, PC games have mostly been doing their own thing with 1992’s Wolfenstein and the following year’s Doom. id Software’s fleet of computer games, spearheaded by a pair of Johns named Carmack and Romero, paved the way for first-person shooters as they churned them all out across the 90s and early 2000s. If you weren’t paying attention, you might not have noticed that this new genre of games was once known as a Doom clone until you played the game that demanded you to take revenge on demons on Mars.

By the 2000s, it was MOBAs like World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls and simulators like The Sims and its admittedly chibi counterpart My Sims.

So, when did I first get into PC gaming as I’ve defined it? I can’t really remember with precision, but I know it started with the aforementioned browser and Windows games from when I was in middle school and even a bit earlier at home. Since my mom was a huge fan of the puzzle and tile sliding games, she managed to install games like Zuma’s Revenge or similar on our home PC when I was around seven years old. So, by the definition I’ve listed, I started out with PC games not too long after I got my PS2. Though I’ve dedicated a section of my childhood to the latter.

For the longest time, PC gaming was lost in the backseat while my attachment to console gaming carried me well into high school, even if the machinery I was using was starting to show its age. I have no idea if dusting off the PS2 despite it being in active use would’ve made any difference, but the TV it was hooked up to was from the 1980s and ran for nearly 30 years before we replaced it with a flatscreen.

In the PC gaming realm, I’ve had to replace my computers. The first PC I got was a 2004 Sony Vaio that I got as an elementary school graduation gift that lasted me three years. I hardly played games on that as that’s not what it was primarily designed to do. In gaming terms, it was a lemon that would probably struggle to run Doom, and according to WatchMojo.com, anything can run Doom.

After that was an Acer Aspire from 2012 that I also struggled to run at times for various hardware reasons. I mostly played YouTube or watched movies on pirate sites, but the one game that kept me was The Sims 4 which I’ve been playing ever since, even on the computer I’m typing this on — and falling into the same trap of leaving saves unfinished in favor of new ones. What can I say? Like Lego, it’s fun to build and destroy and play, but maintenance sort of sucks the fun out of that unless it’s part of play, like a little Lego maintenance worker.

By the time, I was in college, the Acer was also on it’s last legs with the hinges on the screen giving out, though I managed to nab Civilization VI before switching to something more stable to keep up with my studies in college in 2017. Along with the new computer, I put more of my eggs into Civ, The Sims, and Origin, which previously launched The Sims let me play a trial version of Battlefield 1. Side note: I preordered it a few weeks before release in 2016 shortly after getting Mafia III for the Xbox One, and all-in-all while Mafia had a stronger story and killer soundtrack, BF1 had better gameplay variety and didn’t crash like a fleet of Hindenburgs. Weird that soldiers from the 1910s had more semi- and full-automatic SMGs for primary weapons as opposed to the bolt-action, breechloading, and self-loading rifles that they actually did.

There was also the Doom collection of video games I got at a discount. I don’t remember what specific model my previous laptop was, just that it was time for me to get a new one because the old one had the same problems as the one it replaced, but worse. Here, I’ll indict myself as fairly messy. If I’m not accidentally spilling a sugary drink on the keyboard, I’m just letting the keyboard and screen get dusty. I know, I should take better care of my equipment.

In a nutshell, the hinge failed, the battery degraded, the games were prone to slow down, and just like Mafia III on launch day, it also crashed like a fleet of Hindenburgs. Then came the computer I use today, the Acer Nitro 5 in May of 2021. Of course, the library carried over, except for the saves, and it felt like a true upgrade. The last computer could boast all it wanted about its touchscreen capabilities, but when you keep your promise to let me play as Vietnam in 1080p and lead me to a win, then you’ve really got no competition. Maybe this is how you become a member of the PC Gaming Master Race.

In my short time dedicating most of my points toward the PC gaming market as of late, I’ve found something that was probably well-known to PC gamers for decades now; it’s more convenient at times to be a PC gamer than a console gamer.

WatchMojo.com has another video on this:

https://www.watchmojo.com/video/id/19109

But in general, PC games are mod friendly as my Sims 4 mods folder can attest; if you need more storage, a disk drive can help you out most of the time; without a real competition, PC gaming is the sole dominator of online games; and when it comes to customization, the sky’s the limit. You could keep your machine as simple as can be, or give it all the bells and whistles that your little heart desires. And there’s really no stopping you from having a relic of a video game. Before their delisting on Steam, gamers could get the original GTA 3D games and compared to their console versions, they never took up as much space, perhaps as a reminder of the days when online capabilities were trickier to develop for so 20-year-old games were comparatively smaller. I’m 98% certain that if I wanted to, I could fill my steam library with the top sellers from the 90s until the early-to-mid 2000s and have space left over for GTA 5, one of the modern Call of Duty games, or a gacha game like Genshin Impact or one of the Honkai games. And then I’d need to consider whether to get myself more storage.

Having since transitioned from console to PC gaming a majority of the time since around 2017, it’d be easy to say I wouldn’t go back, but I don’t see that happening. My Xbox One sits on top of the entertainment center while working on an impressive dust collection, but it still functions decently well. Some of the games I have on that have PC versions or can be emulated, though with a lot of them prone to padding or having high difficulties by design, the time spent grinding my way through long or hard games is still saved on the Xbox and I’ve had more fun starting new games in PCSX2 than knowing my data from the last save on console got corrupted and I had to start from scratch. I suck enough at Sekiro and I’d like to pick up where I left off than start from square one.

Still, my death grip on game progression has loosened so much as I’ve been able to breeze through games like a shinobi on an assassination mission, so single-player progress has lost all its importance on me especially since I can look for a gameplay video or a summary on the associated wiki if I care so much about that. Moreover, some games are cross platform so if I screwed up because of a flaw on mobile, I can rectify that on PC or console. Multiplayer though proves a different matter altogether, so while I’m not gonna fuss too much about starting GTA 5 from scratch, the grinding mechanics of GTA Online are reciprocally so. Levels 1-12 go by relatively fast, but once my friends and I on console got into the hundreds, it stopped mattering. Level 120 was what we were gunning for anyway because it unlocked the Minigun.

I’d be willing to go to a hybrid style of gaming in the right conditions, but until then, I’ll keep things on PC. Fingers crossed the stuff I listed here that works for PC translates to consoles in the future.

This week’s YouTube recommendation is GTASeriesVideos.

https://www.youtube.com/@GTASeriesVideos/about

A fan channel dedicated to RockStar games, news, and announcements, this channel occupies the same role as Clownfish TV, along with gameplay videos of anything developed or published by RockStar as a whole, to include guides, lore explanations, exposition, and for a time theories on the GTA series for example, as well as a look into cut content. For fans of the series who have had burning questions about XYZ, it’s worth checking this channel out to hear what conclusions they’ve drawn from all their hard work researching. Or if you want to look at guides and get a 100% completion, you’re welcome to view that too.