Bare bones PC build vs pre built

[Aashenfox]

I was always in competition with my friend who was very well off. His father was a doctor and my friend was an only child.

 

So it was hard keeping up with how expensive things were back then. My dad had a good job too, contracted to work in power stations all over the middle east and even the Caribbean.

 

My first P60 was 1800 quid! With no printer, no scanner, no modem (had the option to have one though for a few £100.

 

I don't think any game ran very well on it. It came with Fallout 1. That had extreme load times and really slowed down sometimes. I bought Need For Speed 2 for it. And that was extreme. Long load times and juddering graphics.

 

Also it came with Descent. And that was great on it. Terminator Future Shock ran ok on it too and that was an awesome game. First 3D graphics un a shoot em up u think.

 

The computer I had before that was awesome. I had an Amiga A600 with hundreds of copied games. Cannon Fodder., Alien Breed, Chaos Engine.

 

Can't believe I swapped it all for an Atari Jaguar just to play Alien Vs Predator.

 

Before any of those though, I inherited a Sega Megadrive and before that a Commodore 64.

 

I so wanted to make a woman out of my C64 like in Weird Science

 

Nice! It's funny you mention that Descent ran well, it was one of the games with better graphics of its time, and of course it was built on an iD engine (a variant on the Q2 engine I believe), and here we are God knows how many years later, 25, more? And still iD are making the most efficient FPS engines (iDtech and vulkan GL API in the new Doom is silky smooth). Just goes to show what can be done when you 'do it right'.

 

I was also an only child from a similar upper middle class background as yourself, so I did ok, but I was a terribly rebellious child, when I realised I had advanced computer skills aged 9 (and in 1986), I decided school was a waste of time for me and as son as I could (aged 16) I quit. Didn't even do my GCSEs. I was working a month later at the IBM job I described above and excelling at it. After that, PC Upgrades came rather more easily. It was a magical time, people with skills like mine were like premiership football players for a few years, so in demand you could dictate the terms of your contract. After IBM, I used to flit around london from contract to ball scratching contract, getting paid silly money to do things that end users would do now. lol.

 

From the old stuff, my first dedicated games machine was a Spectrum 128k+2, then a commodore 64, I never had an amiga, but I always wanted one, my mum used to say 'but you've got your spectrum!' and I'd be like, 'mum, there is no comparison...'. Anyway, I can't say anything I was pretty spoiled. Stuck with PCs until the SNES came out and since then I have owned every major console release, up until the Xbox One (first major console in 15 years I didn't buy).

 

I too had an atari jaguar for a while. Crap thing, the power connector on the circuit board side kept breaking, and although I was able to disassemble and repair it myself, eventually after being soldered 50 times, it was dead. lol.

 

Since we're talking about our gaming careers and for the sake of completeness of information, I should probably mention that amongst all of this I became a noted semi pro gamer. I was top 3000 in the world simultaneously on Q3 and UT2K4 (on UT I was ranked 7th in Greece in my first year here, but I must confess I was lucky in a major tournament and my correct position should have been more like 20th. My biggest achievement came much more recently in World of Warcraft which I quit playing about 6 years ago, having gone from a know-nothing newbie to leader of the best guild on our server in the space of two years. It;s a nice story actually...

 

My wife's sister, who is a lot younger than us, had started playing WoW with a boyfriend and suggested we join in. this was late 2008 I think, shortly after release of Wrath of the Lich King. At that time, I had deliberately been avoiding hte game as I knew it would be a life eater. I knew NOTHING. The game appealed to me on every level, and I quickly became an expert, absorbing all the pro literature I could find. I was a Paladin tank primarily, and it wasn't long before a top guild recognized da skillz. I moved server to join an elite raiding guild which were raiding top heroic content three times a week. We were good, very good, I geared up to be the 2nd best geared tank on that server and top 100 paladin tanks in europe for a while, but I couldn't keep up the pace, 3 dedicated nights to raiding a week was crazy, and I was in the immortal words of Danny Glover "getting too old for this @*!#". So I decided to thrown in the towel on the hardcore raiding career and go back to the server where my wife and her sister and a couple of other friends were still enjoying a good ol' casual time.

 

I had a bit of a reputation by then and when I was invited to the guild that wifey was in, a couple of their players recognized me, I must say it was nice. When you join a guild in WoW, every guild member gets an immediate popup 'whatsisname joined the guild', and immediately one guy was like, is that Aashen from Silvermoon? And another guy was 'don't be an idiot, what would one of the top tanks in Europe be doing in our guild'...and I was like 'yeh guys it's me, how's it going, nice to meet you all and all that', and they were like 'omg'.

 

After that it was about a week before people started hassling me to train them to raid, so they made me the guild's raid leader (guild had never raided before up this point, lol) with the goal of training them to get through standard current tier content (hard enough for casuals, believe it, nothing easy about WoW raids, very challenging game of teamwork, coordination and skill). Training went well, and we started slowly working our way through Icecrown Citadel, raiding once a week. Some time went by, and I became more and more influential until one day the guildmaster was like 'this is your guild now, you should lead it' and I was like wow, are you sure? So they made me the guildmaster and I recruited a few more players. Atour height I had 320 players (at least 200 unique individuals) in my guild. After a year or so I had converted a bunch of total casuals into decent raiders (my wife and her sister were in the primary raid group and doing well!), and even raiding only once a week, we were rapidly rising through the server's rankings.

 

Long story short, After we finished Blackrock Mountain in the beginning of Cataclysm, I turned to the raid out of totally nowhere and said 'Guys, that's it for me, I've accomplished what I wanted in this game. You guys are now a top 400 in Europe raiding guild, good luck!" And I didn't log in again for 2 years. the truth is we weren't a great guild like I'm insinuating, we were great for casuals, but we were still casuals, the guy who I left the guild to, went on to take it to the next level, transformed it into a proper raiding guild, booted out most of the casuals and they are still doing well. It remains one of my proudest moments that I helped some casual players achieve some hardcore goals which they will never forget and neither will I, video game or not. When we downed the Lich King for the first time we didn't sleep that night, amazing feeling of teamwork, friendship and accomplishment against the odds. We all wore our 'Kingslayer' titles with pride (title used to only be available to those who have downed the Lich King in current tier).

 

Sorry for the essay life story, caught me in a nostalgic moment.

Edited December 2, 2016 by Aashenfox