What was your first videogame that made you say "Ok, I need to play this game properly: I need to upgrade my specs"?
Going back to your beginnings in PC gaming: the first game you played and loved, but the frame rate and resolution weren’t ideal. Your first “I need/want to upgrade my specs” basically.
I don’t think it was the first time, but I vividly remember Arkham Asylum, I played for several hours thinking that fights occurred in bullet time, slowing way down as more enemies appeared on screen. I later saw a gameplay trailer where the brawls were frantic and quick action. Felt pretty stupid after that.
Metro 2033. I used to play it on my Dad’s slightly more powerful machine until I could upgrade my machine. One of the best examples of art direction and great graphics being utilized together. Last Light looks like a PS4 game no matter what platform you play it on. Easily one of the best looking games ever.
Same for me. That was the first game I explicitly remember that “pushed the limits” in terms of graphics, as it was a big jump in terms of PC requirements compared to other games that were available at the time.
Duke Nukem 3D. I had a 486 SX 25 Mhz processor, but upgraded to the DX 100 Mhz processor. Can’t remember if that helped and I just needed a Pentium to run it properly, but I think it worked.
I was still rocking my windows XP old faithful, and Infinite required the upgrade to windows 7. My motherboard didn’t support 7 though, so Old Faithful finally met its match
I bought a used hard drive at a yard sale in like 1996 or 1997, that contained Doom II and Heretic. The 386/40 that was my personal box wouldn’t tun the latter, and I wasn’t going to set it up on the family’s rapidly disintegrating Packard Bell Pentium-100.
It’s such a gorgeous game and I loved playing it. But the fight scenes would drop frames so badly that I couldn’t finish the game because of one boss battle that requires solid timing to win.
It’s pretty good. It feels like a kids friendly dark souls. Not nearly as hard, but some portions are pretty difficult. But it’s got a good story and beautiful graphics. Highly recommend
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.
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!
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.)
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