So, I'm not what one would call a gamer. I've played Halo before, and I do enjoy games like 'Age of Mythology' and 'Dungeon Siege', but when it comes to first person shooters, I'm pretty horrible, and they don't bring a lot of satisfaction for me.
But I kept reading all this stuff about 'Bioshock' and how great of a game it was, and how the story line was excellent blah blah blah. Then I read that in easy mode, it was really easy. Perfect. So, I bought it. I installed it on my Duo Core laptop, and it ran. Sort of. The game starts in the sea after the plane crashes with you in the water surrounded by fire, pieces of the plane, etc. And it ran at maybe half speed, maybe less. Completely unplayable.
So, I installed it on my AMD 64-bit server machine because what's the point of having a powerful server machine if you can't play video games on it? Launched the game....black rectangular shapes and little bits of fire. What the heck? Oh, great.....http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2007/08/23/no-bioshock-rapture-in-sight-for-ati-x800x850-users I don't have the right Pixel Shading support in my video card.
Okay, let's go buy another one at the local Microcenter. Some NVidia supported card or other, $100. Try to install it, damn, I bought an AGP card and I have PCI Express.
Back to the store, buy another one, $150. Installed, tried to run game, application error. Try to run DirectX configuration wizard, machine blue screens. Great. After about an hour, I remember that Windows Server disables hardware acceleration when you install new video cards. Try to set it to full acceleration, machine blue screens. Another reboot, try to surf the internet to find a cure, another blue screen.
Enough with that. Back to the store, buy one more, $200. This one requires two separate connections to the power supply 'with no other device connected.' Yeah, like I have that, just connect two connections. I try to set video to full acceleration. Machine powers off. No blue screen, just powers off. Sweet.
But, if I turn video to mostly full acceleration, the system stays up, and I can play the game. So, I start up the game and get out of the water and save it. That was two weeks ago, I haven't played it since.
I have to go do something.