I still vividly remember the day when my attitude towards PC gaming took a turn for the worst. With a Ziploc bag full of 3.5-inch disks, I placed each one into my computer. Had my computer worked its way through the 20-something disks, I would have played Doom on our family computer that day. Instead, I got prompted by DOS that my hardware didn’t have the power to run the game at all.
Though it wouldn’t be the last time I would attempt to play games on PC, it was the watershed moment that made me realize that I had zero tolerance for the hassle inherent to the platform at the time. I didn’t want to get left behind because I didn’t spend thousands of dollars on a high-end rig. Or fumble through DOS in order to fix some weird quirks in a game’s installation that prevent it from working as intended. Even at the cost of raw power, I don’t regret opting for the convenience of consoles ever since. The last game I remember spending any meaningful time with on PC was Descent in the mid-to-late 90s.
Fast forward to today. I’ve got a neon monolith under my desk. Though I bought it to be a dedicated streaming machine, I get the sense that it has the horsepower to run most modern games. Furthermore, thanks to a broader effort to standardize gaming on PC, it feels like the platform is a bit more plug-and-play than it used to be. Having missed out on decades of PC gaming, where do I start?
In Third Person 