If you deny modern technology, play on Windows 95, think that if a model consists of more than 5 polygons, then there is no soul in it, and you dream of a wonderful world in which everyone has a Garen account: then you are either Gleb Meshcheryakov (which is unlikely), or a schoolboy whose parents refuse to buy him a computer newer than 2012. The second option is just about me. And now I will tell you why there is nothing wrong with this.
Chapter 1. Childhood
People born in the 90s may not understand (or they may understand, I don’t know for sure) this problem. But my story begins with my first computer with Windows XP. I won’t tell you exactly what characteristics it had, I was 7 years old, I didn’t really know how to type, but what I remember clearly is this worn-out de_dust2. There I still spend my free hours from studying, shooting the rank of “Corporal” with an elephant. I also remember Stronghold Crusader and the second Age of Empires well. These games were extremely difficult for me at that time (and still are, to be honest). But they, along with the first season of Naruto which was shown on TV at that time, taught me not to give up when faced with difficulties.
Chapter 2. Boyhood
Unfortunately, that computer died because we did not unplug it during a thunderstorm. And if it weren’t for my mother, who needed a computer for work, I could have forgotten about games for a long time. This salvation was an outdated computer for its time with an intel core 2 duo processor, a gt 405ti video card and 2 GB of RAM. He became my best friend. I met him in Need For Speed Underground 2. Which I continued to play for the next 1-2 years. And then he came… It was as if he had been assembled from my fantasies and dreams, his square shape attracted me much more than all the girls in the class. As you most likely already guessed, this is Minecraft. I met him from version 1.2.5, in which wood blocks could not be placed horizontally. At that time several of my friends were already playing it, and I begged them for a disc with this game for a long time. To my surprise, they didn’t have the disk, so I went online. At that moment I was introduced to piracy. Installing Minecraft was a real challenge for eleven-year-old me (I was never very smart, which can be understood from the number of typos in the text). But when I was able to create my first world in survival, it became a second life for me. I had so many questions and so few answers.
Having mastered Minecraft to the level where you, purely reflexively, can repeat all the crafting recipes blindfolded, I moved on to more serious games like the Assassin’s Cred or Stalker series. And if the second one ran smoothly for me without any problems, then small problems appeared with the assassin. I found out that FPS exists, and that some games tend to lag on old hardware. Not finding a way out of this situation, I continued to play with 20 fps, which could drop to 10 in action moments. And all this at minimum wages.
With such lags I completed Assassin’s Cread Brotherhood, Far Cry 3, Battlefield 3, etc.n. games. But at some point I saw that all my friends had quite good computers that could afford to run Battlefield 4, which I so desired at that time. And often, I had to play either single-player games like Skyrim or multiplayer GTA San Andreas. By the way, I was not the last person there, the mayor of Las Venturas himself (I’ll keep you posted).
Chapter 3. Youth
And now I’m already 15 years old, and I’m still using my dinosaur, Photoshop, Sony Vegas and a bunch of other useless programs are already installed on it. Deep down I knew that this day would come someday, but I in every possible way denied the idea that my computer could break. But it came… For me it was a real tragedy. And for six months I went without a personal computer. But the moment came when my father was given a laptop for his anniversary for work. He works as a dentist, so he doesn’t really need a laptop, so I use it. I am writing this text from it, and I will take it with me to another city to the university. Initially, my father didn’t want to give it to me, but I still managed to convince him that a programmer without a computer is strange, to put it mildly, and with a scholarship of 26,000 tenge (about 4,300 rubles), I would barely survive in the dorm, not to mention buying a laptop.
I already feel differently about this device than I do about my now dead friend. Now I buy almost all games on steam, origin or uplay. I don’t have an EGS account as a matter of principle. Not to say that it is much better than my old computer, but there is a slight difference.
It made me want to Lowdeposit-casinos.co.uk return to the roots of my gaming career. I decided to go through cult games that I had never gotten my hands on before. I have already completed the first part of The Witcher, and I think that the combat system in it is not as terrible as they say. (for some reason it took me more than 90 hours, although on average, people complete it in 50-60 hours).
I also completed half of the Warcraft 3 campaign, and in the future I plan to complete Company of Heroes, Total War Shogun and other old games. One of the advantages of such an experience is the opportunity to mock friends who do not want to complete GTA:SA due to outdated graphics))0)
I just looked at other blogs on SG compared to my story, it’s like a novel with an essay. But I don’t do it in order to seem like a fucking old man, but in order to tell people with a similar problem that this is not a problem at all. Okay, I’ll finish it, I still have to take a laboratory on the basics of algorithmization. I hope to see you again stopgame))
Best comments
Nicely written, with humor) and know that there’s nothing wrong with being old – they made games before too. I also missed a lot in my time, now I’m catching up, and there’s so much more to the list… I wish you inspiration and good luck for Stopgame 🙂
It’s familiar, I remember on cold evenings when everyone was dying of boredom, I sat in front of the computer playing, by those standards, super cool flash games.
Dead padaise, soulgames, "catapult", minecraft 2D XD. Eeeeh, it just hit me, I’ll go and watch Tom and Jerry. And to you, my friend, I wish you good luck and a red crust.
Poor student who buys games on Steam and also turns his nose up at EGS, where many of them are given for free.
When I had a weak computer, I became addicted to emulators, jrpgs and visual novels. Then I realized that a powerful computer is not needed at all to play good games, there are already plenty of them, enough for a lifetime.
I had a roughly similar story, but it wasn’t that I was poor. Rather, they tried to instill in me the right upbringing, so that I would study and read books. But something went wrong, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this cool story. I got a computer at home in 2006, I used it to play all sorts of new and slightly older games at that time, as far as I was allowed: an ATI Radeon 9250 card, an AMD Athlon processor and 512 megabytes of memory. A signal, or rather an alarm bell, that my computer was no longer a cake was the failure to launch Frontlines: Fuel of War on my wunderwaffle. So I had to screw up San Andreas, the second half and FIFA 2008 a hundred times each. In 2011, I upgraded my computer a little and was able to play slightly more recent games. Just then Far Cry 3 and Battlefield 3 came out, I played them. Then the video card burned out, for about a year I was doing who knows what, until I picked up the video card again. It seems that back then (2013) the 9800GT was even more or less useful, it ran the third mass game and Tomb Raider, even tried the second Crysis, but after six months the video card went to the previous one. So for about five years, before I bought a used laptop, which I now live on, I was plunged into darkness and could not play new games. And somehow it wasn’t very good in the old days, because they got boring. And – horror of horrors – I even had to briefly switch to real life with its difficulties.
And since 2017 I’ve been gradually catching up. Skyrim, Saints Row, GTA 5, Life is Strange, Bioshock and so on. Yes, not something fresh like Spider-Man or Metro Exodus, but someday this will fall into my hands. For now I’m playing something that can handle over thirty frames on my unit. The rest is know-it-all. In short, thanks for the blog, I’m already immersed in memories of my gaming experience.
A very similar and touching story, written with a large dose of humor. Bravo to the author! I had a very similar story. Perhaps you inspired me to write something like this)
Good point guy. You can’t keep up with all the new products, although of course I’m trying, but there’s absolutely not enough time. In any case, if it is not possible to have powerful hardware, then it would be better to just let it go. It’s very good that you said that in general this is not a problem.
Damn, an incredible life story in so many ways. Except that I had even bigger problems with the power of my electronic friends. I learned most of the games from my father at work. These are Heroes III, and GTA: SA, and Stalker. And at home I had a prehistoric Frankenstein, assembled from several other prehistoric machines. It didn’t even produce Minecraft above 15 frames. The only thing I could play on it were several games about Kuzya, Ice Age 2 and, unexpectedly, the first CoD, which, for lack of alternatives, I sometimes played a couple of times a day. I didn’t have the Internet until I was 14, if that’s the case. And after he died, they gave me a laptop, which served me with grief half and half from 2011 to 2018, until it finally grew old and began to fall apart. It was very difficult to live in a world in which all your friends have good cars for their time, and you play Far Cry 3 at a minimum of 25 frames. But fate took pity on me, and only this year I was able to build my own first computer that meets modern requirements. And I still can’t get used to the fact that games tend not to lag.
A tank of tea to the author for the flow of warm nostalgia, even if you wipe away a tear
I’m not poor, but I’m not rich either. I can snag a game for 200 rubles on Steam at discounts/on third-party sites. I want to play simulators like Farming Simulator. jrpg take an awful lot of time))
And about EGS, principles are more important. Here on Steam I buy games that I can’t handle if they give them away for free
Great story, somewhat reminiscent of my journey into PC gaming. I got a PC back in 2005, then I already knew about video games thanks to my friend who had the first Playstation. At that time, I didn’t play much, except educational games that my mother bought for me, as well as browser games from Rambler. However, everything began to change when I started getting my first game discs. Let’s say, like the turn-based RTS Birth of America in the setting of the American Civil War or the first "Corsairs" from Akella and 1C. However, there was one catch, I simply could not complete them and therefore I simply abandoned some of the games that came to me. Everything changed only in 2008. Then my mother bought me Lego Batman: The Videogame at the store, which captivated me for more than one evening. Subsequently, I got a collection with all the parts of the Lego games. Later, I played many famous games like Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne and the first Serious Sam, and I often played GTA: Vice City. This continued until 2012, when they gave me a laptop and after that a lot changed… True, now I want to get rid of it in the hope of assembling it for a new PC.
Yes, I’m not Russian either, but at the same time I always communicated with Russians, in Russian. I can speak very well, but I have huge problems with spelling and punctuation))