Lady Grey, the Mayor of Bowerstone, is the national heartthrob of Albion, where Big Blue Box's Fable is set. Many have courted her, but only the Hero has a chance to secure her hand in marriage. Like the warden of the Bargate Prison, I have resorted to poetry to show the Lady the depth of my ardor. After all, there's no better form to give one's passion than the fifteen, saturnine lines of a Petrarchian sonnet.

Shades of Grey

Unwitting child of prophecy, I rose
From Oakvale's charred and ashen, flesh-stoked pyre.
"Maleficus" was born; goodness expired
With that putrid blaze, the dark path I chose--

My evil blooming, like the blackest rose.
Children decollated, guards set afire,
Death the toll for raising this orphan's ire.
Yet something clouds my polyphonic prose.

As assuredly as I quashed my foes--
Your stately Arena knelt 'fore my Will--
I knew, as I struck an heroic pose,

A piece of treasure I was missing still.
My direful stench, feared here to Katmandu,
Brings me no satisfaction, without you.

I was treated to all the graphical resplendence of Windows' famous bluescreen, and the auditory glory of the searing “BEEP” that accompanies a core physical memory dump.

As someone for whom gaming is primarily relegated to the living room, I am consistently impressed with the ingenuity and perseverance displayed, in the face of considerable adversity, by the PC community. Having recently bitten the fiduciary bullet, and treated myself to a new PC build, I have suddenly been rocketed back into the electrifying world of games that don’t work out of the box and the message boards that exist because of them, of undisciplined development houses and broken release dates, of incredible hype and dubious payoff. It’s fortunate that this masochistic group of gamers is one of the closest-knit and most-supportive anywhere. Not every video game community is so pertinacious.

In many ways, PC users are the early-adopters of video games. In our pursuit of the greatest graphical fidelity and most robust gameplay available, we must be prepared to, in many ways, get the proverbial shaft. Not every developer has the wherewithal or the desire to conduct as long and well-structured a beta test as Blizzard, with its World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, this means that games are often rushed to retail in a state hardly deserving of the denotation “gold.”

My recent PC experiences will surely elicit sympathetic chortles from the throngs of computer gamers who have encountered similar troubles. My first frustration began even before the PC was built. Several of the parts sent to me by newegg.com, a popular online vendor, were dead on arrival. Unsurprisingly, the onus was upon me to ship these items back and await replacement.

That important step completed, it seemed that I was finally ready to play Doom III, a game whose freakish, atmospheric visuals had tugged proportionally at my heartstrings and wallet strings. Sadly, I experienced marginal performance on the highest settings, which my over-powered machine should have supported. Worse, the game would frequently crash to my desktop, leaving me with an odd color palette and tear ducts filling with my broken dreams. Some cursory forum-trolling led me to the conclusion that many owners of ATI cards were in the same boat. ATI’s website even admitted problems with the game and its current drivers, and issued an early beta of its Catalyst 4.9 driver, in hopes this would ameliorate some performance and stability issues. Great—I downloaded and installed these babies, fingers crossed all through the bright-red splash screen. Shortly thereafter, I was treated to all the graphical resplendence of Windows' famous bluescreen, and the auditory glory of the searing “BEEP” that accompanies a core physical memory dump.

Apparently, ATI’s own hotfix had recognized my one 9800 Pro 256 as two cards, and this caused a variety of crazy problems. ATI tech support suggested this was a known issue with the 9800 Pro. Releasing drivers that cause conflicts with your most popular video card line doesn’t seem like a winning strategy to me.

Back to the Beyond3D forums, I came across a user-created tweak that made all the difference. An ATI engineer and Doom player named “Humus” has made himself the hero of the internet by finding an easy way to tweak a single Doom shader, thereby improving game stability and vastly increasing framerates on systems with ATI cards by 40%. Variable results were achieved with NVIDIA chipsets. John Carmack responded, in an interview with Beyond 3D, that this issue was the result of simple oversight, on his part, and presumably not some evil arrangement with NVIDIA. However, it strikes me as strange that Carmack, having acknowledged Humus' code as an improvement, wouldn't have included it Doom's recent, 1.05 patch, which, when used alone, doesn't improve Doom's performance on my PC.

Apparently, Carmack's code was referencing textures using a lookup table, rather than a faster "power function." I was able to implement this hack into my own copy of Doom by following a few simple instructions, listed in the thread. Although I'm in no position to understand the gravity of these changes, it seems incredible to me that a fan was able to so easily and markedly improve upon the code of one of gaming's leading technologists. Yet, gamers often find solutions to bugs, long before developers manage to. The considerable investment I made in my new computer was certainly an incentive to do so. At the risk of sounding ungenerous, maybe John Carmack should spend more time on his shaders, and less on his rockets…

Humus' tweak, combined with DirectX 9.0c and the ATI catalyst 4.8 drivers, made Doom run really well. Unfortunately, this driver combination also prevented Painkiller from running at all, for unknown reasons. A fresh installation of windows fixed the issue, naturally. I can't imagine that those obligated to use their PC extensively for non-gaming purposes are at liberty to constantly reformat, as I have consistently found necessary.

Incidentally, PC game compatibility seems to work in a cycle. When the game first launches, many hardware configurations may be unsupported or under-supported. After a patch or two, and maybe a driver refresh, these problems are mitigated. Eventually, however, games cease to be patched and work less well with modern drivers. I still cannot get Knights of the Old Republic to function well with any ATI drivers newer than Catalyst 4.5. With my console mindset, I find the implicit expectation that I am aware of these nuanced differences between myriad driver releases highly reprehensible. The last console game I remember as simply not working out of the box was the Dreamcast's first-gen survival horror title, Blue Stinger.

In all fairness, it’s easy to see why the PC gaming is fraught with technical peril. While console developers only have to worry about Q&A on one to three platforms, the PC man must consider how his game will run with a nigh-infinitude of different hardware and driver configurations—known as “SKUs” in developer jargon. Furthermore, PCs aren’t dedicated gaming devices. Negative interactions with user-installed software, or surreptitiously-installed spyware are difficult to anticipate. The PC world is constantly fluctuating, and the customizability inherent in the platform makes differences between machines harder to anticipate. This is why PC gamers so often need to install windows afresh: to return to the base state developers used when their games met Q&A testing.

This provides a convenient segue into mobile, a subject that no one can afford to dismiss, anymore. Yes, as the mobile guy, I am suddenly being thrust into prominence, raised to a bad eminence, like Satan on the Miltonian throne of Jerusalem. So here goes. Digital Chocolate's Trip Hawkins has long been hailing the mobile phone as the next PC, and device multiplicity is just one parallel between the two, rapidly-converging worlds. As Robert Tercek said in last Thursday's keynote mobile panel, at the Austin Game Conference, a large proportion of any game publisher's time and budget is spent in ensuring that a game runs on hundreds of different handsets, over several carriers. This makes it very difficult to ensure the absence of bugs, despite a publisher's best efforts. This is tragic, as mobile gamers do not share the tenacity of their PC counterparts. They are more akin, as an audience, to the most casual of console gamers—Animal Crossing addicts, The Sims junkies. As mobile gaming is an industry expanding at the alarming rate of fourteen-percent per month(!), it would be a shame if it were to tumble into the same, buggy pitfalls as PC gaming, as yet lacking its helpful community of fellow sufferers. A PC forum recently helped me through a problem I had with The Political Machine (it wouldn't boot, do to a CD detection bug), when Stardock's own employees were snoozing. Who would do the same for a confused mobile user, I wonder. Fortunately, I didn't encounter the same problem in *cough, shameless content plug, cough* Sorrent's Bush Vs. Kerry Boxing, for Sprint Vision.

Despite my complaints with PC gaming, I am greatly enjoying my vastly-upgraded processing power. I like clicking the checkboxes next 4x anti-aliasing and specular lighting. Most of all, though, I like interacting with a community of dedicated nerds who, sometimes, are one step ahead of the developers they so admire.

...hate the game. Or love it, if it's Def Jam: Fight for New York. Man, does that game whet my appetite for some crazy, AKI-engine beatdowns. Also, although I'm not usually too into customizing my gear, Alex Nevarro's visits to Jacob the Jeweler's pad have convinced me that this game might warrant an exception.

For years, I've been a huge fan of PC RPGs, but have hated massively-multiplayer gaming. This isn't for lack of trying. I've played Everquest and its expansions, forked out for Asheron's Call, and suffered through the buggy, post-apocalyptic world of Anarchy online. More recently, I've even participated in the World of Warcraft beta; and, while I can appreciate the game for its high production values and interesting skills system, I remain unenthused.

Last night, I bought Fable, and discovered a world that might not boast all of the deep, moral ramifications that Peter Molyneux was touting, but certainly holds up to action RPG standards. Interacting with Non-Player Character townsfolk--replete with quaint, regional accents—I realized exactly why I can't seem to make the jump to multiplayer.

You see, I love chatting it up with artificial intelligence. I've loved it since the days of Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. I take equal pleasure in immersing myself in NPC-populated worlds and in "breaking" them, by finding little glitches in AI scripts. I also love being the center of a game—a distinction impossible to win in an MMO environment. When I'm the only player in a relatively-static land, I'm free to explore and discover at whatever pace I choose. There's no pressure to obsessively level up, to compete with friend or foe. Most of all, I love piecing together a story through conversation with NPCs, admiring how all those little subplots converge into the primary tale of my heroism.

I'm not ashamed that I'd rather be told, in choppy English, that "The Castle is in the East," than be forced to extract—through brilliant supposition and ingenious surmise--that same information from more-experienced, human players whose primary function is to lead my fledgling dark elf into troll-infested caves, only to abandon him.

Humans are loose variables, and it's hard to control for them. Computer-controlled characters act with a single-mindedness that mirrors my own game-playing style--indeed, my own personality. I create goals for myself; then I complete them. I don't like to dick around. I'm intensely logical and analytical. In a lot of ways, I guess I behave more like an NPC than a human player, making me the ideal candidate to assist in a fixed Turing test. I will probably never like MMOGs; but, as long as I enjoy pattern-recognition and exploitation, I will always love their single-player equivalents.

I'm consistently amazed by the amount of consumer electronics that simply do not work. My recent purchase of two Pelican Universal Arcade Sticks is a perfect example. I bought the things because they come with connectors for all three consoles, and can, therefore, follow me from Capcom Vs. SNK: EO to Guilty Gear X2 to Soul Calibur and back again. Cool 'nuff. Unfortunately, the buttons feel chintzy, and the joystick is nearly unusable. Well, at least the things have communicator ports, right? True, but, when in use, they make my Xbox think the sticks are unplugged. I should have just bought another X-Arcade and called it a day.

What I want is so bloody simple. I want to play antiquated, two-dimensional fighters. For these games, control happens to be paramount. I don't mind spending more for a good product. Can't anyone cater to my needs? With all the Xbox Live fighters on the way (GG #Reload is out today), I think the 2D fighting market is going to rapidly expand. Someone better offer a decent control solution soon, before my crazy pills run out.

...she is a cruel mistress