PLEASE, MASTER: WHAT’S PC GAMING LIKE THESE DAYS ON A CHEAP(-ISH) COMPUTER?

This isn't my computer, but IS almost identical to my old work computer. But I can't tell you what that was like for gaming, as apparently 'playing videogames isn't suitable in an office environment'. Spoilsports.

Right, let’s get the contentious issue out of the way first: I’ve always been a console gamer at heart. My first ever games machine was an Atari 2600 – the one with a bit of wood stuck on, no less, which I’m sure my 7-year-old self reallyappreciated (you know, young kids and their love of teak veneer and all that).

And – aside from a brief diversion for the ZX Spectrum and an Amiga (sorry, Biffo) – I’ve stuck with consoles ever since. In fact, I last properly dipped my beak into all things PC about 20 years ago, when I managed to get Tomb Raider 2 running on a horrible beige Pentium 75 tower I had at university.

So obviously, I’m the ideal person to do an article about PC gaming!

Why the console preference? Well I’m dead lazy, so I like the lack of platform faff with no driver updates, setting tweaks and security updates for one thing. I’m also a big right-on hippy and like the fact that on console, everyone gets the same experience (and yes, that’s slightly less true these days what with the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro – but only a teeny bit).

Dell, here, showing off their almost legendary flair for captivating designzzzzzzzz....

On a more controversial note, I much prefer joypads as a control ‘medium’ too.

Yes, I know mouse control is very accurate and FPS enthusiasts swear by it, but keyboards? Keyboards as game controllers is just someone taking a thing that was handy and using it to do a thing they needed done, and it’s now the norm through familiarity even though as soon as you think about it, you realise it is this: well stupid.

If they were really such great input devices, the centre console of an F-22 fighter jet would be an Olivetti typewriter.

On a personal level I also don’t ‘get’ dedicated PC gaming hardware: it’s mostly still a hideous ‘1980s nightclub’ colour scheme of black plastic with garish red highlights. Throw in rainbow LED light-up keyboards & logos, viewing windows and other nonsense and most gaming rigs look like they’re designed to appeal to either the worst sort of clichéd nerd stereotype, or kaleidoscope enthusiasts.

As a representation of modern gaming? Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

But my main love of consoles comes from the fact I can plonk down my money, safe in the knowledge that in most cases the hardware will be good for every single game on that format for a solid 4 or 5 years with no further outlay (i.e., I’m a tightwad).

Even in the rare instances where it isn’t true, such as the Dreamcast or Wii U, 9 times out of 10 if you hang onto your hardware for a decade or so you can sell it on to a daft retro gaming enthusiast at a vastly inflated price! It’s win–win!

For PC gaming, even the biggest PC platform enthusiast would have to agree that the quality of your experience ultimately still comes down to cash (and a lot of it), and that towards the top end – like with new cars – the moment you buy a new PC gaming setup it’s already depreciating at eye-watering speed.

A few years on, and the 4-figure high-end kit you splurged on is probably worth less than half what you paid. And sure, consoles come down in price too – but the starting point is a hell of a lot lower as well.

Hello. I am Sir Alan 'you're terminated!' Amstrad. I'm like Clive Sinclair, only less randy! Would you like to buy a phone? It has too many buttons. Much, much too many.

So if I feel this way, why dis article exist, guv?

Thing is, not long ago I started to get more interested in PC gaming on the basis I had recently picked up a Windows laptop to use for work. So as I had it anyway, where was the harm in seeing what it could do?

(Don’t get me wrong – I’ve owned a computer for years and I’m not some luddite who’s previously been banging out articles on an Amstrad E-m@iler plus. I just couldn’t game on it because it’s a Mac, so woefully underserved in that capacity.)

The laptop I now own is by no means a gaming rig, but it isn’t something chronically anaemic like the feeble netbooks of yesteryear either. So do my old prejudices still hold true? Well after 6 months or so, this is what I reckon.

The one thing that has vastly improved from yesteryear (yet in another way, has got worse – I’ll get on to that in a minute) is getting games in the first place and getting them running well.

Why isn't the steam logo a kettle? Idiots.

Thanks to services like Steam, Battle.net and EA Origin, as well as better hardware autodetection in games themselves, it’s a lot easier to access a lot of titles and get them optimised for your PC without wasting hours twiddling with sliders and performance options to eke out a few more frames per second.

But also: it’s worse, because there are a lot of these services all bellowing for attention, and on some (Steam – I absolutely mean Steam) discovering the good stuff is a nightmare because the interface is woeful. Steam’s storefront is akin to a library where all the staff are blind drunk, and they’ve organised the books by spinning round until they’re sick and then kicking them up random shelves.

You also have to tolerate updates to the launch platforms as well as the games (an extra layer of downloadery), and they tend to sneak in everywhere and start leaving their ‘dirt’ (icons, shortcuts, auto-startup clients and notifications) all over your desktop too, like a guilty dog with the runs bum-scooting across a rug.

That’s all background shenanigans though – what are the actual games like?

Here, I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised. You can get a massive array of really good and often fairly recent games at sometimes stupidly cheap prices, and – for the most part – they look pretty decent. The indie selection is also far and away wider and newer than even well-served consoles like the Switch.

Granted, you won’t get the benefit of all the graphical bells and whistles in AAA games you’d see with super high-end systems, if they run at all, but the gap between a £500 laptop and a £2500 gaming desktop is much closer these days.

For example, my laptop has a midrange processor from 2017 and integrated (i.e. fairly rubbish) graphics rather than a dedicated chip, but can still put out a level of detail I’d consider more than acceptable AND move it about without it being so slow it looks like a powerpoint presentation.

I'd probably have enjoyed Destiny 2 on my PC, had I not shut it down fairly rapidly because I thought the fan was going to fly out through the casing, it was spinning that fast.

As you might expect I only really struggled with very new and/or very flashy games: I got the PC version of Destiny 2 running, for example, but it was only at console-level refresh rates and horribly grainy PS2-era graphics quality.

Something a bit less demanding though, and it was no problem. Mass Effect: Andromeda looked great and ran really well. (Which, ironically, was a bit of a shame as it really allowed the dire gameplay and lousy script to ooze through.)

So am I a convert of sorts? I think so – I wasn’t bothered about PC gaming at all a year or so ago, but now I’m keen to get a minor upgrade* just so I can enjoy games at a bit higher resolution. There are also a fair few games I meant to pick up on console I never got round to that are so stupid cheap on PC, it’d be rude not to.

In short: what I assumed I could get to run, how much bother it would be, and how good it would look turned out to be well short of reality.

At the same time though, there’s no way I’d ditch my PS4 simply because I still want to be able to play the newest games too, and I think that’s the balance: PCs are undeniably the best if you want the absolute cutting edge of graphics quality. The newest games on the newest PC gaming systems blow consoles away, no argument. But that still comes with a huge price tag.

And that’s the strength of consoles – that middle ground. Access to the same brand new games a high-end PC can run (and that a mid-range one maybe can’t), but at a vastly reduced asking price with only a small hit to quality. Until broadband-reliant stream-o-game services like NVidia’s GeForce NOW really take off, I can’t see that changing.

I still think high-end PC gaming is, realistically, off limits for most because of its astonishing cost and comparatively short hardware lifespan. But a midrange PC will last you years and not cost a lot. Couple that with a console, and that’s the real best of all worlds – and probably still cheaper than one of those awful LED light-up monstrosities to boot.


*EPILOGUE: I got that new PC - a laptop with a dedicated graphics chip - and it's like night and day. It's yet to fail to run anything I've thrown at it too. How long it'll be able to keep up playing new(er) stuff is questionable, but despite being a 2017 model it more than meets the suggested spec for Anthem. So who knows? I'm still buying Anthem on PS4 though anyway. Because KEYBOARDS ARE STILL RUBBISH CONTROLLERS.

The PS4 Pro: is it worth it?

Stood up like this, the Pro looks a lot like an air conditioning unit. Which, if you're unlucky enough to get a certain model, is probably closer to the truth than Sony would care to admit...

Get this, plebs: the other week, I descended the solid bronze staircase from my emerald castle, rummaged in my top hat for a few thousand pounds-worth of gold coins in loose change, then threw them at a tramp and told him to go forth and buy me the most popular advanced console there is. And a Christmas goose for everyone!

(That’s right: I’ve gone and bought myself a cheap second-hand PS4 Pro on eBay. And a load of dead geese!)

The Pro has been around for a while now of course, but I suspect many of you are in a position much like the one I was in when I took the plunge: my original PS4 was busting at the seams with data, I’d got myself a 4K telly in the past couple of years anyway, and I’ve been increasingly tempted by the growing number of ‘enhanced’ games for the Pro.

The tipping point for me, other than not fancying my hand at a hard drive upgrade, was the imminent arrival of the Pro-enhanced Red Dead Redemption II and its obscene file size – a corpulent 100+ GB. Justified as, of course, nothing is more important to modern gamers than the data-heavy, ultra-detailed textures needed to render horse genitalia and dirty cowboy chaps in 4K.

This isn't my actual oven, by the way. For one thing, it's clean.

The minimum hard drive on the Pro is a whopping 1TB – double the 500 GB of the original PS4 – so you can see the appeal there. And yes, I know hard drive upgrades are supposed to be relatively easy on the PS4, but the last thing I tried to upgrade was the air intake fan on our old cooker. This? This did not go well.

Despite the repair allegedly being a simple case of swapping out a broken part for an identical replacement and hooking up a couple of wires, I forgot to turn the mains off before I opened the cooker up and thus electrocuted myself.

This caused me to yell our oven was a ‘hot metal bastard’ loudly enough for our neighbour to hear and come round, thinking we were being attacked by a burglar (who, I assume, they must have thought was a sexy yet villainous robot).

To make matters worse, after all that I went and fitted the fan backwards so it pumped the kitchen full of greasy hot air. This meant I had to open it up all over again and, in my haste to do so, re-electrocuted myself in the exact same way.

Consequently, although I can now charge batteries just by looking at them, my DIY attempts at anything involving wires are probably best avoided. But back to the PS4 Pro. Now I’ve got one, the big questions are was it worth it? And do I think it would be worth it for YOU?

To which the answer for both is a decidedly non-committal hmmmmmmmmm.

The PS4 Pro is of course able to render you running away from big monsters in tremendous detail.

The problem is, unless you have a stupidly opulent gaming setup you’re never going to see the picture from a Pro next to the picture from a vanilla PS4 simultaneously. So while all games on the Pro have some degree of benefit from HDR colour, lighting and so on, you simply won’t notice much difference a lot of the time because you have no immediate frame of reference.

This is all the more true in the heat of the action when you’re not paying attention to (graphical) detail.

It’s like mineral water and tap water: if you’re thirsty, you’re probably not going to care that the former has been filtered through igneous rock in the Andes before being collected in a crystal bucket by an ‘artisan aqua barista’, rather than spurting out into your kitchen sink in Stevenage via a plastic drainpipe.

Don’t get me wrong – there are times when it’s obvious you’ve got something with way more power. Running Shadow of the Colossus in performance mode so it’s hitting a constant 60 frames a second is beautiful, and going back to a janky 30 fps afterwards is akin to regressing from a SNES to a NES and then watching it through a zoetrope.

Equally, some of the games that offer specific graphic-enhancement modes really lay the pretty on thick. Horizon: Zero Dawn being one: you can see a lot more detail, see it from a lot further away, and with much lovelier, more realistic lighting. It’s not game changing at all for sure, but it’s definitely game enhancing.

Because while we all know graphics aren’t everything, they clearly are something – if it really didn’t matter what stuff looked like we’d all still be happily clonking about on ZX Spectrum +14s, 8-bit colour clash and all.

Funnily enough I was playing Destiny 2 the other night, and fell off the map at almost precisely this point. Mad skills! 

However…the jumbo bag of eye candy isn’t so lovely that I can hand on heart say ‘this is the next generation’. Because let’s face it – it isn’t. It’s still a device for playing PS4 games, albeit ones that are nicer looking to varying degrees that don’t suffer framerate drops, and the PS4 has been around for yonks now.

In that, it’s an upgrade to what you know, not a jump to the next level – it’s buying a regular car with air con, heated seats and a turbo, not a private jet.

Take a game like Destiny 2. That’s a good-looking game anyway, but is HDR-enhanced on the pro. Yet all I can honestly say I noticed is that it’s a bit darker and the colours are more saturated – something I could have done a fair job at replicating by accident just by sitting on my remote control.

There are also potential downsides too. Depending on your telly, it’s a pain in the HDMI port to configure everything correctly to make sure you get the best possible picture.

Turns out it also doesn’t integrate properly with the original-generation PSVR headset (which, inevitably, is the version I own), meaning whenever you want to use it you have to do a marathon amount of faffing about with cables – undoing everything you did to get the best picture in the process.

Worse still, I’ve had more system lock-ups in a week with the Pro than in 6 months with my old PS4. Though I have got lucky with the noise factor – my Pro is actually much quieter than my original PS4, which is remarkable given a quick Google search shows that some Pros sound like you’ve installed an Airbus testing facility in your lounge; it seems what you get in this regard is basically pot luck.

All this means the value of the proposition is going to depend on a lot of factors.

If you have a capable TV, need more storage, play a lot of the titles that have the best enhanced modes like God of War and Spider-Man anyway, and can get a deal/trade in your old PS4? Yeah, like me you’ll probably be happy – assuming you don’t get a ‘loud boy’.

If you don’t have a 4K TV though, or aren’t fussed by something approaching gaming PC level smoothness and nicer lighting?

Despite my being a sucker for new hardware, I’m inclined to say don’t bother.

The chances you’ll notice any improvements are minimal, and – crucially – you still get to enjoy the exact same games. There are no PS4 Pro exclusives, and that’s not ever likely to change.

In the right circumstances, then, it’s an undeniable upgrade. In others, I can easily see someone wondering what on Earth all the fuss is about. Now, can I interest you in a used goose?

500 GB out of 1TB

NINTENDO SWITCH ONLINE

"So...how can we make a banner poster announcing an online service seem exciting?"
"I dunno. Just say 'online' a lot?"
"Sounds good to me. Pub?"

If there’s one consistent thing about Nintendo, it’s their bewildering inconsistency.

One minute they’re taking what on paper should be utter disasters such as a console controlled with a wand (the Wii), an underpowered tablet with funny handles (the Switch), or literal cardboard trousers (Labo), and turning them into beloved works of utter genius.

The next, they’re making a total honk-up of ideas and services that should be the proverbial chunk of Battenburg.

Observe, love: they sauntered into mobile gaming years late, then made weirdly paranoid and irritating choices such as needing a constant internet connection on Super Mario Run for it to work. Mario himself is always skulking in dank pipes and tubes, but can you play his mobile title on a train going through a tunnel? No, no you cannot. Bloody hypocrites.

Hardware is no exception either. All they had to do to replicate the Wii’s success is make an HD follow-up and not ruin the formula. Instead, in the Wii U they guffed out the clunkiest, most charmless machinery this side of early 1970s Soviet cars, with a gimmicky controller everyone largely gave up on not long after launch.

Short of making it out of Bakelite and putting games on punch cards, it couldn’t have looked more dated even before it launched.

Plus, of course, they inadvertently created their own biggest nemesis when they utterly messed up their relationship with Sony while co-developing the SNES CD drive – a cack-handed move which led the latter to shove all the electronic bits they’d developed into in a bag with some pig organs, creating a real-life Frankenstein! (The original PlayStation.)

Hence, much as I love my Switch, it was with a fairly jaded eye that I approached Nintendo Switch Online, their new service that lets you play games against people not in the same room as you. You know: because you’re an antisocial loner.

"Hey, that company we did the banner ad for also want a shot of the system in action. What will grab people's attention?"
"A drab, static menu of game saves?"
"Genius! Pub?"

The launch of the service has been long delayed for one thing, and for another it’s adding no-brainer stuff like cloud saves; something that should have been on the Switch from Day 1. Plus you need a smartphone app (and, obviously, a smartphone to run it on too) for voice chat – a ‘feature’ that has been standard on the PlayStation and Xbox for generations.

So what do you get for your money then, and how much of that precious coin do you need to part with to get it?

Well, one thing in the Switch’s favour is that Nintendo’s online service is cheap – potentially REALLY cheap. A year is 18 quid, or you can pay monthly for a small extra premium, but get this: you can buy a ‘family pack’ of 8 memberships for 35 quid. And in an entirely un-Nintendo move, rather than applying some arcane rule stipulating these must go to people who you have a minimum 85% DNA match with, they don’t give two hoots who you dish them out to.

In short, get yourself a group of Switch owners, club together, and save some £££. This is the option some Switch-owning chums and me went for, meaning 12 months of the service cost us all of £4.50 each. That, clearly, is a bargain.

Regardless of what you pay, you of course get online gaming. This is what it is and works fine, as you might imagine. The app-to-chat is an extra layer of faff and wiring, but I can kind-of see why they did it: Nintendo guard their kid-friendly status fiercely, so don’t want impressionable young ears wandering into chatrooms where people call each other smelly poo bums (OR WORSE).

Or, at least they don’t want that to happen without the get-out clause that someone had to have enabled it via giving a kid access to the phone and app so it’s all YOUR fault, you terrible parent you.

There’s also the aforementioned cloud saves, which finally allow you to move from one Switch to another without losing your game progress – and given the portable nature of the Switch, this is one console likely to take more ‘in transit’ damage than most and need replacing. After all, it’s not that often you’d be in a position to drop your XBox down the toilet.

And finally, a feature some people might find enticing enough to justify the whole service: NES Online. A load of classic NES games, free to play, with more titles added each month.

"Hey, it was really nice of that company to give us one of their game machines after we made them those great adverts that we spent ages working on."
"Yeah. But the graphics are a bit rubbish. I might go back to FIFA 19 on my Xbox."
"Really?"
"Nah, just kidding - I spend all my money on class A narcotics!"
"Hah! You are a one. Pub?"

Admittedly a proper Wii-style virtual console would be even better, and some of the games on offer really show how retro gaming is at best 20% good, 80% ancient tedious dross, but there are enough genuine gems in the mix to keep it interesting such as Super Mario Bros 1 & 3, the original Zelda, and Gradius to name but a few.

The real seller for these oldies though? They’re also online multiplayer compatible. That means you can laugh at the horribly dated visuals and gameplay of 2-player titles such as Double Dragon with someone else, even if they live at the bottom of a well!

What’s the verdict then? Well it’s all about value for money. If you can get a group together to take advantage of that sweet, sweet family discount, go for it. It’s barely more than the price of a baguette and a coffee for a whole year’s access.

But what if you’re horribly unpopular, and have no friends?

That’s trickier. If you don’t care much about the golden oldies (and bear in mind some of these are more golden dog eggs…), and/or aren’t that fussed about online play given the Switch’s obvious strengths in local multiplayer, I’d leave it – for now.

If the NES online service expands to SNES online (or better still, N64 or GameCube online) and the price remains broadly the same, this will be an essential purchase. It’s a reasonable start, and that pricing is a cracking idea to get groups of Switch owners together and a whole social gaming thing going, but it’s still a bit threadbare.

It covers the online basics, but unless you really love the retros or are forever smashing your Switch up and need those cloud saves, have a good old think first.

8 bits out of 16 bits.