Point and Click

I’ve been listening a lot to the Gamers with Jobs podcast over the past few months, a very good gaming podcast with intelligent insight into the world of gaming. The team over there talk about PC games a lot which has made me pine for some of the great games I used to play with the keyboard and mouse.

The only problem is I don’t own a decent gaming PC at the moment as I’m a Mac user. Hence, I’m toying [as in ordered and all the bits are being delivered today] with the idea of getting a PC to play some of those games that only really work with a keyboard and mouse, which I’ll come back to in a bit.

The last PC I owned was sold back in 2003 – since then I’ve been 100% Mac but one of the problems with the Mac computers is they aren’t very good for gaming. Let me qualify that, Macs are fine for gaming as long as own a new one  which will have a half decent graphics card in it.

I currently own the first Intel iMac from 2006 which has a graphics chip integrated with  the motherboard – as you know this means it’s impossible to upgrade with getting a new logic board (£300 + paying someone to fit it) which is out of the question. The onboard graphics chip is a ATI XT1600 which is okay for playing Warcraft (a five year old game) with all the settings set to medium but anything other than a 5 year old game will strain the old girl which in all other respects (videos, music, pictures, word processing etc etc) is still more than capable (probably more so than a similar aged Wintel machine). But the bottom line is, whatever you think of Macintoshes, they are not great when it comes to gaming due to the lac of upgradability.

The alternative to getting a new PC was to sell my existing iMac and get a new one – the new iMac looks freakin’ awesome and comes with a lovely screen 27 inch screen (or 21.5 inch) but the graphics card is a still only ATI Radeon HD 4850 (512MB) hardly cutting edge and totally unupgradeable which is a shame as the machine looks amazing (although they have been plagued by screen problems according to a report from computer world (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9147518/Apple_boosts_27_in._iMac_shipping_delay_to_3_weeks?taxonomyId=12)

So with a heavy heart I have to conclude that for gaming Mac suck – coming to terms with this is not easy  but I want to play some PC games at a decent price plus have the ability to upgrade at some point in the future.

So PC it is. But it’s been years and years since I bought a PC (the last time was in 2001 and it came with the Medal of Honour – the one with the Normandy Landing). In other words I don’t know anything about PC specs and what’s good and what’s bad. Having done some some research it seems like building your PC is the way to go these days. This is a conclusion I’ve come to based on looking at the prebuilt gaming rigs – which you can pick up for around 500 quid for something like thishttp://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/system/UK_ULTRAYIN/7 but when you look at some of the components they’re not really up to much or by the time you’ve gone through the upgrade options and swapped out the ropey Power Supply Unit and stuck in better graphics card the price rockets up. Having consulted a few geeks / PC Gamers at work it seems that building your own PC is the way forward. I must admit this is a daunting experience.. spending the best part of £600 on a lot of components that need to be screwed together in a certain order without the help of a manual is worrying but I’m banking on the fact that today’s PC are a lot more straight forward than they used to be. I could end up with a decent gaming rig for an unbeatable price or I could end up with a useless box of wires and circuits that the kids can use to make a more realistic looking robot the next time they decide to cut up a cardboard box.

It all seems like a lot of hassle and expense so apart from hearing some American podcasters talk about PC games and Steam a lot what is my motivation for joing the ranks of the PC gamer (a dying breed according to most pundits the PC games market has been in decline for many years with the pervausiveness of the consoles reigning supreme).

Well, in my opionion there are still plenty of games that just don’t work on the console and hence can only be experienced on the PC. Like the RTS for example. This is a genre of game that I’ve just not played for years as I refuse to move a pointer around a TV screen with a joypad – life is too short and this is like trying to drive a car with a mouse – it just doesn’t feel right and is the equivelent of trying to bash a square peg into a round hole. I missed out on the original Star Craft game but I really want to experience the sequel when it comes out on a decent PC – we also have Diablo 3 due out sometime towards the end of the year (I’m trying to convince myself that I need this)

I also want to play Crysis as the game looks amazing – enough said there – oh and I miss playing an FPS with the mouse a keyboard. You can’t under state how right the FPS is with the mouse and keyboard interface. I remember the first time I played Quake on a friend’s PC – it blew me away. Sure there are some decent console shooters out there and things have come a long way – games like the Halo series make using a joypad feel very natural but it’s not as fast as the PC alternative.

The only thing holding me back at the minute is the lack of funds. January is not the best time to be dropping £500 on non-essential items so it’s going to be a case of flogging a few things on ebay and getting a few pay cheques under the belt before taking the plunge. It might take some effort – I took 10 games to CEX on the weekend and came out with enough money to buy a harddrive.. not quiet as much as I was hoping.

I will be blogging about my experience when building the machine – hopeful it will all go smoothly and take a few hours. If not I have a couple of emergency contacts numbers of some hardcore PC gamers at work to fall back on.

I can’t wait to get some new hardware – it’s been years since the current consoles were released and I feel like I need a change to my gaming diet.

If you’re interested in building your own PC then this is a great website for information http://www.buildyourown.org.uk/ There are also lots of tutorials on youtube which are good for getting a visual representation of what goes where – this one is pretty good http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldJNp6wdfqI

Finally, this is a list of great PC titles coming out in 2010 http://adrianwerner.wordpress.com/games-of-2010/