I have never upgraded my system in preps for a game about to be released. In the past few years, there have been surges in mass upgrades across the entire PC gamer demographic. The first was caused by Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. The more recent one was caused by BioShock and, perhaps more so by Crysis. some gamers are obsessed with running the latest games at the highest frame rates and detail settings. Not me.

While I went through my phase of trying to upgrade graphics cards and processors on an annual basis, I am now trying to stick to running each for at least 18 months. There just isn't enough of a performance grade over a 12-month market cycle of game development to warrant annual upgrades. I am not going to be "forced" into a hardware upgrade because a developer codes their product to require system specs that far exceed the consumer mean spec baseline. Studies and statistics show that even amongst gamers, the average PC specs significantly trail behind the current market offerings, with most gamers running hardware that is a generation behind the latest greatest offerings, even when the latest greatest offerings have been on the market for over a year.

Going out and spending $600 on a video card just to run Crysis when, 3 months after its release, it is still the only title on the market needing the level of muscle it requires is an act I can not understand. I spent $300 a piece on each of my two 8800 GTS chip cards (one for each of two desktops). I have not fired up Crysis yet, but when I do, it will be set at a level of detail that those systems can handle. When I upgrade 18 months later, I'll probably re-install Crysis to see how it looks on a generation later graphics card.

While butter smooth and shiny graphics are part of the joy of playing any particular title, the gameplay has to carry the title for me over the graphics. This sounds cliché, because a great deal of the media and the industry itself ascribes to this philosophy. I am all for the desires of early adopters and "hardcore" gamers driving costs down for the rest of us by going out to get their latest hardware fix. I just do not feel slaved to joining them. I am comfortable running a few months behind the "latest-greatest" curve. Good games are like good music....you never really get tired of them. Years after buying a game, there is a good chance I will still have it installed on my hard drive if it is an excellent title. The game has time to let hardware catch up to it; I'm not in any rush. I do not yet see the need for a quad-core processor or a 768MB Video Card. I'm glad they're out there, but I'm not in the market for one...not until you can buy them for $300 anyway.

Drafted on my Gateway TabletPC running Ubuntu LINUX at 10,000 feet on Delta Flight 4707.