On 1/24/2012 9:49 AM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote:
>> While playing through Core, I tried to shoot one of the enemies, and the
>> screen turned bright green and my headphones nearly blasted my hears off
>> with a loud buzzing tone. I had to reboot the PC to get it to respond
>> again. Putting the pain back into crashing, eh?
>
>> Best of all, when I loaded up the game again, all of the game saves from
>> the last two hours were gone.
>
>    That's the downside of PC gaming. No such problems on the consoles.
> (Ok, there are similar problems with console games as well, but they
> are way, way more rare. Perhaps in 1% of all games, while the same figure
> on the PC side is more like 50%.)
>
Wow.. Except for things just not wanting to install, or maybe 1-2 games 
that actually have crashed, and I had a fair idea why (like low memory 
resources, or the like), I literally haven't seen any of this stuff... o.O

Ok, actually there was one case, with some of the Red Faction games 
where a "known" glitch existed. Seems when the video-sync was not on 
(its off by default), on faster machines you could end up having the 
graphics engine de-synch from what ever the GPU was doing, or something, 
and somehow that left you with your mini-sub a smoking wreck. lol 
Turning on VSync fixed it.

When playing Arkham Asylum I was running on a machine that was "below 
spec", so a lot of the animation was slower than normal, in some places, 
so that "could" potentially cause the same sync issue, on a machine that 
is on/over-spec.

Only other major one I had was trying to run Halo 2 on an XP machine, 
using a trick that emulated some systems calls that are missing in the 
older DirectX. At one point one of the cut scenes does some *major* disk 
swapping, and this tries to trigger the Win Vista/7 extended disk 
caching, or something, which loads bigger chunks, much faster, but XP 
couldn't do that. So, the solution was to run a background program, for 
system diagnostics, which somehow forced the machine to use the older XP 
file fetch system, instead of trying to use the advanced, and missing, 
one. This got you past the crash, but the diagnostic thing was brain 
damaged, and kept eating up memory, with more and more data on what your 
system was doing at the time. So, if you forgot to shut it down, after 
you got past the problem, it would crash anyway, and memory was consumed 
by the other "diagnostic" process... lol

Generally, the problems, when they exist, fall into some category of 
some bit of hardware not liking how fast/slow/etc. the stuff you are 
using is, and simply changing resolution may not be the problem, but 
some other thing, like the VSync (which normally isn't at all 
necessary). Sometimes its a conflict you can't fix "at all". Telltale 
Games, for example, seem to especially have problem with mouse control, 
under anything higher than XP, for no damn sane reason. They don't track 
its movement like they should, but drag the cursor *slowly*... Who the 
heck knows why.

And, yeah, console is nice, but that is just one more piece of hardware 
that can break, it can't do what a PC can, in some cases, and they are 
always trying to stop you doing things like you could for Neverwinter, 
or others, where you can create your own content, official or otherwise. 
And, frankly, getting stuck slogging two rifles at a time, for example, 
in something like one of the STALKER games, to get money, to upgrade 
equipment, without any way to "over muscle" my inventory, would make the 
game play way longer, far more boring, and a massive pain in the ass. 
lol Better to have something like that on a PC (no idea if they ever 
made it for console though), where I can make "adjustments". ;)

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