Neverwinton Nightmares.

This is basically a rant against PC gaming in general.  Stuff that never appears on PC and a few general installation woes thrown in.  If you want an eloquently written rage against the machine here is the Rev's take on the same theme.

For once we decided to take a punt on a pc game for sale up in Oxfam.  Its the critically acclaimed Neverwinter Nights from Bioware.  Unlike Stu who's tolerance of Orc's is set somewhere on the minus area of the chart, I don't mind messing with goblins and the like.  So after putting in the hours with Baldurs Gate Shadows of Amn. We decided to give Neverwinton a punt.  Big mistake.

First up, we decided to Install all three disks, and after much waiting we decided to load up, only to be told that you need a playing disk to play.  Looking in the box we found that there wasn't any such disk there, but a look online on Biowares forums showed that the latest patch actually did away with such things.

Which is our second mistake.  The game is supposed to update and patch itself but for some reason it doesn't well not the latest patch (1.69).  Through more poking on the forum, we found a link to the patch we needed t o download, and it updated our game excellently.  Booting up as normal we found that the game itself crashes out at the title screen, a quick uninstall and a trip to my old PC running XP finally got the game working (well sort of it crashed a character generation screen).

Two things here. Games on PC are always going after the highest spec where most people are running something much, much lower powered.  Why do you think The Sims is so popular, low specs to run and walling people up in the toilet.  (Incidentally my Sims 2 had a bug where they could never order food meaning any relationship was doomed to slow starvation.)

The other stuff is the weird dichotomy of PC gaming, its either call or duty or object poking simulators, leavened with World of Fucking Warcraft and the like.

Harvest Moon could never be made for PC, (though farmville is, I suppose, its coin sucking equivalent)
primary colours aside.  There are never any JRPGS for the pc in mainstream shops, same with Mario and the same with Dodonpachi.  Platformers and 2D shmups are never considered for PC gaming. 

I'd love a fps with the same mentalness as Parodius, giant cats that are half submarine, imagine how much better Call of Duty would be if the Russians wheeled out a massive laser spewing elephant with the communist flag on its back, all the while playing tannenbaum / Red Flag in the background.  Or Wolfenstein where hitlers head could explode like in Bionic Commando.  I don't expect realism in my games, I don't want it dirty, brown or indeed miserable.  Gimme a blue sky and I'm happy, gimme the commie elephant as an end of level boss and i'll even think about playing COD.