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The first game your computer struggled to play

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Phediuk

Member
You know, the first game where you knew that you needed a better computer to do it justice.

I remember playing King's Quest 3 in CGA, and even back then, I knew I was getting a gimped experience.

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eww.
 
Diablo 2. In fact, Diablo 2 was the first game I actually played on PC. Family was pro Apple at the time... not any more though. :P
 
I remember playing World of Warcraft at 800x600 on low graphics with like 30fps in an empty area like Mulgore.

But dense cities... the nightmares.
 
I think I had to change something for Jazz Jackrabbit or Jill of the jungle to get sound working properly. Dont remember clearly. Had no problems doing doom and doom II at launch though.
 
Not sure if it counts, but my first gaming computer had no sound card. So I had to check which games could run without that card. I got Venom/Spider-Man: Separation Anxiety. and I couldn't run it because it needed a sound card.
 
The SiN demo ran well enough on my family's Pentium 200MHz/32MB RAM/2MB S3 Somethingrather system, however the full game wasn't 32MB-friendly at all and virtually unplayable, which was particularly disappointing as I received the game for Christmas. I had to wait for patches, which, at the time, I got via the monthly PC PowerPlay demo discs.
 
Quake III Arena but only because game started at high-quality settings by default.

After a crash, I tweaked the settings to mid-low and my S3 Savage 4 Pro was capable of running it :D
 
Bleem!

I purchased it to play ps1 games in high res, and my pc could barely manage to play it with a voodoo 2. I upgraded my pc for the pleasure.
 
Trying to remember for sure but think it was probably Logical Journey of the Zoombinis or FIFA 97. I think I couldn't get Zoombinis to work properly on Windows 3.1 on our old family PC. If not that, I remember FIFA 97 was a juddering mess on the PC we bought after that, like wading through treacle. Same with FMV heavy games like Phantasmagoria that mates brought round to play, couldn't deal with it.

The first game I fully remember that I couldn't get to work at all was:

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Was on my shelf for years and years and our PC just couldn't play it.
 
Original Counter-Strike. Going around the corner from CT spawn in cs_assault would always cause an FPS drop. Got a 2nd stick of RAM (My first ever PC upgrade iirc, though my Voodoo 2 might have preceded that now that I think about it), dropped it in and the FPS fluctuation was completely gone. It was an amazing experience honestly.
 
All of them because of integrated graphics. Mostly stuck to older games or none GPU dependant stuff on our first system as a kid.
 
The first PC I built. It was a Pentium 100 with 16 mb RAM and a Matrox Mystique graphics card that came with a copy of Mechwarrior 2, which ran like ass. I remember I was super disappointed, coming from the Amiga where everything ran fine on a 7 MHz CPU.
 
I was down at Blackpool and got my mum to buy me Resident Evil 2. When I got back home the game wouldn't run. All it showed was a black screen :(

It could run Tresspasser though :|
 
Frogger (1997)

Played it at a solid 5fps. I was a kid so I dealt with it. When my dad got a better computer and I played it again I felt like I was seeing at the speed of light.
 
Rise of The Tomb Raider. Upgraded for the first time a few months ago in five years. I tried playing it with a core 2 duo and a radeon 5 series card. It barely managed 720p resolution and a frame rate in the high-teens.

I don't want to think what it cost me to play that game after upgrading (i7-6700k, gtx1080, etc).
 
Bioshock. Ran at sub-30fps with it set to 640x480 + lowest settings This was years ago, before PC became my primary platform, and I never did upgrade that exact machine. Though recently, DOOM ran awful on my GTX 760, and it was the game that got me to upgrade to a 1060. First time a game's pushed me to upgrade my PC.
 
I've been playing PC games since the early 90s, earlier than that if you count other people's computers. I'd say the first game I had problems running (besides missing out on CGA graphics in Wizardry on a roommate's monochrome-monitor equipped PC) was Wing Commander 2. My roomie at that time could run it on his system, I could not on my 386sx-16 with 4 megs of RAM.

I also had some problems running games on a Mac mini for a while, which I ran from 2006-2008 or so (it broke due to brownouts - got a UPS but it was too late.)

Then I had a core2quad gateway PC desktop, I equipped it with a low-profile 9500 GT, and ran games on medium to low settings from the Xbox 360 era until Skyrim wouldn't run on it except at real ugly low settings. I got it for my Xbox 360 at that point, which wasn't all that much better I suppose, and didn't play it on PC again until I had a 750ti in an i3 server, which ran original Skyrim at ultra settings. (I haven't tried it on Special Edition; the 750ti lives in my r9 390X system as a PhysX coprocessor in Windows 10 now.)

Now I have built a gaming-rig, and pretty much can run nearly anything at 1080p60fps. I've pretty much given up on gaming on affordable prebuilt PCs though, nobody seems to make balanced affordable PC gaming rigs that you don't assemble out of parts yourself. I've seen countless PCs labeled as "gaming" systems with either horrid parts for that or horrid prices, or both, though... so I expect this thread to go on for several pages. :)
 
Some shit point and click game called "Spud!" an adult humour game about a kid who has to go save his uncle (who happens to be Santa, but it's not explicitly said) after he's kidnapped.

I remember it had a shower scene with one of the reindeer... Boobs and all. Fucking weird.

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Couldn't run it at all, turned out I needed a card for displaying graphics!? Crazy, anyway my parents bought be a fancy new one and it ran UT99 too!
 
Command & Conquer.

I had a friend with a faster computer and I was so jealous :-(

I managed 15 - 20 fps I think at best.

Loading the first level took ages.
 
Oh man. The original Doom fucked my shit up.

Next computer struggled with Duke Nukem 3D.

After that, it was Quake.


I was never caught up to the most recent games. I was always a couple years or more behind. Well, until just two weeks ago when I built my first computer.
 
I think the first one was Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time though it didn't just struggle to play it, it outright couldn't play it. (I also wasn't much of a gamer back then so I didn't really upgrade my PC with any kind of regularity or frequency.)
 
Command and Conquer Generals. Wouldn't boot because my PC was using integrated graphics at the time and 12 year old me didn't understand. I phoned EA tech support who told me what was up. Poor guys.
 
My first one!

The Lord Of The Rings RTS game from ages ago. I didn't really know anything about PC's beyond "get ATI" back then, and bought a prebuilt which had an onboard X300 chip. It really didn't work well at all. I'd been pure console before this point before getting a PC to use Ableton on.

Then began my baptism of fire about PC hardware. I got an X800GTO2 shortly after that. Oblivion got released and brought everyone's PC to their knees, which lead to me getting a PS3 to play it on.

Straw that broke the camels back on my PC next was upgrading from a 4:3 screen to 16:9 at a higher resolution. Left4Dead went from smooth and everything on High to... well, not.
 
Doom 3 literally melted my graphics card. Before that I usually kept my PC up to spec with what I was playing.

Oblivion is good one too, that shit played like a slideshow but I endured it anyway?? ????????????
 
SpacLock said:
Oh man. The original Doom fucked my shit up.

Next computer struggled with Duke Nukem 3D.

After that, it was Quake.


I was never caught up to the most recent games. I was always a couple years or more behind. Well, until just two weeks ago when I built my first computer.
Click to expand...

That reminds me of this xkcd comic.

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The original Need For Speed, in '94 or so.

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I had a 66 mhz processor, 8 megs of RAM, and goddamn joystick for some reason. A joystick, Jerry! I could really only play the game at 320x240. At 640x480, it was a literal slideshow--a new frame drew like every two seconds (so, 0.5 fps). Pretty sure discrete graphics cards didn't exist at this point, at least not for consumers. And I had to edit *.bat and *.ini files and shit to get sound working. It ran in DOS.

Despite all that, I loved this game SO MUCH. Look at this shit. It was glorious:

1088106_3d0_1.jpg
 
The one memory that sticks out is playing the Doom 3 alpha leak at sub-10 fps. I'd love to see some stats on the number of graphics cards that game sold.
 
I bought Warcraft II back in the days but it needed 8 MB RAM while I had just 4 MB. My grand parents then went out and bought me another 8MB stick so I had 12 MB RAM which was quite a lot. :o
 
brohmbel said:
The original Need For Speed, in '94 or so.

nfs.jpg


I had a 66 mhz processor, 8 megs of RAM, and goddamn joystick for some reason. A joystick, Jerry! I could really only play the game at 320x240. At 640x480, it was a literal slideshow--a new frame drew like every two seconds (so, 0.5 fps). Pretty sure discrete graphics cards didn't exist at this point, at least not for consumers. And I had to edit *.bat and *.ini files and shit to get sound working. It ran in DOS.

Despite all that, I loved this game SO MUCH. Look at this shit. It was glorious:

1088106_3d0_1.jpg
Click to expand...

Yeah, NFS still holds up incredibly well.
 
The original Test Drive in EGA (16 color). I had a 4.77 mHZ processor and I think it needed a 10.

edit: Test Drive II: The Duel, not the original.
 
I didn't even know what framerate was at the time. I just assumed the game was "loading."

Who knew that Diablo 2 wasn't supposed to run at 3fps?

When I finally spent my savings on a new computer, and could run the game at 80fps, it was like seeing for the first time.
 
The first computer I built myself on a shoestring budget had "trouble" with Half-life 2, in the sense that I had to play it in DX8, 1024x768 at around 35-45 fps. But I was coming from PS2 and Xbox, so it was still impressive to me. As soon as I got a good DX9 card and ditched the ti4400 64mb, it was buttery high res goodness!
 
I couldn't launch a demo of Tomb Raider 2 that came with some Tomb Raider derivatives on the family's Pentium 133 MHz computer without graphics accelerator card, although this computer could play the full-3D-full-voice-acting-tremendous-music Little Big Adventure 2 with no issues at the time !

My dad later bought a new computer with 600 MHz CPU, a glorious GeForce 256 Anhihilator Pro and 256 MB of RAM but my interest for Tomb Raider had then sunk and I didn't even bother to install this demo, LBA 2 always had a placec on the HDD though.

Oh ! And Final Fantasy VII on PC. This one didn't work at all... Traded it for Diablo at the videogame store back then, couldn't get past the Butcher and eventually finished the game about 10-15 years later.
 
I remember never adavanced past a point in Phantom of Opera because the lack of ram in my 386 sx. No matter what I tried with autoxec and himem.sys. In the 2000s I get a new video card just to play Bioshock.
 
Hitman. Friends in school were talking about this cool game were you work as an assassin an can take people's costumes and work in disguise. I was gutted when I bought it and it had a terrible framerate on my PC.
 
Castle Wolfenstein... back then I only had a 386 my dad got from an office sell off, to play around with (or as he liked to think, learning how to become an accountant)
Castle Wolfenstein would run, but just barely. Biggest achievement was to install Win 3.1 on it (came on 11 floppys if I recall correctly)

My first own PC only started to struggle with Far Cry and to an extend BF2 (mostly the expansion packs). Come to think of it, I stopped PC gaming pretty much then.
 
Some of the effects in Supreme Commander murdered whatever graphics card I had at the time. Mass Effect 2 was quite slow everywhere so that was another card upgrade.
 
Not 100% sure, but I think it was Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear.

I remember it running like shit on the 4 MB integrated card and going with my brother to a store to get a new video card.

I think we ended up getting a Voodoo 3 3000 16MB.
 
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