Lesson on buying PC games

Not only I fell for this many times before but many of my friends and their friends have experienced this problem in buying moderately recent released version of PC games.

Buying the game is the cheapest part of the exercise and only fools would believe that's the end of the deal.

Unless your machine has the latest video card, inevitably after paying for the game, you are then forced to begin on the journey of upgrading. First the video card and then memory and in the extreme case literally a brand new box because the CPU is not fast enough.

I have never heard of one case in which a games console game forcing the owner of the console to upgrade. If the game is labeled to run on PS2 , XBox or XBox 360 you pop the game in and it runs flawlessly. Why can't PC game developer doing the same thing, writing to some most commonly found hardware configuration rather than using a very narrow set of the latest and greatest hardware? Could it be some symbiotic relationship with hardware manufacturer?

Just like this afternoon, I was called by cousin to rescue his system.

They bought this game for the son. The game wouldn't run on their GForce card. So they upgraded the card as required by the game. Started the game and after the intro and set up to begin playing, machine threw up a message that looked like someone has pressed the power down button.

Took a look at the card, I suspected the old 400W power supply could not meet the surge. The regulator may be faulty. I did a quick transplant of my spare 400W power supply and off it went and the game played, albeit a bit slow. So the next was a search on the net for memory and that looked like a good time to bid my cousin goodbye.

This hopefully will serve as a lesson to anyone contemplating on buying PC game.

After adding up all the cost (of course my service call was free) and hassle he could have bought 2 or more console games. Never will I consider a PC game.