Modern PC gaming Rant!!!

Last night I lost access to my XP and ultimately had to format my system drive and re-install XP. Luckily, I have a removable hard drive system which my games go on, so I hadn't lost any.

...Or so I thought! Pretty much all my modern games - like Bioshock and The Witcher and others now wouldn't start because of, I suspect, the loss of a registry entry. I had also lost saves as modern games use My Documents for the save files now!

My older games, like Medieval II Total war, just needed a D3D file from DirectX copied into the folder to work.

Older games still, like System Shock 2 worked perfectly!

PC games have become applications. No different to Word or Excel. Lose your OS and you now only have to re-install your applications, you need to re-install all your games - and start many of them again!

We are now left with having to make sure we back up our saves, as though they were Word or Excel files!

What was so wrong with the older games that didn't need registry entries and were happy to ut the saves in the game folder?

Granted, at the moment I am a bit miffed, but nevertheless, I never saw any debate in the media about how these changes took place!

In the next couple of days I will calm down - after I have re-installed about 5 PC games and start them from the beginning again - but for now I am pretty miffed!

...Oh, and one last thing, the most recent PC game that worked fine? STALKER! No wonder this game is my Game of 2007!!! :)

Last night I lost access to my XP and ultimately had to format my system drive and re-install XP. Luckily, I have a removable hard drive system which my games go on, so I hadn't lost any.

...Or so I thought! Pretty much all my modern games - like Bioshock and The Witcher and others now wouldn't start because of, I suspect, the loss of a registry entry. I had also lost saves as modern games use My Documents for the save files now!

My older games, like Medieval II Total war, just needed a D3D file from DirectX copied into the folder to work.

Older games still, like System Shock 2 worked perfectly!

PC games have become applications. No different to Word or Excel. Lose your OS and you now only have to re-install your applications, you need to re-install all your games - and start many of them again!

We are now left with having to make sure we back up our saves, as though they were Word or Excel files!

What was so wrong with the older games that didn't need registry entries and were happy to ut the saves in the game folder?

Granted, at the moment I am a bit miffed, but nevertheless, I never saw any debate in the media about how these changes took place!

In the next couple of days I will calm down - after I have re-installed about 5 PC games and start them from the beginning again - but for now I am pretty miffed!

...Oh, and one last thing, the most recent PC game that worked fine? STALKER! No wonder this game is my Game of 2007!!! :)

Humorguy_basic

Pc games are BECOMING applications? When has that not been the case? lol

I think you need to calm down and get your thoughts out clearly. But in any case, you really should be backing up your registry. It's easy to do, and should be done even if you don't play games.

OR you can buy your games from Steam. Bioshock is availiable on steam, and steam games don't use registry entries.

my WIC work well after re-install

but lost save

i do think the game can store saving in local address

I am a bit calmer - thanks for the support!

All I can say is we talk about why PC games don't sell, like because they need high end rigs, and you have to do this and that to get them running, and you only have to look at this thread to see another reason why games companies are out of touch and doing things that they don't have to - I mean, tell me why they HAVE to put saves in My Documents? Who decided this and when? Why didn't the media tell us it was planned? I see no logic to why saves cannot go into game folder like they did for 16 years! Then, as people say above, all the config files in god know's what folders, and then the registry now having to be backed up for GAMES for goodness sake!

What a huge gap there is now between so many PC gamers and the media/marketplace..... What I have gone through in the last 24 hours shows how stupid most of these 'new' ideas that games companies have. Gamespot. Read this thread and then ask industry leaders why this is now the case for PC games!

The exact same thing happened to me recently. There are two things you can do.

The first is quit whining, so what if you lost a few game saves? Start again. I did.

The second is to find yourself a copy of XPe (the Windows you can boot straight from the CD with no need for a hard disk) and you will never lose any data ever again due to OS corruption. I did that, too.

I hate it when that happens

Firstly, now we have bigger drives, or in my case, removable drives, we can have half a dozen games or more on our drives. This is a lot of games to have to restart from the beginning - and to the person who said restarting a game was no biggie - give me a break! The same goes for the registry back up people - that doesn't solve the restart issue! And why should I have 30gb of saves with another 30gb of backup saves somewhere else, eating up hard drive space?

As to regular crashes, well, yes, you do get crashes, but not where you lose the OS totally. Usually where you can do a 'repair install' where it keeps all the data in My Documents, etc.

All I know is that some 2006-2007 games manage to work without needing all the registry files, etc and not all games put the saves in My Documents, etc, (althrough more and more publishers are copying this idea - for no good reason!)

I find myself playing my older PC games from my collection more as modern PC games become fewer in number and of a lesser quality, This just drives me to play these older games even more! There are some games I may not re-install for a while, given I have to re-start them. It will be a darn sight easier firing up DOSBox and installing one of my older 13mb games; playing it within 5 minutes of installing it, than it will some of the 20 minute installs you have with modern games!

Yes, I have learnt my lesson, back up my registry more and consider backing up saves. But I shouldn't have to do it. Win 3.1, Win 95 and Win 98 were also flaky systems that crashed, and sometimes I had to re-install the OS. But never did I even think that my games wouldn't work after such an event. It interesting that the peak of PC gaming, in terms of unit sales, were the late 90's, the time of win 98. If games back then had saves in My Documents and registry entries and had to be re-installed when win 98 crashed, would be have a PC games market today? I think not.

Lastly, I will have to check out the NOCD answer a person above game. If that solves the registry entry problem, I will do that more. Although some games don't use the registry just for a CD check, so it won't sold every problem!

Yes, I have learnt my lesson, back up my registry more and consider backing up saves. But I shouldn't have to do it. Win 3.1, Win 95 and Win 98 were also flaky systems that crashed, and sometimes I had to re-install the OS. But never did I even think that my games wouldn't work after such an event. It interesting that the peak of PC gaming, in terms of unit sales, were the late 90's, the time of win 98. If games back then had saves in My Documents and registry entries and had to be re-installed when win 98 crashed, would be have a PC games market today? I think not.

Lastly, I will have to check out the NOCD answer a person above game. If that solves the registry entry problem, I will do that more. Although some games don't use the registry just for a CD check, so it won't sold every problem!

Humorguy_basic

#1: 1998 was not the peak of pc gaming sales. Not even close. The biggest selling game in 1998 by far was starcraft which sold 1.5 million unitsthat year. To date, it has sold nearly 10 million. These days, plenty of games hit that mark or come very close to it. Adn then there are games like WoW, Orange Box, the sims, warcraft 3, diablo 2, doom 3, half-life 1&2, counterstrike, and a bunch of others that have sold more than 1.5 m illion in the years following 1998.

#2: You can easily backup your registry, saves, and everything else by simply "Ghosting" your hard drive. Ghosting is the act of creating a completely identical copy, or a ghost image, of a hard disk using backup software. You can use software like Norton Ghost (or a free solution if you prefer that) which will create an exact copy of your hard drive which you can load up in seconds whenever your system dies, or if you want to copy everything to a new hard drive. It's really fast and simple, so I don't think anyone really has room to complain about losing files when making backups is so easy and hastle free.

You're not listening, are you?! why should I HAVE to back up saves and back up registries? I neve had to in the past when game saves went into the game install folder and no registry entries were made! Why should I go to the vast expense of ghosting my drive, just because PC games today want to have copius registry entries and save in My Documents?! Why are you as PC gamers willing to bend over and take it up the.... for games publishers that do things they don't have to do? I would love to know one reason why saves now have to go into My Documents for so many publishers (not all!)?!

As to re-installing Vista, as I said, most crashes can be fixed with a 'repair-install' which maintains data, but because of registryuse and My Documents us by PC games today, when you have a total crash of the OS, you can still have the game on your hard drive all with all the files you need to run it, but because they now put data in the registry and the saves in My Documents, you have to re-install and re-start the game as though you bought it yesterday! I'd rather support those games that still work, games like STALKER and Medieval II Total War and my older games like System Shock 2 by playing them, and not bother at the moment with any game I have to go through the hassle of re-installing and re-starting!

I find it amazing that so many can say it's my fault for not backing this or that up, when there is absolutely no reason for the problem to exist at all - even with an OS crash! Instead of demanding that we gamers jump through more and more hoops (which it's obvious fewer gamers are willing to do!) Why aren't we demanding that publishers do what they did for 15 years with no problems!

As to 1998 - I said late 90's. Not 1998. I could say 1997 and list the PC games of that year, over 100 - when, since 2000, have we had this many PC games RELEASED - let alone of this quality!!!!!???? The depth of quality and range of genres was amazing! And Starcraft sold 1.5 million in the USA in it's first year! They were not worldwide sales!

There is absolutely no doubt that 1995-1999 was the peak in PC gaming, both in interest, media coverage, income and unit sales! Even if you only look at the 'classics' released you can see that 1997 has beaten any one year since 2000 for quality as well as quantity! I could do the same for any other single year between 1995 and 1999!!! I'll just list some of the classic games of 1997 below and you tell me what year since 2000 that has matched this - in a single year?!

Total Annihilation, Blade Runner, Fallout, Age of Empires, The Last Express, Dungeon Keeper, Longbow 2, Tomb Raider II, Carmageddon, Interstate 76, EF2000, Star War Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, The Curse of Monkey Island, Quake II, Zork: Grand Inquistor, MDK, Broken Sword: The Smoking Mirror. X-Com Apocalypse.

So don't tell me the peak of PC gaming was not the late 90's, but sometime since 2005. Heck, even 1997 slaughters any year since 2000! AND EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM WORKS WITH A FULL OS REINSTALL!!!!