[OT] GRAAAAAAAAAHHHH! HULK SMASH STUPID COMPUTER!! >_<#

Okay, so for Christmas this year I decided to get back into gaming. I
considered getting an XBox 360, but decided that could wait until next year
when it has a lower price, a bigger game selection and less hardware bugs.
Instead, I asked for a better video card for my computer and a pair of games
I've been wanting to play- Fable The Lost Chapters and The Bard's Tale. I
got all three. Merry Christmas to me, right? Wrong.

The video card installation (a Radeon 9200) goes off without a hitch, which
is good because that's what I was most worried about- can't very well play
games when you've accidentally busted your motherboard, right? But no such
problems. Encouraged, I install Fable.

It doesn't work.

First it tells me my drivers are out of date. Okay, that's annoying, but no
big deal. I get the latest drivers, and that's that. Only, it still doesn't
work. Whenever I try to start it up, it crashes. It's not even an
interesting crash that you could take to a message board and describe to
find a solution to, just the standard "Fable the Lost Chapters has to be
shut down. Report this error?", and asking for details gets you 100 pages of
technobabble. But, okay, no really big deal either. It's new and a console
port, so some bugs are to be expected. I figure wait for the patch and go to
The Bard's Tale for now. So, I install that.

It doesn't work either.

What's worse, I haven't a single solitary clue WHY it doesn't work. It says
that Direct3D isn't working, and the readme says that basically means it
needs DirectX9.0c. This makes me grimace badly. See, I have a Dell Dimension
4400. I got it a while back- a few years ago, I think. It came with
WindowsXP installed, and they scrimped on the shipping by not sending the OS
disc. This is a problem because, some time after I bought the machine,
Microsoft went and decided that all copies of Windows XP had to be
"genuine", whatever that means, and refuses to update or support any copies
that are not "genuine". The OS pre-installed on my machine is, you guessed
it, not "genuine". Which means that any attempt to keep any
Microsoft-manufactured software on my machine updated requires a lot of
Googling and frustrated hair-pulling and, ultimately, hanging around warez
sites.

This turns out to not be an issue, though. The real problem is even more
infuriating. See, I DO have DirectX9.0c on my machine, at least as far as I
can tell. I've checked the version numbers on the files, even ran dxdiag,
and everything appears to be ship-shape. Yet I can't play the frickin' game
because it keeps insisting it can't work with the version of Direct3D I
have. Heaven forbid it actually TRY to play the game instead of giving me
some patent pending excuse and kicking me out.

grrrrrrrr...

Crap like this is the reason why players and developers alike have more or
less abandoned the PC as a gaming platform. When was the last time a
reasonable game came out that wasn't some EverCrack wannabe or a buggy
console port? I should have just taken my chances with the 360. At least in
that case, when I put in the disc, I can be resonably sure I'll be able to
PLAY THE FRICKIN GAME!!!!!

-Lord Craxton


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