Gaming. I’m not a huge gamer; I play Frets on Fire enough that I invested a whopping $10 in a guitar, and I have finished every PC Call of Duty game to date except the newest one, which I will finish shortly after I buy a new video card.

I own a Nintendo Wii. Mostly I play Super Smash Brothers Brawl on that; I didn’t even finish Twilight Princess. I think you get the idea. Casual gaming is becoming more and more appealing to me, and I got much further in Peggle than any human being ever should.

But PC Gaming is dead. The only struggling vestige of hope is Steam, and more on that later. First: this is why PC Gaming is dead.

I picked up Mirror’s Edge today.

mirrors_edge3

It hasn’t gotten the greatest reviews, and while I usually trust Yahtzee, this one was just too different for me to pass up. I managed to forget about it for awhile, but found it, and the back said this:

OS: Windows XP or Vista (I have Vista)

CPU: 3.0 GHz or faster (OK, mine is a 2.66 GHz dual-core, that should do)

RAM: 1 GB or more (I have 2 GB)

Disc Drive: 8x or faster DVD-ROM drive (16x)

Hard Drive: 8GB of free space (I made room.)

Video: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 or better (this is my card. I knew the game wasn’t going to be pretty)

So as you can see, my system meets the requirements. If I got a new card, it would happily exceed them. Windows said the “required” rating was a “Windows Rating” of 4.0, and “recommended” was 5.0; my system is a 4.8.

OK, so it should run. It should. So I sucked it up. I installed the game (and SecuROM) onto my hard drive. I paid for it. I typed in the serial code. I jumped the hoops. Finally, I get to play.

I can’t play it in my native resolution, and it won’t even let me try anti-aliasing. Fine, my video card isn’t good, fine. But the damn thing crashes hard in the middle of the first mission. It was a ctrl-alt-delete style crash. I was just climbing a ledge, and nope.

So what can I do if it doesn’t work? Well thank to SecuROM, I’ve already used one of my allotted installs. And can I return it because it doesn’t work, despite meeting my system requirements? Nope. Thanks EA.

This is why PC Gaming is dead. Steam comes the closest to delivering on-demand, hassle-free legal gaming, and even Steam sucks if you can’t get connected to the internet and just want to play some damn Peggle.

What if I buy a game for my Wii? It works. If it doesn’t work, I can return it. Same if I had an Xbox, or even a PS3. This is bullshit. The only hope we have is that guys like 2DBoy and Behemoth just keep running strong.

DAMMIT.

Anyway if I get Mirror’s Edge working I’ll write about what I thought of it.

Update:I disabled PhysX support and now it doesn’t crash randomly. Hopefully it keeps not crashing randomly.