Thoughts on games, work, and… well, mostly games

Moments after I saw this,

which is the error message that the Love Beta showed me to gently alert me to the fact that my hardware is too old to do anything cool, I read this:

CES 2010: Dell/Alienware announces new gaming PC netbook

in this article at bigdownload.com.

My laptop—on which I tried to run the Love Beta with the same wishful thinking that tells me Congress will “come together”—is 4 years old.  My desktop is older.

…hmm…so that’s what it feels like to give up any trace of credibility I had as a PC gamer…

I’m officially in the market for a new computer.  And this netbookish Alienware machine looks very promising.  I’m sick of building my own boxes.  The desktop I have—which I spec’d for Half Life 2—has suffered from the same undiagnosable USB-related hard freeze problem for almost 6 years now.  I put up with it because until recently I hardly ever used my desktop (I think Spore was the last game it really ran) and this particular problem only seems to occur when I’m not around.  It was fun to build my own PC when I was in college, but now that exercise would just be a huge time sink.

And now we have things like Love on the scene, which I really really really want to play on a decent machine.  I don’t think PC gaming is dead yet.  In fact, modern PCs’ processing power and the more sophisticated control schemes that keyboards and mice offer really do make certain kinds of games feasible that weren’t possible before.  I dare say that my own big game idea wouldn’t really work well on a console for that very reason.