I bought my first video card ever with a gift card I received for my birthday. Picked up an nVidia GeForce FX 5200 PCI. Which would be something to brag about if it were 5 years ago and AGP slots had never been invented. I really just picked it up to run Beryl more smoothly than the 3-4 year-old integrated chip was doing.
Picture doesn’t cut it, try a live CD
But, I haven’t purchased any games lately (more than 3 months, easy). Xbox is officially dead. No new games coming out and why can’t I even buy a replacement Xbox Live headset anymore? (I’ll take Forced Obsolescence for $400, Alex). There are a couple games I still kinda want to pick up, being in the bargain bin and not owning a 360. I have a few games for the DS to finish, but nothing much has come out lately. Looks like Spring might deliver some good games.
I’ve noticed the DS has a different economy than other consoles. For Xbox, a game would start at $50. If it was a mover, it would stay at $50, otherwise — after realizing that gamers realized this game wasn’t worth $50 — there would be a price drop. This would continue until about the $20 range, unless it’s a few years old and everybody has it, where it drops to $10. Used games aplenty at dedicated game stores. For the DS, games start at $30-$35. They don’t drop very far. It seems like when a game stops selling, they don’t drop the price through the floor, but just stop making the game altogether. My “wait until it’s dirt cheap” strategy doesn’t apply here. I mean, Super Mario 64 DS for $30, after at least 2 years of being out?
Also, there is an obvious lack of native Linux support in games. There are some pretty good open-source titles, and a handful of commercial games. One development house that makes it look easy to make games for Linux is id. I installed Quake III: Arena after moving to Linux more than a year ago and it ran fantastically. It ran okay under XP, but it ran much smoother without all the overhead of a Windows OS/anti-virus/etc. I installed Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory after getting this video card and it ran very smooth. Feels so strange to have a decent frame rate on 3D PC games. Been into consoles for so long, the last PC game I played where I was within the recommended specs was probably Doom 2 (that’s 1994, folks).
So, since I wanted to stop at Best Buy to pick up some CD-Rs (I swear I buy at least 200 of these a year), I also picked up Quake IV for the PC. I really loved Quake 1, sadly skipped on Quake 2 (think I had an pathetic excuse for a PC at that time), played a fair amount of Q3A (even though there was no story and single player was just multi-player with bots). I’m just skating by the minimum specs, so maybe this will motivate me to start buying parts for a more modern system.
Minimum specs (my specs)
- Pentium 4 2.0Ghz (P4 2.4Ghz)
- 512MB RAM (1024MB)
- 64MB GeForce 3-7 Series (256MB GeForce 5200 [PCI])