The Second-to-Last Straw

I give up! You win. I'll never play console-ports again.

Last night I came to the (sad) conclusion that whenever it comes to pc games that you'll (see: me) always encounter weird problems that you'll rarely have if you just bought it for a console instead. Sure, it'll play better, have better graphics and integration.. but the convenience of knowing it will work is starting to become a big factor.


Take Skyrim for example; when I first blogged about it, I was trying to decide whether I should get it for the pc or 360. I had at the end chosen the 360 because I knew that there would be no problems at all. I did have the very rare crash which had me very paranoid causing me to save every 5 minutes. In my defense though, you can do alot in 5 minutes. 


Then you try it on the pc with the first obstacle of installation; it was like jumping through hoops and it took forever (7hours), unlike the 5ish minutes of installing it to the harddrive of the 360. Almost like day and night, playing the game with a mouse/keyboard configuration was much more convenient and accurate. Hot keys for weapons, spells and potions made combat much easier. Then came the familiar gray screen of death; sometimes coming after a meer 30 minutes of gameplay.. othertimes after 2 hours. I saved even more frequently but gave up last night. Trying to go to safe mode crashed my pc. Deleting registries and reinstalling drivers didn't work.


So I then tried to play some Mass Effect 3, because it worked without ever a glitch, right? WRONG.
Somewhere between the new dlc and all the deletion of registries, updating my drivers, I lost the PhysX driver.. which I prevented the game from loading. I found and reinstalled it from the internet but no luck. Maybe re-incarnation is real and I was a bad bad hacker in my last life and in this life i'm meant to suffer with unending pc issues.


I'll probably try to get a new video card (got mine second-hand from my cousin)and see whether that fixes everything. But it makes me realize how much effort I put into gaming and how it could be better invested into other areas like personal fitness or photography. I've decided (at this point) that from now on, if there is a game that is both on the pc and consoles, ill get the console version. 


Maybe board games... they don't crash.