That's not really a computer. That's the control panels from an S5W nuclear propulsion plant used on submarines built from 1960-the middle 1970's. I spent 6 years of my life sitting in front of those.
What bothers me, is the fact that tech is getting more powerful.
But MMORPG developers are using more of their resource to develop Graphics, instead of improving gamplay.
just imagine how much contents a MMORPG wuld have, if it had as much data as AoC or Aion, but had graphics like Everquest. that game would be packed full of Contents, not held down by super Graphics.
I don't like it when the graphics on the games I play are not as good as they could be, because they are trying to get money from the people with crap computers. If you care enough to be writing for MMORPG, you should be making it a priority to get your computer upgraded. Get a paper route, get another part time job...something. $150 will buy a card that will push 1920x1200 resolutions with high end settings, and mid level AA.
Can't you write off your PC as a "work expense" on your taxes? After all, you have to be able to play these games as intended to review and discuss them. That is your job. Talk to Uncle Sam, I'm sure he'll see it that way too.
2011 is looking like it's going to be a big year for MMOs. There are a lot of games coming out that look so pretty their shiny polished exteriors they're almost hypnotic and I want to play them based on that fact alone.
Well its a good thing I spent most of 2010 building a shiney new PC, mainly for FFXIV {which I do still play a little}, but since that was mostly a bust for now, I've a damned-powerful PC that can/should run everything coming out this year and next on max settings.
AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
We are passionate about games and as something we spend a lot of time doing completely justifies costs involved in wanting to play the latestest and greatest.
When AoC launched I had no issues playing with a mid dual core, 2gb ram and an 8800GT at the time I then got a 2nd 8800GT and then a 4870X2, 2x GTX285's and a GTX 480 with 4GB to 8GB ram and lots of other little upgrades.
Obviously this was not for one game but for my "hobby". People are passionate about smoking, drinking, eating out, cable TV and movie theaters. I keep money back for the hobby which I do most of
This constant upgrading is fine for people who have jobs today but for those of us on Social IN-Security who havent gotten a raise in the last two years (even though the politicians gave themselves a $3000/ month raise) it is a real PITA.
Oh well, guess I'll do some politics ranting. Just $3000? What is the politician salary in the States (Congress)? Here in Brazil there was a raise equivalent to $6000 (making the current salary equivalent to $15.7k/month, yup, near Christmas the leaders of your country suddenly feel that the pressing matter is almost doubling their own salaries, this is such a punch in the face IMO). And they have so many extras...
---
Anyway, back on the current rant, I finally did an enthusiast upgrade, my previous video card died but I decided to build a whole new machine (from a 9800 GX2, 2 GB DDR2-667, Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz to a GTX 460 SLI, 8 GB DDR3-1333, i7 3.06 GHz base setup) . Previous ones were merely due to malfunctioning hardware (fortunately, with a bigger budget available every time). It feels so good to hit the 60 FPS cap on my monitor on intensive games, after all these years living with 15-20 fps and then 25-40 fps. Hopefully I should not get a 120 Hz monitor anytime soon.
I remember the days I would be simply unable to run a game or achieve "playable" performance - Warcraft III, Half-Life and Guild Wars I'm looking at you :P Fortunately I never suffered the case of no longer being able to run a game due to increased hardware requirements, so I can't comment on that, but I know that wouldn't be a good-bye but simply a see you later.
If you're going to rant about how your current hardware isn't good enough anymore, it would help to say what your current hardware is. For all we know, you might be running anything from an Atom netbook to a Pentium III with Windows Mistake Edition to an otherwise nice system that is merely missing a video card and would be perfectly good with a $50 upgrade.
I'm not entirely sure endless graphics downgrading works on competitive online games. There are things you simply cannot change without changing the gameplay. Let's suppose i'm hiding in a vast field of tall grass moved by wind. As your machine can't handle it, you have the option to remove the grass or use some ugly static bunch of textures that make any glimpse of movement by myself totally evident.
There are some serious game experience changes as graphics change. In single player games, or online coop, it might not matter (thus you should be allowed to play however you want, even in wireframe without textures), if a game allows some form of competition, well, things definitely change and it's hard to keep the game experience same to everyone with much different graphics.
Adam the best suggestion I could give is to get a job that pays better. And, yes, in our current economic climate that is a tall order. But that is just about the only way, shy of winning the lottery or ditching both the wife and kid, that you are going to be able to "afford" to indulge.
Well we don't have the problem you do as for the wife because I play as well as my hubby and son. But the financial end I do understand. We do upgrades or new comps at tax time. We can't afford to do it on our budget during the year. Sometimes we are able to do two then but if not the one with the most issues or older one gets upgraded and then the following year the other. Taking your wife doesn't play so have to work out something for her. But this works for us.
My wife's machine was in need of a graphics card upgrade a while back, but since she hardly games anymore I didn't wanna spend upwards of $100 for a video card she'd use twice a month or so. I poked around on eBay and found, to my great surprise, that there are quite a few sellers who build "show-off machines" that run for a single show, weekend, convention, whatever, and then they part them out. The guy I bought my card from was selling 3 identical cards he had in triple-SLI mode. Original price of the cards was around $200 each. I paid him $79 for one. They had been run for less than a day. Can't beat that.
I even asked him how he could sell them so cheap. He said he builds rigs like that and is essentially "sponsored" by companies, so he gets the parts dirt cheap, the company gets the exposure.
No godless person can comprehend those minute distinctions in doctrine that provide true believers excuse for mayhem. -Glen Cook
This is my problem exactly. My PC is a joke! It doesn't even run games like Oblivion and it had some trouble running other games. Thank god I can play FM 2011 and some other games. I can't even play Fists of Fuu with full window without having some errors in the collours. If I could show you the how my image looks when I fly in a mmorpg called DOMO, most of the players had already left the game without login in lol
I don't want to show that I'm like a fanboi of Guild Wars 2 (there, I said it lol) but I have to say that FINALLY a great mmorpg is going to release that will mostly probably run in this computer. Why do I say this? well, because of 2 things:
1- They said they are making GW2 to run in older-end computer, it will run well in computers that run GW1 in mid-graphic requirements.
2- this PC, although it drops sh*t in most games, has really run smoothly in Guild Wars 1, and in high-graphic requirements for the game (One of the few games where I can see great water and fire lol). That means, I can wait for a AAA game, to release probably this year, where I can play in this PC.
I just hope other game devs follow the same example of Arena.net devs and start doing their games to have at least a "look like crap" option. I remmember that Perfect World had that option to use in crowded areas, and that was one of the few things I blessed them for doing.
I wouldn't mind the games requiring top end systems if the games performance justified it. I think a lot of it these days is simply that coders have gotten lazy and/or poorly educated over the last generation. It shouldn't take a top end machine to deliver a game that looks, plays and feels like it could have been cutting edge 10 yrs ago.
I have to agree with eric coding has become very horrible. I built a high end for AoC it ran excellent until you did seiges which would stutter and freeze and that was just a 50 v 50. Then before Aion came out i built my latest high end. (specs below)
Asus P6T Deluxe V2
I7 920 @ 3.9 Ghz
12 Gig ram @ 1920 Mghz
2 1TB HDD's raid 0
gtx 295 dual pcb edition not the single pcb edition
Zalman 1000 watt PSU
all in a new Lian Li PC-80 full tower
Guess what they couldn't even get seiges to work even when high end machines dropped everything to low.
Moral of this story is that all the high end machines seem to improve upon is single player games, because developers of mmo's don't care about the life of the game anymore. All they are interested in is getting a huge game sale at the start and then squeze the consumer dry for about 2 years till their next game comes out.
This is my problem exactly. My PC is a joke! It doesn't even run games like Oblivion and it had some trouble running other games. Thank god I can play FM 2011 and some other games. I can't even play Fists of Fuu with full window without having some errors in the collours. If I could show you the how my image looks when I fly in a mmorpg called DOMO, most of the players had already left the game without login in lol
I don't want to show that I'm like a fanboi of Guild Wars 2 (there, I said it lol) but I have to say that FINALLY a great mmorpg is going to release that will mostly probably run in this computer. Why do I say this? well, because of 2 things:
1- They said they are making GW2 to run in older-end computer, it will run well in computers that run GW1 in mid-graphic requirements.
2- this PC, although it drops sh*t in most games, has really run smoothly in Guild Wars 1, and in high-graphic requirements for the game (One of the few games where I can see great water and fire lol). That means, I can wait for a AAA game, to release probably this year, where I can play in this PC.
I just hope other game devs follow the same example of Arena.net devs and start doing their games to have at least a "look like crap" option. I remmember that Perfect World had that option to use in crowded areas, and that was one of the few things I blessed them for doing.
Ah, thanks for posting that. I've been racking my brains trying to remember which company had recently stated that the intended their game to be able to run well on older machines, and I just couldn't remember who it was. ArenaNet ftw once again ^^
I remember the drastic upgrades for EQ. But then, I had a job at the time so spouse and moi were able to keep playing.
What I don't understand is games that seem to have roughly the same requirements (so that a little tweaking of video settings ought to give you smooth play) but some run well and some are just painfully unplayable.
I understood when I loaded Rift onto my old laptop - it was clearly below min specs and I thought it wouldn't run at all...but I had to try you know. Actually, it did run, but every once in a while I would get a nasty error message and have to restart. So I went to my new system which seemed to clearly be midrange between the min and max specs. And it runs without the restarts I had on the older machine, but it is just on the wrong side of being painfully slow (i.e. 5-20 fps varying). I am really hoping they get the coding improved for the launch (there are rumors that there is a lot of diagnostic stuff going on during the beta for testing). But why do people who have comps with comparable/worse specs than me talk about fps that is several times better? I agree with others that GW did run well --- and WoW for that matter (I haven't tried Cat).
I will say it again because it never gets old - the game has to run smooth first. Then I will worry about everything else. If they can get MP FPS games to run fairly smooth, why not MMOs?
You can put together a whole new PC for $400 - $500 on budget parts if you travel the AMD route. In fact I've built comps cheaper too. You are willing to spend a lot of time playing free MMOs, and im sure you even have your subscription model of a game and spend money on your habits...Considering you also work and earn a living, giving you some rights to your own money.
...And the best you can come up with is a rant about how your wife is the boss and you can't afford a new PC, when I am sure given human nature, you and your wife spend money to fuel your own habits.
Seriously! If you are waiting for a newborn and are pressed for time, how come you post here rather than focusing on working harder for some entertainment and your own way?
If you call that old, than my laptop is its grandpa and my desktop is dead for 100 years. HD graphic card with 1GB? DDR3? Intel i7?... I don't wanna be rude but.... it made me LMAO! That's what is selling best in the main tech stores right now in my country! o.o
If you both work full time with decent wages then buying a new computer or rather building one yourself should be a non-issue.
To you new computer builders out there on a budget this is my recommendation:
CPU: Intel Core i5-2400 @ 3.1GHz
Memory: 4GB DDR3 or more
Motherboard: Any with the Intel P67 chipset
Graphics card: The upcoming GTX 560
Match that up with a good looking computer case and you are good to go... oh and when coming to power supplies I recommend Corsair in the 700 to 800 Watt range
I forgot about harddisk drives, don't buy anyone smaller than 500GB and make sure that it's a SATA six Gigabits per second because that's the latest in HDD speeds for the average consumer
Try saving. As in, save $20-$40 a week. Everyone says they can't do that but mysteriously they come up with the money when it's something important to them. After a year, you can get the latest system (not high end but still very good) for a decent price & voila, you will be able to play GW2 not long after its launch ;-)
I wouldn't mind the games requiring top end systems if the games performance justified it. I think a lot of it these days is simply that coders have gotten lazy and/or poorly educated over the last generation. It shouldn't take a top end machine to deliver a game that looks, plays and feels like it could have been cutting edge 10 yrs ago.
I agree wholeheartedly with the blog and this. The problem with a lot of newer MMORPGs on the market is that it's mostly looks and not so much content and gameplay. I want to play a game, not stare at pretty graphics all the live-long day.
The way developers go about making their games nowadays follows the Apple syndrome: everyone's so quick to go with the latest trend in technology that things become obsolete in a matter of months. I don't want to have to save up to buy a new system to play a particular game only for it to be obsolete when I want to try out another new game that comes out later. Not a lot of people have the kind of money to go buy system after system just because developers can't be arsed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. If Blizzard can optimize World of Warcraft to be playable on computers with generic graphic cards and such, why doesn't everyone else? It all comes down to laziness. Developers want WoW numbers, but aren't willing to put in the work to rake them in.
If you're rich enough to buy upgrades for your PC (or buy multiple PCs and/or gaming systems) in order to try out the newest games, good for you. You're the Paris Hilton of the gaming world. But for people like me and the blogger, if I'm going to be spending a lot of money on a hobby such as gaming, I'd much rather invest in something that'll last me at least a few years.
Comments
That's not really a computer. That's the control panels from an S5W nuclear propulsion plant used on submarines built from 1960-the middle 1970's. I spent 6 years of my life sitting in front of those.
What bothers me, is the fact that tech is getting more powerful.
But MMORPG developers are using more of their resource to develop Graphics, instead of improving gamplay.
just imagine how much contents a MMORPG wuld have, if it had as much data as AoC or Aion, but had graphics like Everquest. that game would be packed full of Contents, not held down by super Graphics.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I don't like it when the graphics on the games I play are not as good as they could be, because they are trying to get money from the people with crap computers. If you care enough to be writing for MMORPG, you should be making it a priority to get your computer upgraded. Get a paper route, get another part time job...something. $150 will buy a card that will push 1920x1200 resolutions with high end settings, and mid level AA.
Can't you write off your PC as a "work expense" on your taxes? After all, you have to be able to play these games as intended to review and discuss them. That is your job. Talk to Uncle Sam, I'm sure he'll see it that way too.
Well its a good thing I spent most of 2010 building a shiney new PC, mainly for FFXIV {which I do still play a little}, but since that was mostly a bust for now, I've a damned-powerful PC that can/should run everything coming out this year and next on max settings.
Here is what I bought:
Motherboard: EVGA P55 FTW 200 SLI
CPU: Intel Core i7-K875 Lynnfield 2.93GHz {OC 3.53GHz}
GPU: EVGA GTX 570
Monitor: 40" Proscan HDTV
Case: Antec 1200
PSU: Antec 750w
RAM: 8GB A-DATA Gaming Series DDR3 1600
HDD: Hitachi 1TB 7200
OS: Windows 7 64bit
Even though I just air-dusted it, and behold many many purdy lights!
We are passionate about games and as something we spend a lot of time doing completely justifies costs involved in wanting to play the latestest and greatest.
When AoC launched I had no issues playing with a mid dual core, 2gb ram and an 8800GT at the time I then got a 2nd 8800GT and then a 4870X2, 2x GTX285's and a GTX 480 with 4GB to 8GB ram and lots of other little upgrades.
Obviously this was not for one game but for my "hobby". People are passionate about smoking, drinking, eating out, cable TV and movie theaters. I keep money back for the hobby which I do most of
Oh well, guess I'll do some politics ranting. Just $3000? What is the politician salary in the States (Congress)? Here in Brazil there was a raise equivalent to $6000 (making the current salary equivalent to $15.7k/month, yup, near Christmas the leaders of your country suddenly feel that the pressing matter is almost doubling their own salaries, this is such a punch in the face IMO). And they have so many extras...
---
Anyway, back on the current rant, I finally did an enthusiast upgrade, my previous video card died but I decided to build a whole new machine (from a 9800 GX2, 2 GB DDR2-667, Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz to a GTX 460 SLI, 8 GB DDR3-1333, i7 3.06 GHz base setup) . Previous ones were merely due to malfunctioning hardware (fortunately, with a bigger budget available every time). It feels so good to hit the 60 FPS cap on my monitor on intensive games, after all these years living with 15-20 fps and then 25-40 fps. Hopefully I should not get a 120 Hz monitor anytime soon.
I remember the days I would be simply unable to run a game or achieve "playable" performance - Warcraft III, Half-Life and Guild Wars I'm looking at you :P Fortunately I never suffered the case of no longer being able to run a game due to increased hardware requirements, so I can't comment on that, but I know that wouldn't be a good-bye but simply a see you later.
If you're going to rant about how your current hardware isn't good enough anymore, it would help to say what your current hardware is. For all we know, you might be running anything from an Atom netbook to a Pentium III with Windows Mistake Edition to an otherwise nice system that is merely missing a video card and would be perfectly good with a $50 upgrade.
I'm not entirely sure endless graphics downgrading works on competitive online games. There are things you simply cannot change without changing the gameplay. Let's suppose i'm hiding in a vast field of tall grass moved by wind. As your machine can't handle it, you have the option to remove the grass or use some ugly static bunch of textures that make any glimpse of movement by myself totally evident.
There are some serious game experience changes as graphics change. In single player games, or online coop, it might not matter (thus you should be allowed to play however you want, even in wireframe without textures), if a game allows some form of competition, well, things definitely change and it's hard to keep the game experience same to everyone with much different graphics.
Adam the best suggestion I could give is to get a job that pays better. And, yes, in our current economic climate that is a tall order. But that is just about the only way, shy of winning the lottery or ditching both the wife and kid, that you are going to be able to "afford" to indulge.
tell your wife to lay off buying makeup for a month , be a man and upgrade your pc
so say we all
Well we don't have the problem you do as for the wife because I play as well as my hubby and son. But the financial end I do understand. We do upgrades or new comps at tax time. We can't afford to do it on our budget during the year. Sometimes we are able to do two then but if not the one with the most issues or older one gets upgraded and then the following year the other. Taking your wife doesn't play so have to work out something for her. But this works for us.
Gikku
I hate to say it, but eBay is the ticket.
My wife's machine was in need of a graphics card upgrade a while back, but since she hardly games anymore I didn't wanna spend upwards of $100 for a video card she'd use twice a month or so. I poked around on eBay and found, to my great surprise, that there are quite a few sellers who build "show-off machines" that run for a single show, weekend, convention, whatever, and then they part them out. The guy I bought my card from was selling 3 identical cards he had in triple-SLI mode. Original price of the cards was around $200 each. I paid him $79 for one. They had been run for less than a day. Can't beat that.
I even asked him how he could sell them so cheap. He said he builds rigs like that and is essentially "sponsored" by companies, so he gets the parts dirt cheap, the company gets the exposure.
No godless person can comprehend those minute distinctions
in doctrine that provide true believers excuse for mayhem.
-Glen Cook
This is my problem exactly. My PC is a joke! It doesn't even run games like Oblivion and it had some trouble running other games. Thank god I can play FM 2011 and some other games. I can't even play Fists of Fuu with full window without having some errors in the collours. If I could show you the how my image looks when I fly in a mmorpg called DOMO, most of the players had already left the game without login in lol
I don't want to show that I'm like a fanboi of Guild Wars 2 (there, I said it lol) but I have to say that FINALLY a great mmorpg is going to release that will mostly probably run in this computer. Why do I say this? well, because of 2 things:
1- They said they are making GW2 to run in older-end computer, it will run well in computers that run GW1 in mid-graphic requirements.
2- this PC, although it drops sh*t in most games, has really run smoothly in Guild Wars 1, and in high-graphic requirements for the game (One of the few games where I can see great water and fire lol). That means, I can wait for a AAA game, to release probably this year, where I can play in this PC.
I just hope other game devs follow the same example of Arena.net devs and start doing their games to have at least a "look like crap" option. I remmember that Perfect World had that option to use in crowded areas, and that was one of the few things I blessed them for doing.
I have to agree with eric coding has become very horrible. I built a high end for AoC it ran excellent until you did seiges which would stutter and freeze and that was just a 50 v 50. Then before Aion came out i built my latest high end. (specs below)
Asus P6T Deluxe V2
I7 920 @ 3.9 Ghz
12 Gig ram @ 1920 Mghz
2 1TB HDD's raid 0
gtx 295 dual pcb edition not the single pcb edition
Zalman 1000 watt PSU
all in a new Lian Li PC-80 full tower
Guess what they couldn't even get seiges to work even when high end machines dropped everything to low.
Moral of this story is that all the high end machines seem to improve upon is single player games, because developers of mmo's don't care about the life of the game anymore. All they are interested in is getting a huge game sale at the start and then squeze the consumer dry for about 2 years till their next game comes out.
Ah, thanks for posting that. I've been racking my brains trying to remember which company had recently stated that the intended their game to be able to run well on older machines, and I just couldn't remember who it was. ArenaNet ftw once again ^^
I remember the drastic upgrades for EQ. But then, I had a job at the time so spouse and moi were able to keep playing.
What I don't understand is games that seem to have roughly the same requirements (so that a little tweaking of video settings ought to give you smooth play) but some run well and some are just painfully unplayable.
I understood when I loaded Rift onto my old laptop - it was clearly below min specs and I thought it wouldn't run at all...but I had to try you know. Actually, it did run, but every once in a while I would get a nasty error message and have to restart. So I went to my new system which seemed to clearly be midrange between the min and max specs. And it runs without the restarts I had on the older machine, but it is just on the wrong side of being painfully slow (i.e. 5-20 fps varying). I am really hoping they get the coding improved for the launch (there are rumors that there is a lot of diagnostic stuff going on during the beta for testing). But why do people who have comps with comparable/worse specs than me talk about fps that is several times better? I agree with others that GW did run well --- and WoW for that matter (I haven't tried Cat).
I will say it again because it never gets old - the game has to run smooth first. Then I will worry about everything else. If they can get MP FPS games to run fairly smooth, why not MMOs?
---------------------------
Rose-lipped maidens,
Light-foot lads...
You can put together a whole new PC for $400 - $500 on budget parts if you travel the AMD route. In fact I've built comps cheaper too. You are willing to spend a lot of time playing free MMOs, and im sure you even have your subscription model of a game and spend money on your habits...Considering you also work and earn a living, giving you some rights to your own money.
...And the best you can come up with is a rant about how your wife is the boss and you can't afford a new PC, when I am sure given human nature, you and your wife spend money to fuel your own habits.
Seriously! If you are waiting for a newborn and are pressed for time, how come you post here rather than focusing on working harder for some entertainment and your own way?
I still running my old 'puter and it makes all work:
Intel i7 Extreme 965 3,2 GHz, ProlimaTech Megahalems, Scythe S-Flex 120mm 1600rpm [object Window]Fluid Dynamic Bearing[object Window], Gigabyte GA-EX58A-UD7, 12 GB (6x2GB) Corsair TR3X6G1600C9 Matched XMS3, Gigabyte Radeon HD 5870 Super OverClocked 1 GB GDDR3 PCIex2.0, 2 x 2000 GB SATA2 Hitachi, Liteon 20A1L SATA DVD-RW, ThermalTake Toughpower 1200W PSU , Chieftec LBX-01BBB MediumTower, 30[object Window] Dell 3008WFP
If you call that old, than my laptop is its grandpa and my desktop is dead for 100 years. HD graphic card with 1GB? DDR3? Intel i7?... I don't wanna be rude but.... it made me LMAO! That's what is selling best in the main tech stores right now in my country! o.o
If you both work full time with decent wages then buying a new computer or rather building one yourself should be a non-issue.
To you new computer builders out there on a budget this is my recommendation:
CPU: Intel Core i5-2400 @ 3.1GHz
Memory: 4GB DDR3 or more
Motherboard: Any with the Intel P67 chipset
Graphics card: The upcoming GTX 560
Match that up with a good looking computer case and you are good to go... oh and when coming to power supplies I recommend Corsair in the 700 to 800 Watt range
I forgot about harddisk drives, don't buy anyone smaller than 500GB and make sure that it's a SATA six Gigabits per second because that's the latest in HDD speeds for the average consumer
Sorry dude, grow a pair of balls and just buy.
I'm willing to bet your wife will deal with it and forgive you as opposed to becoming a single mother.
Try saving. As in, save $20-$40 a week. Everyone says they can't do that but mysteriously they come up with the money when it's something important to them. After a year, you can get the latest system (not high end but still very good) for a decent price & voila, you will be able to play GW2 not long after its launch ;-)
I agree wholeheartedly with the blog and this. The problem with a lot of newer MMORPGs on the market is that it's mostly looks and not so much content and gameplay. I want to play a game, not stare at pretty graphics all the live-long day.
The way developers go about making their games nowadays follows the Apple syndrome: everyone's so quick to go with the latest trend in technology that things become obsolete in a matter of months. I don't want to have to save up to buy a new system to play a particular game only for it to be obsolete when I want to try out another new game that comes out later. Not a lot of people have the kind of money to go buy system after system just because developers can't be arsed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. If Blizzard can optimize World of Warcraft to be playable on computers with generic graphic cards and such, why doesn't everyone else? It all comes down to laziness. Developers want WoW numbers, but aren't willing to put in the work to rake them in.
If you're rich enough to buy upgrades for your PC (or buy multiple PCs and/or gaming systems) in order to try out the newest games, good for you. You're the Paris Hilton of the gaming world. But for people like me and the blogger, if I'm going to be spending a lot of money on a hobby such as gaming, I'd much rather invest in something that'll last me at least a few years.