onken
Member
I've been a PC gamer since my step-dad snuck me and my brother into his workplace one weekend to play Doom 2 on the LAN - I don't know how old I was but probably about 8 or 9. It blew me away how much better it was than my Genesis and I couldn't wait for more. It probably didn't help that my real dad was/is a total prude so wouldn't let me play any vaguely violent games back then, so it made it all the more forbidden fruit for me.
Back home I bugged my dad incessantly for a PC but he didn't need one and they were way too expensive back then so I was stuck with Sega consoles for the longest time. I would still get as much play time in as possible on friends' PCs, LAN cafes, sneaking Quake installers on the school PCs and so on but it was always a temporary fix - I needed more. Around that time my sister had moved in with her then-boyfriend and he had a PC his parents bought him which he basically never touched, so after school I would often go round and play whatever games he had like Thief, Resident Evil 2 and GTA (we had a Saturn so I never got to play either before then).
A year or so later my dad bought us some piece of junk from a yard sale, I think it was an original Pentium at 233MHz with 32 whole megabytes of RAM. It was already old for the time but I didn't really care - it ran Quake and Duke Nukem 3D and that was good enough. Of course eventually I would hear from my friends about these new amazing games that were coming out - Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, Thief 2. Needless to say these wouldn't run on my ancient thing so sure enough I was already eyeing-up parts in magazines.
I was older then, about 15 and now had a part-time job. My brother and I saved up all summer and eventually we bought our first gaming PC - an Athlon 800, 128MB memory and a Riva TNT2. When the parts arrived there was a note explaining that the TNT2 had just been discontinued so they had upgraded us to an original Geforce for the same price - happy days. When we finally got it built I remember so clearly launching Unreal Tournament and watching the intro in-game cutscene and it just ran so smoothly it was glorious, I couldn't get over it. We had also bought a new 1280x960 100Hz CRT monitor so the effect was even more profound. It was also around this time the last family console we had, the Dreamcast, was already on its way out and that was pretty much the end of my interest in consoles.
With my new PC, I could also finally run this little game called Counter-strike. I had played it before at LAN cafes and it just barely ran on my old PC but I never had unrestricted access to it, mainly because my dad didn't want me sitting on the Internet tying up the phone line all day. Anyway we eventually discovered you could buy this dongle thing which would kick me off when an incoming call came in so my dad was happy with that and the Internet floodgate was opened. In summary, it destroyed my life for about 3 years, I didn't want to do anything else. Some days I would play 4pm after school to 5am, sleep 3 hours and repeat. My grades nose-dived, I went from straight-A student to barely graduating high school. I moved to the city and lived with my mother in her basement, I was truly living the stereotype.
But all was not lost. She got me an interview at a small company her friend worked at and I got a job as an entry-level office drone. At this time my mother had just got a 512Mbs ADSL connection and this nicely coincided with my discovery of torrents. I won't go into details - I'm not proud of the many, many things I stole in that year but I like to think I make up for it now. I basically played every major (and a heap of minor) PC game there was, as well as an ass-load of Counter-strike of course. Towards the end of this year I also saved up for another new PC - an Athlon 2000 XP and a Radeon 9800 Pro, it was pretty kick ass. In this year I also bought a Gamecube because being a life-long Resident Evil fan I desperately wanted to play REMake and RE4 so a console presence was still there, but admittedly at a lot lower level. Generally I didn't touch that generation at all, I just couldn't get over how shitty the graphics were compared to PC games at the time.
Anyway, I will skip a bunch of drama at this stage but eventually I decided this wasn't the life for me, studied my ass off and got into a top college. First year in dorms didn't have Internet in individual rooms (we were the last year that didn't) so that basically killed all my online gaming and Internet presence as a whole. It probably did me a huge favor. I still played my PC offline sometimes but in between partying and studying, there wasn't much room for gaming of any sort. The one exception was this horrible, horrible MMORPG called Maple Story I played for an obscene amount of time one year on my little Vaio laptop which I had bought for study. Eventually the graphics card overheated and broke so I could only run a VGA desktop, looking back it probably saved my degree haha.
By the time I graduated, the PS360 generation was kicking off and coming from my old PC, it was about the same level. Also I didn't have room for a desk in my old apartment so my PC sat on the shelf next to the TV, sad and alone and whenever I busted it out I was always wresting with the mouse/keyboard controls on my coffee table. The new consoles were finally getting to PC-comparable graphics (*zips on flame-suit*) and perhaps it was just enabled by poor memory of what PC gaming used to be like - I admit I was happy with what those consoles had to offer. On top of this, I had never played a PS2 game before then so I was enjoying the back-catalog on my original BC PS3.
A few years later I was in town and I saw a local computer shop closing down, they had an obscenely good offer for a Radeon 5750 which was going for half-price. I bought it on the spot out of pure impulse. But of course it wasn't compatible with my old motherboard so I had no choice but to buy the rest of parts which I went out and did. An E8400 (which had just come out) and 4GB memory, recycling what I could from my old PC - I had myself a rig again. Sad to say, I never really got to play it much. My marriage of 5 years was breaking down at this stage and when I moved out I didn't have the space or desire to keep it. I sold it to my mother for a pittance and she still it uses it to this day.
Fast forward to last year. It had been a long console generation and I, like many people, had become slowly dissatisfied with the output so I was ready to buy. I kept looking at the new PC thread but whenever I did it always seemed like some new chipset was just around the corner so I kept putting it off until... Two weeks ago a guy at work bought two 780 Ti cards by accident and was going to get charged a 15% restocking fee to send one back. On the spot I took it off him and once again I was stuck with a kick-ass card and no PC. After work I went down to a PC parts shop, I had been religiously following the new PC thread so I knew exactly what to buy - GA-Z87X-UD3H, 4770k, Corsair H60, 16GB memory, an SSD and a Windows 8.1 OEM disc.
I have to say this was my first PC build that had basically zero problems, apart from having to reseat the motherboard because I forgot the backplate duh (which ironically has nothing plugged into it). Everything worked straight off the bat. I remember on my last PC chasing down bluescreen issues for weeks because my memory was running at the wrong voltage but this time it was all automatic. Seeing the UEFI menu for the first time was pretty unsettling let me tell you, but I have so far resisted the urge to switch to classic mode. Admittedly I was having an issue where my games were crashing at random times, but after a BIOS update on the motherboard and re-installing Windows (was bluescreening on boot after the update) it hasn't crashed once. I am so happy with it, I had a bunch of games lined up that I had snagged on Steam sales which I wasn't able to play but now finally I can - maxed out to the freaking moon at 1080p and 60fps, the awesome never gets old. Playing Skyrim maxed out coming from the PS3 version, I just spend half my time wandering around trying to pick my jaw up off the floor rather than play the game. I can't believe it's been so long since my last PC, but looking back I can understand why. The setup cost me almost $2000 but it was worth - so very worth it.
Feel free to share your stories of your off-on relationship with PC gaming!
Back home I bugged my dad incessantly for a PC but he didn't need one and they were way too expensive back then so I was stuck with Sega consoles for the longest time. I would still get as much play time in as possible on friends' PCs, LAN cafes, sneaking Quake installers on the school PCs and so on but it was always a temporary fix - I needed more. Around that time my sister had moved in with her then-boyfriend and he had a PC his parents bought him which he basically never touched, so after school I would often go round and play whatever games he had like Thief, Resident Evil 2 and GTA (we had a Saturn so I never got to play either before then).
A year or so later my dad bought us some piece of junk from a yard sale, I think it was an original Pentium at 233MHz with 32 whole megabytes of RAM. It was already old for the time but I didn't really care - it ran Quake and Duke Nukem 3D and that was good enough. Of course eventually I would hear from my friends about these new amazing games that were coming out - Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, Thief 2. Needless to say these wouldn't run on my ancient thing so sure enough I was already eyeing-up parts in magazines.
I was older then, about 15 and now had a part-time job. My brother and I saved up all summer and eventually we bought our first gaming PC - an Athlon 800, 128MB memory and a Riva TNT2. When the parts arrived there was a note explaining that the TNT2 had just been discontinued so they had upgraded us to an original Geforce for the same price - happy days. When we finally got it built I remember so clearly launching Unreal Tournament and watching the intro in-game cutscene and it just ran so smoothly it was glorious, I couldn't get over it. We had also bought a new 1280x960 100Hz CRT monitor so the effect was even more profound. It was also around this time the last family console we had, the Dreamcast, was already on its way out and that was pretty much the end of my interest in consoles.
With my new PC, I could also finally run this little game called Counter-strike. I had played it before at LAN cafes and it just barely ran on my old PC but I never had unrestricted access to it, mainly because my dad didn't want me sitting on the Internet tying up the phone line all day. Anyway we eventually discovered you could buy this dongle thing which would kick me off when an incoming call came in so my dad was happy with that and the Internet floodgate was opened. In summary, it destroyed my life for about 3 years, I didn't want to do anything else. Some days I would play 4pm after school to 5am, sleep 3 hours and repeat. My grades nose-dived, I went from straight-A student to barely graduating high school. I moved to the city and lived with my mother in her basement, I was truly living the stereotype.
But all was not lost. She got me an interview at a small company her friend worked at and I got a job as an entry-level office drone. At this time my mother had just got a 512Mbs ADSL connection and this nicely coincided with my discovery of torrents. I won't go into details - I'm not proud of the many, many things I stole in that year but I like to think I make up for it now. I basically played every major (and a heap of minor) PC game there was, as well as an ass-load of Counter-strike of course. Towards the end of this year I also saved up for another new PC - an Athlon 2000 XP and a Radeon 9800 Pro, it was pretty kick ass. In this year I also bought a Gamecube because being a life-long Resident Evil fan I desperately wanted to play REMake and RE4 so a console presence was still there, but admittedly at a lot lower level. Generally I didn't touch that generation at all, I just couldn't get over how shitty the graphics were compared to PC games at the time.
Anyway, I will skip a bunch of drama at this stage but eventually I decided this wasn't the life for me, studied my ass off and got into a top college. First year in dorms didn't have Internet in individual rooms (we were the last year that didn't) so that basically killed all my online gaming and Internet presence as a whole. It probably did me a huge favor. I still played my PC offline sometimes but in between partying and studying, there wasn't much room for gaming of any sort. The one exception was this horrible, horrible MMORPG called Maple Story I played for an obscene amount of time one year on my little Vaio laptop which I had bought for study. Eventually the graphics card overheated and broke so I could only run a VGA desktop, looking back it probably saved my degree haha.
By the time I graduated, the PS360 generation was kicking off and coming from my old PC, it was about the same level. Also I didn't have room for a desk in my old apartment so my PC sat on the shelf next to the TV, sad and alone and whenever I busted it out I was always wresting with the mouse/keyboard controls on my coffee table. The new consoles were finally getting to PC-comparable graphics (*zips on flame-suit*) and perhaps it was just enabled by poor memory of what PC gaming used to be like - I admit I was happy with what those consoles had to offer. On top of this, I had never played a PS2 game before then so I was enjoying the back-catalog on my original BC PS3.
A few years later I was in town and I saw a local computer shop closing down, they had an obscenely good offer for a Radeon 5750 which was going for half-price. I bought it on the spot out of pure impulse. But of course it wasn't compatible with my old motherboard so I had no choice but to buy the rest of parts which I went out and did. An E8400 (which had just come out) and 4GB memory, recycling what I could from my old PC - I had myself a rig again. Sad to say, I never really got to play it much. My marriage of 5 years was breaking down at this stage and when I moved out I didn't have the space or desire to keep it. I sold it to my mother for a pittance and she still it uses it to this day.
Fast forward to last year. It had been a long console generation and I, like many people, had become slowly dissatisfied with the output so I was ready to buy. I kept looking at the new PC thread but whenever I did it always seemed like some new chipset was just around the corner so I kept putting it off until... Two weeks ago a guy at work bought two 780 Ti cards by accident and was going to get charged a 15% restocking fee to send one back. On the spot I took it off him and once again I was stuck with a kick-ass card and no PC. After work I went down to a PC parts shop, I had been religiously following the new PC thread so I knew exactly what to buy - GA-Z87X-UD3H, 4770k, Corsair H60, 16GB memory, an SSD and a Windows 8.1 OEM disc.
I have to say this was my first PC build that had basically zero problems, apart from having to reseat the motherboard because I forgot the backplate duh (which ironically has nothing plugged into it). Everything worked straight off the bat. I remember on my last PC chasing down bluescreen issues for weeks because my memory was running at the wrong voltage but this time it was all automatic. Seeing the UEFI menu for the first time was pretty unsettling let me tell you, but I have so far resisted the urge to switch to classic mode. Admittedly I was having an issue where my games were crashing at random times, but after a BIOS update on the motherboard and re-installing Windows (was bluescreening on boot after the update) it hasn't crashed once. I am so happy with it, I had a bunch of games lined up that I had snagged on Steam sales which I wasn't able to play but now finally I can - maxed out to the freaking moon at 1080p and 60fps, the awesome never gets old. Playing Skyrim maxed out coming from the PS3 version, I just spend half my time wandering around trying to pick my jaw up off the floor rather than play the game. I can't believe it's been so long since my last PC, but looking back I can understand why. The setup cost me almost $2000 but it was worth - so very worth it.
Feel free to share your stories of your off-on relationship with PC gaming!
