Blade and Sorcery, because my PC with a Ryzen 3 1200 and GTX 970 at the time could hardly run this and a lot of other VR games. And also Cyberpunk 2077, to a smaller degree.
First game was Dark Forces. Family PC didn’t have enough RAM so my dad and I ventured into the world of hardware tinkering.
Most current game is most likely going to be Starfield. I built my current PC in 2020 with those first pandemic checks. My specs are all at the recommended, except for my GPU, which is the minimum. So if the game is good at launch I’m going to probably look to upgrade my GPU.
They literally stopped supporting the hardware I originally started playing on when it was still new. The game went from sluggish, to playable, to perfect, and then onto completely unplayable just with the updates to the game, since it wouldn’t even start after that particular update.
Half-Life 2. I remember being completely blown away by early source engine, even on low graphics to keep the frame rate above the 20s. I watched the weird little graphics benchmark animation probably a hundred times to dial in the settings. If you told me that in the future I'd be capping the framerate on highest settings to keep it from hitting the default limit of 300 I'da called you a liar.
Yeah, I saw that e3 demo with the pachinko barrels, water physics, and wood breaking, and I just knew had I to play it with no compromises. Spent my life savings at the age of 14 to build my first computer. Paid a friend’s older brother to teach me how. 😅
I have no idea how Source went from being so taxing to so insubstantial in the course of a few years. By the time I really got into gaming around 2010, Source games were the ones we’d throw on our shit box laptops and play together in class.
Plenty of games have made me say it, but I can’t think of a single one that got me to actually do it.
I do know that Half-Life 1 was the first time I ever looked at the requirements and was floored that my computer didn’t even meet the minimum. It was the first game I tried when my family got a new computer like 2 years after it came out.
Minecraft. It was probably the inspiration for my entire career path, to be honest. When I first played it, it ran horribly. I had an Athlon II and 4gb of ram running Windows Vista. After a few months I bought some AMD gpu that was waaaay too big for my Dell SFF case. I tried modding (read “hacking up”) my case, but couldn’t get it to fit. Wound up building an entirely new computer about a year later after scraping up all my birthday and Christmas money. After that I bought a high refresh rate monitor, then a better mouse, keyboard, and you know how the story goes from there.
Quake1 after voodoo came out with transparent water patch. It’s so good it felt like cheating knowing some players have no idea that I can see through water. Resolution upgrade is a big enough advantage as well.(from 320x240 to 640x480 )
Then Quake 3 I upgraded to nvidia’s TNT card.
I think most of time I stay roughly with the upgrades(usually 2nd place card) with the exception during the bitcoin/covid time.(I stick with my 1080 oc version until I can buy 6800XT from amd direct.)
I mentioned in another post that Unreal Tournament 2004 was one of them for me.
Later on down the road, after I built my first gaming pc using an XFX 8800gts with a whopping 640mb vram - I tried to max out XCOM when it came out. Next thing I heard was a pop, then I smelled the smoke that was billowing out of my GPU. It was time to upgrade again!
Neverwinter Nights. I was scraping by on the 800x600 resolution and lots of slowdowns. 2006 I built a new computer with a 1080x1080 LCD and turned on that glorious high resolution text option.
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