20 Signs You're A PC Gamer

You like a good plot line and can appreciate graphics better than console players.

Gaming takes energy. Got Caffeine?

When the game is really good losing track of a number of hours or occasionally days is not without precedent

Save, save, save. It's the gamers mantra.

You can crouch, run backwards while firing and still simultaneously jump and reload

You couldn't use an XBOX controller if your life depended on it

You know what you frame rate is and have benchmarked your system...several times

You've chosen sides, ATI or Nvidia. (And hopefully you didn't pick ATI...)

Your mouse hand can get cold or maybe it's going to fall off. Might want to take a break in a hour or two just to find out.

Farmville doesn't count as PC gaming

Your computer chair is more comfortable then your bed

On occasion computers do crash. It's the price we pay for better selection and killer graphics See #4

Four hours of gaming is just breaking in your chair

If you're an RPG player just choosing the right character can take this long!

There's always time for one more quest.

Yelling at the screen is part of the game

When your eyes glaze over it's time for a Dew break. See #2

Your mouse and keyboard are wired.

When in doubt, shoot to kill.

You fully expect to be doing this when you turn 80

The APTICOM

I found the APTICOM in my companies warehouse. I was immediately compelled to retrieve it and put in in my office. I believe the APTICOM is more than an aging job aptitude grading device. I believe it is sentient.

The APTICOM forced me to write this note to my co-workers and let them know of it's arrival.

Dear Staff:

The “APICOM” has invaded us and decided to take up residence in my office. Much is still unknown about this mysterious visitor. We don’t know everything about it yet. For one the APTICOM claims to be terrestrial but this could just be a fiendish ruse. What we are fairly certain of is this. The APTICOM is evil.

If you do stop by and see it, please don’t stare this makes the APTICOM uncomfortable.

Make no sudden moves around the APTICOM

Do not taunt the APTICOM or call it “vintage” This might enrage the APTICOM.

Do not touch the APTICOM buttons. We don’t what this implies to a being such as it.

The APTICOM doesn’t see overtly aggressive but I wouldn’t pretend it to be benign either. So feel free to come by and greet the APTICOM and assure it that we all mean it no harm.

Peter,
Servant of APTICOM

Hopefully the APTICOM is content with this but I doubt it. I see an alter in the future. Cedar incense, sweet meats and maybe a few intern sacrifices... The age of the APTICOM has arrive. Be afraid.

Holding for Abuse

I'm stilling in the Symantec Enterprise Support phone que. I've been on the phone for 26:34 at this point indicated by my phones digital readout. In between the mind numbing 50's music remixes (Bobby Vinton is belting out a painful verse of Blue Velet right now) and monotone announcements a perky voice pops on every 3 minutes and informs me:

"The customer waiting longest has been on the line for less than a minute."

This is in Symantec Time. Programed by the same people who make the progress bars. The same tech that will shortly pop on the line and say. "We can fix that in about 20 minutes or so."

This acually means that you are about to endure a three day agony of "top tier tech support" where they will mangle your data, destroy your settings and eventually conclude that a full reinstall will completely solve your issue.

"I just called to fix an issue with a pull down menu."
"Yeah and if we had known about that corrupted database this would have been much faster"
"You corrupted the database by canceling the integrity checker halfway through"
"Well it said it was going to be completed in less than a minute..."

Going Back To Geek Bootcamp

Video games. It's my real only purpose for a home PC. Sure I like email and the web, but they do not afford the real computing meat that comes from gaming, the entrée or substantial repast, if you will. Don't misunderstand, I do enjoy the occasional You-Tube side dish, but what is rice without a savory curry of RPG, FPS or RTS? Hollow. Wanting. Mac like, if you will.

Anyway. So I have an older PC that I've tried to keep current over the years. Maxed out the RAM in 2008. Bought a cutting edge GPU in 2009, upgraded to 1Tb 2010... blah blah. You know, $100 here and there over 3 years is pretty painless. Over all it has allowed me to keep up with my gaming habit with little issue. Save one little issue. My CPU. It is a sad and pitiful 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4 with almost no L2 cache. I'm ashamed to admit it, but there it is. I feel like a computing failure.

Knowing that I still didn't have a lot of coin, I thought I would just upgrade a notch to a simple dual core processor. This one specifically. I figure for $150 I could stave off the upgrade fairy for another year and still get enough power to play some newer games. Oh gentle reader, I must admit to you that I have been a long time removed from my hands in computer cases. I haven't build a computer from scratch since 2001 and had no notion of ever undertaking the endeavor again. So, it never occurred to me that my Dell mainboard with a Socket 775 wouldn't run this processor.

The resulting bios beeps where deafening. Especially since there is no return policy on processors. Ah yes, a familiar path. If you recall my GPU upgrade a couple years ago. So here I am with thermal paste on my fingers wondering what to do next?

I did what I always do. Take a bad situation and juggle it with massive amounts of poorly thought out decisions mix that with potential disaster! It's my MO!

So I shelled out for a brand new outdated mainboard and cheap unfiled computer case! I spent $89, which brought my total up to $240 something and left an astounding $6.34 in my paypal account. How stupid can one man be? It was that or have a $149 processor paperweight.

Anyway. So last night saw me trying to recall over a decade of lost skills. I felt like I was back in geek bootcamp, "Drop down and find that jumper switch pasty!!" I forgot how tedious computer builds really were. Still I did alright. Started at 7:00 and finished getting all the new drivers installed by 10:30 or so.

BTW if you upgrade your motherboard, Windows XP needs to be reactivated. It will not let you install your NIC driver first, so you must punch in two hundred thousand digits on the telephone to an electronic operator. If you weren't aggravated before you got to this point, you soon will be.

I can't complain too much. I do have a working system that is clocking about 3.4Ghz on Core 2 Duo. It is certainly a step up from where I was. And tonight? Well I think it might be time for a little DragonAge...

Too Old To Wii

My lovely bride married a geek nearly 13 years ago, and thus was entered into a world she understood very little about. In the passing years she has done a great job of adapting to this strange environment. She now is a full fledged closet trekker, has seen every episode of Stargate SG1 and liked it. She has even read countless sci and fantasy books (and a select 7 novels more than a couple times through...) Additionally she has wiped the floor with me on more than a few RTS matches. In short, my wife rocks!

In Christmas in 2009 I was blown away to receive a new Wii. We had idly talked about one for a while but as a PC gamer I hadn't given it much more than a passing fancy. I figured if I had a spare $200 bucks and the desire to fight off a couple hundred soccer moms I might pick one up. Otherwise I would just miss out on this latest gaming craze. So imagine my surprise when lo an behold under the tree, was a shiny new Wii from the aforementioned rockin' wife. There was much excitement in the room at the prospect of the body wiggling game console and the fun we would soon enjoy.

We played the sports games, had friends over and generally humiliated ourselves in the name of fun. We then bought a bunch of other games and soon had a decent collection. For a while I thought more about playing games in the living room than in the office. But it was a fleeting romance of only a month or so. The Wii requires something that I've found I don't have that much of. Exuberance.

I'm a lazy bastard and the last thing I want to do while having "fun gaming" is jump around like a ninny waving my arms and pointing this wand and Ikea tool handle at my TV. Sure it's fun for a few minutes, but after that the joy is gone and I just want to sit on my fat behind and shoot things in the face.

Ever played a role playing game on a Wii? Who wants to engage in long conversations or immersive storylines while standing up six feet from the TV? I know I can sit down, but then why wouldn't I just sit down in front of my PC and get better graphics, faster load times and a place to rest my lazy wrist and cup of Dew?

As far as I can tell I'm just too old for the Wii. I've tried to renew the love, by picking up games I thought were better suited for it. I tried the Marvel Alliance series, Raving Rabbits and party games. I just can't seem to care. So now what.

I have officially become my father. I am now an old man that cannot adapt to the new fads. Worse is that I'm not even interested in trying. Shrug. Soon I'll start pining for the, "good ol days" dressed in a pair of ratty coveralls. I'll sit on my front step and yell at the kids walking by, "Stupid Wii. Back in my day the joysticks where unresponsive, the buttons were stiff and if you moved the controller around while playing your friends made fun of you!"