So, once again, I'm unable to play Beat Hazard. I tried to start the game and was rewarded with an eternal black screen.
Now, where I come from, when you want to play a video game you put the game in the system, turn it on, and begin playing. There's no updates, there's no surveys, there's much less waiting and loading, and there's NO CRASHES. I don't have to cross my fingers and pray every time I turn on my 3DS in hopes that Pokemon Y will boot - it boots 100 percent of the time, in seconds, and in less than sixty seconds after turning the system on I'm playing my game. Even my Atari and Genesis are more reliable, and they aren't 100% - I might have to wiggle the cartridge or blow on it, but at least it doesn't take five minutes to reboot. Console games that crash are usually either extremely old/dirty/corrupted or terribly coded shit-piles, but when I play PC it's just par for the course.
This is the biggest problem I have always had with PC gaming. There are four PC games I have spent great amounts of time with - Robot Wars: Arenas of Destruction, RPG Maker XP, Streets of Rage Remake, and Beat Hazard. I love these games and three of them are great at taking advantage of the fact they're on PC by using customization features that are hard or impossible to use on normal consoles, like importing your computer's graphics or music. But three of these four games are unreliable, with problems I have to wrestle with every time I play them, sometimes keeping me from playing altogether. Beat Hazard often fails to boot. Robot Wars has the same issue, and also has sound problems. Nothing about my system setup changed between these games working perfectly and them turning into gambles. RPG Maker XP, meanwhile, will crash 100% of the time when playtesting a project unless I use an annoying workaround that shouldn't be needed involving constantly editing and re-saving a Notepad file.
These problems are not acceptable. I understand things like not having a powerful enough system to run such-and-such, but here I am unable to run games I could run fine a few months or years ago on the same system. I KNOW my system can run these games, because it's run them dozens of times. So why don't they work now? It's worse when they fail to work, then work again, and then fail again. That's even MORE unacceptable! Now it's just randomly crashing for no reason! My GameCube doesn't just decide it can't play Skies of Arcadia today, that's nonsense!
I can't rely on it at all. Every time I play a PC game I have to treat it like I may never get to play it again. Until PC gaming lets me play my games 100 percent of the time guaranteed like a console would, I can only see it as a novelty and occasional source for games I can't otherwise play, not a "real" gaming system I get new games from regularly, and certainly not something I spend more than pocket change on for new games. It's far too risky to pay for a full-price game if I don't even know if it will boot.
PC Land seems nice and all, but it won't let me appreciate it properly. I might get a new computer in a year or two. It might make Steam more reliable, but it might lock me out of Robot Wars or RPG Maker. Who knows for sure? I don't.
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