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.
Oh shit, I remember there WAS a game. I believe I bought a Geforce 2 MX or sth for it…could have been an FPS, possibly Unreal Tournament.
I came here to say Unreal Tournament 2004.
I remember on my laptop - trying to get on a hoverboard and my frame rate dropped to 3-5fps. I knew I needed to finally build and put my laptop away.
The day I went from console to PC. Game, no clue.
I think it was either Arena or Daggerfall.
Battlefield 2. My dad and I went wild building our first PC together. Good times.
I can’t recall exactly which one of the two it was but it was either Quake 4 or Doom 3. I remember I managed to squeeze out like 14 fps using RivaTuner on the family computer. I got my first job not long after that and put together my first PC.
Doom 3 for me by far, I remember reading the pcgamer article and it was the game that they were predicting would cause millions of upgrades. IdTech at the time was incredible with what it was trying to do, and they weren’t kidding. Kind of funny that it’s so accessible these days.
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.)
Elden Ring. I really really really wanted to play it. Playing it on 8gb RAM felt like a slideshow.
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.
I gamed in EGA, “back in the day”. lol
Glad you did get the gear you needed!
Morrowind, specifically the Tribunal expansion, and then I played it anyways at like 10fps and fucking loved it lol
Witcher 3. I played the first two on my old laptop but waited to upgrade for that one.
Kena: Bridge of spirits.
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.
Holy shit how have I never heard of this game? It looks amazing. It’s giving me massive Fable vibes.
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
Heretic.
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.
Officially- Bioshock Infinite.
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
