Bean

To find out the system requirements for a game? Really! You would think that this would be something that is readily available on the website, but no. Most publishers hide the information so that I'm forced to go to Wikipedia, or online forums to find out.

Is it that hard for them to understand that I want to know if I can run the game? I'd hate to think the gaming companies are so stupid as to think that by hiding them they get more sales, because 90% of those people are gonna bog down the tech departments screaming about not being able to play.

Take THIS game for example.

Can you find, without difficulty, the system specs for this game? I couldn't. But they sure as hell have a nice easy one click solution for BUYING the game.

Not convinced? Try THIS one. Couldn't find em. I found all kinds of information about the "Collectors Edition" but not wether I could run it or not.

Is it that fucking hard, for a publisher, while putting up all those fancy flash animations, and wonderful screenshots, and links to buy, to put up ONE FUCKING LINK to the system specs? Hell, it doesn't even have to be it's own dedicated link. How about putting it where someone might expect it to be? Like I dunno... how about the ABOUT THE GAME link that every publisher seems to have, but doesn't actually tell you FUCK ALL about the game!

I don't see a reason for it. Not even a cynical "They're trying to trick you" reason. There's no reason for them NOT to do it. It doesn't cost them any additional money, it HELPS the customers, and saves them the headache of dealing with people who bought the game and are outraged they can't use it.

WHAT'S THE FUCKING PROBLEM??????

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Cymro

Yeah, I feel the same way. Fortunately, I haven't bought any that my system can't handle but that's because I've been vigilant about it.

Won't have to worry for a while now though

__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Bean

Either stop bragging, or ship me your old stuff :P

I'm in a different situation. I can pretty much rest assured that my system won't run most games. Those two examples are WAAAYYY beyond what I have. But I still have that odd chance of being able to run something new, even if a little sluggishly, so I want to see those specs before I get all hyped up for it.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Cymro

I think the last game I bought was Medieval II: Total War, and it worked OK on low details unless I had a battle with too many troops. In all fairness, the same happened on Rome: Total War if I had an especially large battle with it set on Medium-High, it's mostly a matter of keeping all the extra soldiers in RAM.

The only thing stopping me from running newer games even in a limited capacity is the graphics chip. I managed to get my friend's copy of ST:Legacy to run (albeit sluggishly and with plenty of crashes) after editing the game files so it wouldn't try and use any pixel shaders, but when I tried his copy of Oblivion I just got a HUD on a blank white screen. It's because of my MoBo only having an AGP 4x slot and my Graphics Card having an outdated pixel shader version. The only game I've tried that's been released in the last couple of years that's worked well, really, was The Godfather, and that's because it was ported from the PS2. HL2: Ep 1 was OK too, I guess.

I've also found that having a program that moves all the shit Windows leaves in RAM to the paging file has a MASSIVE positive impact on some games, especially stuff using the Source Engine (which usually runs better than most games anyway).

BTW, I'm currently running:

AMD Athlon XP 2400+
128MB ATI RADEON 9200
512MB RAM
3x 80GB IDE ATA-100 HDs

And it's soon to be moved to the living room as a Media Center.

It seems to me that nowadays CPU clock speed has a lot less to do with Gaming performance, as the Graphics Card Processor, Graphics Card Memory and amount of System RAM have more to do with it. And for the record, I'm really glad that when my new system starts to get a little low, I can just add an extra Graphics Unit as well as another 4GB RAM when I need to .

__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Bean

Really? What's the name of the app you used? Maybe I'll give it a try.

I was able to get Legacy to run as well using what sounds like the same edit to the system files. It actually ran really well once I heard about the edit.

HL2 ran really well on my system. I was amazed. I didn't think it would run at all, although when I tried HL2 Episode 1, it didn't even want to start. I don't know if they did something different.. I can't see it, but who knows.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Cymro

I use TuneUp MemOptimiser, but there are a lot of apps both commercial and open source that do the same. You get a little icon in the corner that shows you how much unused RAM you have left, and you can set it to clear automatically at any given point. I have it set really low because you can't do anything for the 30 seconds it takes to clear when I don't even need it to, but I usually run the Manual Optimisation option before I run a high-powered app like a game or Photoshop.

It's quite interesting to watch the little icon, though, because for one thing, half my RAM is already used up when Windows starts. You can also see your available RAM jump up when you close certain applications, but not when you close others. The reason I need it is because Windows keeps a lot of stuff left by closed applications in RAM, which I don't need, and is perfectly fine to have on the paging file.

It's strange you had trouble with Episode 1, I found it was a little slower than HL2, but I could still run it with higher settings than most games provided I cleared the RAM first. That's actually something I as a programmer admire about Valve, they really do work on their programs to get them to run as efficiently as possible, which is something most other developers don't do. Most developers basically say "You should have upgraded by now, so there", because it saves time if they're sloppy and don't bother to hone the programs down. I like to compare it to how American car builders like to use old fashioned technology in new cars, they get away with it because American roads don't have a lot of bends in them and petrol is extremely cheap there.

__________________
"Let me tell you something about humans, nephew: They're a wonderful, friendly people - as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working.

"But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those friendly, intelligent, wonderful people...will become as nasty and as violent as the most blood-thirsty klingon."

Bean

Yeah, I suppose I should have included Valve in my other thread about big game developers. Although it's a shame they only really do Half Life games. Although I hear Portal? is fairly decent.

__________________
"I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."

--James T. Kirk

Space Goat

On the subject of tweaking for performance, this site is worth a look: TweakGuides.com. I've found it invalueable.

__________________