[GLLUG] Building a new system

[Jeremy Bowers]

Keyes, Randall wrote:
> If you can't laugh at yourself... :)
> 
> Still, my wife is a PC gamer who constantly is cursing M$, so if you 
> folk hear of a viable alternative for playing PC games on another OS, 
> let us know. :)
> 
> I hope to get WINE running on a machine for her this fall, but I've seen 
> mixed reviews.  She's a heavy RPG'r.

Seriously... consider a console. I always thought of myself as a 
computer gamer but lately gaming rigs have gotten *much* more expensive, 
relatively speaking.

What do I mean by that? I mean that it used to be you *had* to drop 
thousands of dollars on a system to satisfy a "computer person" like me. 
At that point, spend $200 on a graphics card and *bam*, top-of-the-line 
gaming system. So in a way, only the $200+ graphics card was "gaming" 
expenditures.

Now that the processors and all have advanced so far past the apps, 
that's not as true as it used to be. I have a Duron 800 MHz at home, and 
*no desire* to upgrade. With a nVidia TNT2 in it, it's a great little 
system for almost everything I want to do. To replace it now is 
impossible, because you can't buy that cheap anymore. ;-)

Thus, to keep up with computer gaming now costs thousands for the latest 
CPU and graphics and a lot of other stuff, which is now *not* necessary 
to have a decently usable system. So to a person like me, the true price 
of computer gaming has skyrocketed in the last few years.

The only issue is what kind of RPG your wife is into. The big consoles 
like the PS2 tend to have what I think of as "nose stinging" RPGs... 
after being led around by the nose for 40 hours, your nose starts 
stinging. (I enjoyed Skies of Arcadia, for instance, but after being 
raised on Fallout and other computer RPGs, it never once challenged me 
with anything like a non-linear dungeon; I guess that would be too scary 
for their target audience.)

At the risk of being tarred and feathered, I'm seriously thinking of 
picking up an XBox sometime in the next few months, for Star Wars: 
Knights of the Old Republic, and Morrowind, for the upcoming "Game of 
the Year Edition" (market-speak for "gold" version containing the 
expansion packs built-in, apparently), both very computery-type RPGs in 
terms of freedom. (The console crowd are going ga-ga over the freedom in 
those games; hopefully "they" figure out what "we" computer RPG-ers have 
known for a while and console reviewers start to bitch about linearity 
in their RPGs... but I digress.) (Yeah, Microsoft may suck but I have no 
loyalty and low opinions of Nintendo and Sony as corporations too, so 
what are you going to do?)

Something worth thinking about. Also, some games do run OK in Wine, and 
it can be worth trying them out to see which they are. For instance, 
Fallout runs flawlessly under wine (except sometimes the videos lock up, 
so skip them), so that's one less reason to reboot for me. You may not 
be able to run them all in Linux, but every one you can move over is 
that much cooler.