As most of you are likely aware, steam has recently been having a rather decent-sized sale. Because of this, I purchased borderlands, due to lots of praise for it. I bought it, downloaded it, and started it up. Then I found out I couldn't play it. Apparently I am missing something called "Shader Model 3.0" a google search revelaed it to be linked to graphics cards, meaning to play the game i'd have to go out and find another graphics card. Still, i've heard graphics cards and laptops don't always fit. This means i'm either down the money i payed for the game, or down more money to buy god knows what to play it. it's happened before too, like when i bought kotor 2, and found out it doesn't work with vista, and both events cement the reasons why i stick to consoles.
this ever happen to you, or am I a disgraceful failure?
I wouldn't go so far as to call you a disgraceful failure but the fault does lie in the fact that you didn't fully check the system requirements for the game (at least that was the impression I got). While it's true that consoles are less of a hassle compared to PC's, the downside is that they are limited through a number of factors (i.e. You can't play with mods on consoles). Both PC's and consoles have their strengths and weaknesses, it's just a factor of how competent you are with either.
To answer your question in short though, no. Though some games run very poorly on my PC then I thought it would.
Yea this has happened to me before. But i am in no way saying its anyones but my own fault. But i find it more of a hassel than what its worth. I mean u have to check ram, cpu, graphics card and i mean how do u know a gfx5600 is better than a 3200x2pfc and then how do u know either is better than what is reccommmended which is a g3422blah blah(made these up just for example). So yea that is why i stick to counsils mostly but i did purchase torchlight from steam and i had to do some research to see if it woud work on my laptop but yea. If your serious about pc gaming then u have to be up on all the requirements. But for me its just easying to walk into gs and look for the xbox 360 symbol. lol.
Before I buy a PC game I'll usually have a look at CanYouRunIt (http://cyri.systemrequirementslab.com/srtest) . It's fairly useful but don't rely on it. It's more of a guide than a definite answer. But yup when I buy from Steam I always check OS requirements now, since thats happened to me a few times.
I've never bought a PC game I didn't have the requirements to run at all, but I have bought PC games that didn't work for dumb reasons, DRM or incompatibilities.
You gotta read the requirements and know what they mean.
lol, I did the same fucking thing, Now I have the borderlands icon staring me in the face laughing at me, And to make matters worse I dont have the cash to upgrade my video card for a couple months.....
" Yep. PC has a lotta things over consoles, but compatibility isn't one of those. "
Compatibility isn't that big of an issue, honestly. It's just that he has a laptop and laptops are a poor choice for any kind of modern 3D gaming. A desktop PC is much simpler. :)
I always check the system requirements before I buy a PC game, though the last time I bought one, my graphics card could just barely handle it. The game ran okay, but the graphics came out jaggy as hell.
Just be glad that we're no longer in a day and age where our PC games might be held hostage by MS-DOS.
Yep, remember it fondly after all these years, but at the time it was very frustrating.
So there I was 13 year old me, thanks to some South Korean friends I was deep into Starcraft. I heard rumblings from the few internet sites I frequented with my dial-up connection that Warcraft III was about to come out. The first game I knew that existed before it came out, very exciting for me. Later on I went to some random electronics store that I don't think exists anymore and found the collectors' edition, my mom bought it for me and there I was on the ride home, reading the manual, it was actually pretty thick. I could not contain my exitement. I salivated over every minuscule detail, except one, system requirements.
I went straight to the computer, which btw had Windows 98 and some sort of horribly slow Pentium processor. Put in the multiple CDs, followed the installation wizard and then waited for a couple of hours in anticipation to play this gift from the Blizzard gods... then it finished installing. I clicked twice on the little orc head icon and boom, got a black screen.... is it starting? I thought, nope, all my excitement came to a halt when I saw the error message saying that I lacked Directx 8 support. I had so much to learn about computers, and that day slowly but surely I learned what a Directx was and why my painfully slow computer had no chance of running Warcraft III.
So I had to wait many months until we got a new computer, nothing fancy, but light years ahead of what we had before. I made fucking sure it had a video card that supported directx 8. And so after my little research ordeal, I became "that computer guy".
I did the same thing when I thought I had Pixel shader 3 and I bought Bioshock but went into massive graphical glitches when I tried to run it. I learned from that mistake and always check the system requirements beforehand and never buy games I'm not sure will run unless they have a demo which I download and see if I can run so you aren't alone on that mistake.
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