Visualize this baby seal?

So cute! A blobby white puffball straight out of a Miyazaki film. Oh, look! The widdle baby has involute over on his backrest! He wants us to rub his belly-welly! The way he wiggles! The way helium makes those precious piggy grunts!

image

I'm non going to rub off his goddamn abdomen.

In fact, I'm going to plug him. I'm sledding to punch him right-handed in his widdle mouth.

I don't want to. I'm determined to. My rage cannot be contained. You fill out a glass as well full and the water spills over.

This baby seal is adorable as shit.

And I'm still going to punch his lights out.

Because Crysis just locked up on me again.

***

Crysis is the latest offender only it still serves as a perfect example – just unmatchable more turdlet atop a piping heap of efflux – of why Microcomputer gaming makes me want to do terrorist acts upon nature's virtually endearing inhabitants.

I'd apt au courant playing games on my PC. I'd put it retired of my head. I have an Xbox and an iPhone. Some accommodate my gambling needs nicely. Neither runs me through the gauntlet of kidney punches and painful insects, a gauntlet oft-demanded whatsoever time I attempt to install and flow from a game happening my machine. I'm comfy with my gaming devices. Why pile with contentment? Why wrestle with bitterness? In my forward years – the old age of 34 – my longanimity has worn narrow alike tooth enamel, and complete that's left is a quivering nerve. Why tongue said nerve?

I sentiment I'd gotten inaccurate.

Then, cardinal words. Pronounce 'em with me:

Steam Sale.

You already know this, but just just in case: Steam, Valve's substance-delivery client, allows you to jack games straight onto your computer. No need to run to Best Buy or Target or that shadowy gentleman fiddling with his privates on the corner. You can download Modern War 2 and its hot, fresh maps patc sitting in your underwear, licking Cheeto dust from your keyboard.

At Steam, everything I'd ever longed-for was suddenly incomplete-off or better – and that's after the consideration that PC games are a helluva lot cheaper than anything I'd buy connected the console.

I started small. Equitable a taste. Team Fortress 2.

I played it. IT was awing. It worked!

But that's how they getcha, isn't it? A little dab'll do you. Before I could secern myself no, I was back at the Steamer store, hand hovering over the pussyfoot, jaw slackened as I perused my roughly infinite options. "Ooooh. I've already played Bioshock. But I want it! Simply what about Borderlands? And L4D2? And this indie game! And that Ea release! Sweet Johnny Reb Jumpup, bundle packs?"

An hour later (and hundreds of dollars gone), I felt look-alike a man of excess: bloated with the mere potential of long amusement. In for, I had to take out a second mortgage on the home. I had to max out the credit cards, buy or s social security numbers and betray the taco terrier to a local preschool dogfighting phone. (My wife can't interpret this, right?) All worth it, right? My return to PC gaming would be problem-free, publicized with a multitude of pixels. And virgins. And virgin pixels.

image

Fast-forward to the dozenth time that Crysis shit the roll in the hay and crashed my computer, and again I'm left asking why I invited this upon myself.

I'm left with something akin to post-masturbatory ignominy. Dingy and boiling. Shame soon boils over to rage.

And now I want to punch a sister seal.

***

Erst upon a time, it didn't bother me.

My first computer was a Tandy 1000 SX, and fifty-fifty hind then, getting a game to keep going your PC was an adventure. You had to jiggle the knobs, crack the case, convey your hands scabrous aside dicking around with jumper switches and sound cards. Laying on my bedroom floor, surrounded by RAM chips and old graphic cards, I felt comparable I was learning something: The journeying into the twist matt-up intrepid and uncharted. Looking back, I was sure that my father probably felt the same thing when He was a immature tinkering with the carburetor of a 1950s Bel Air hardtop.

To get Ultima V running, or maybe Male monarch's Quest, you had to jump finished hoops. But that was o.k.. It felt like a new frontier, traveling Retired West to areas of the correspondenc once pronounced only with "Here There Be Dragons."

Except somewhere along the way, things changed. The journey Out Westerly became inferior about the thrill of the Gold Rush and more about the part where the wagons break down and the food runs low and next thing you know you're eyeing up your buddy George IV and wondering what his backfat might taste like when simmered in an iron skillet.

I remember being a teen and having my motorcar – a Pontiac Grand Am – break down because of something to dress with the car's computer. (It poor down in the intervening of my first driving prove, which caused the course to close for the day, which earned me angry looks from my 16-twelvemonth-senile peers.) After we got the car back to the house, my father time-tested to fix it, the but result being defeat. He eventually just pitched the tools falling in the dirt and aforementioned, "You pay this much money for a automobile, the shit's supposed to work."

Gone were those contented days of tinkering under the Bel Air tough.

And gone are the days where I'm patient with my PC gaming experience.

***

Uncomparable (meaning, worst) example? Fallout 3, Pun-Of-The-Class edition.

image

I had Fallout 3 for my 360, and lost weeks of my life to it game. I loved all grim minute.

I hesitated, withal, buying the DLC, figuring that one day they'd hit shelves as the same GOTY edition. And it did. I was this shut in to buying the console adaptation when I caught wind of a sale online that had the Microcomputer interpretation for a buy Mary Leontyne Pric. My Personal computer was robust: a Dingle XPS, above-average in terms of graphics and store. So I ordered it.

What followed was a series of events that would make Sisyphus – with his onerous Boulder-pushful – gibber and cry.

The game came with deuce DVDs: "Disc Unmatchable," and the jauntily-named "Phonograph record 2."

Disc Unmatchable went into the drive. Initiation went without crusade for sadness Oregon varnish-punching. Never once did it ask for the second disc, sol I assumed that when the time came the game would demand that I introduce it. Unchaste-peasy.

I ran the file. Started up. So –

Quintet minutes in, information technology crashed to the desktop.

I did some research, found out that lo and behold, Disk Two is non in reality a drink coaster and that it must be installed individually.

No problem.

Except, problem. Installation introduced the moving blue circle of doom, a cursor not unlike the evermore-pirouetting hourglass. IT hung. Inert. Stable. Once to a greater extent I returned online (the manual was no help as it was the extremity for the pre-GOTY edition) and there I discovered this is all totally normal. Let it hang! It's okay! Walk away!

I walked away. Fifteen proceedings later, the desultory blue cursor finally resolved and the DLC portion installed.

"Glory of glories!" I cried, "it's again time to murder mutant miscreants in the Wasteland!"

Except the game wouldn't even freight. Rather, an error: "Innovative 5360 could not exist located." And then something about "xlive.dll."

Another trip to the internet, another serve.

Games For Windows Live didn't auto-install, then that needful to constitute installed separately. Trio hours into this process, what other am I going to do? I submitted. I installed.

And again, I tried to play the game.

And it played.

It played!

Let the angels sing! Songs from the Cherubim chorus! Trumpets! Cembalo! Dappled light filtered through with gauzy clouds! The dulcet tones of –

Information technology locked up.

That's where I tapped out. Any time I try to gambol the brave, five minutes in, it crashes. Sometimes to desktop, sometimes the whole computer lays its fool direct down and goes to sleep.

You were me, you'd punch a baby seal, too.

***

It's not just my desktop. Information technology's my wife's, too. And my laptop.

Crysis crashes most 25 percent of the time – for a PC game, not a bad ratio. Sometimes it just forgets my computer graphic settings.

Socialistic 4 Absolutely 2 works pretty comfortably, honestly. Of course, nobody can seem to get their microphones to work: it's all just mute staticky belches.

Cherry-red Faction Guerilla from time to tim yells at me about "failure to authenticate."

Saints Row 2 tries to throw Pine Tree State epilepsy by flashing the screen. Not e'er. But often enough.

The Sims 3 worked great … until I got the expansions. Now it's sluggy. Boggy. Like a fat laugh at in rubber hip to-waders slogging his way through a thrill-sucking mire.

***

It's great that PCs offer their owners –

*does some quick maths*

– one bajillion options. A million brands, a trillion hardware options, a cardinal-trillion software options. You know what? I centre options.

image

There exists, notwithstandin, a tipping point.

That tipping point occurs when these options go far impossible to create programs that encompass the volume of said options. Concluded-complexity lurks in the system. Our options have created an endless maze, and in IT we are lost.

***

I've heard the criticism.

"Man ascending, Nancy. Get wind to troubleshoot. Can't you read a manual?"

I can. And undergo. And South Korean won't anymore.

Let's turn the tables.

Got a car? Do you like it? Let's say you mount a GPS on the dashboard, and directly five minutes into every junket, the car shuts off. Happy? No? Not agitated about expensive technology failing you?

Instruct to troubleshoot. Can't you read a manual?

Thirty seconds into the brew-clock on your coffee-maker the device instead sprays hot coffee on your balls, searing them to the corduroy. You don't like that? Not a fan?

Learn to troubleshoot. Send away't you read a manual?

I could sell you a washer that works for $100 – or, for $20, I could just send a cat to your house and break your trachea with a bat. We cool?

Learn to troubleshoot. Can't you – well, you know the bore.

Fact: I want my shit to work. I bought Angry Birds for the iPhone, and you know what it does? It works. Same with whatsoever game I bought for my 360. The games work. No tinkering. No new computer hardware. No draconian DRM that demands I be online at all times and sacrifice a bleating goat. Console and iPhone games work.

You know what console games don't do?

They don't fix me want to bif a infant seal.

That's it. I'm through with. Courageous over, man. Game over. No more Personal computer gaming. I feel like a monkey in a Skinner Box who keeps acquiring shocked every time he stabs the "snack" clit. You can take your Microcomputer gaming and mystify it in your USB port.

Fuck PC gaming.

Until Civilization V comes extinct, at least.

I mean, I'm single human.

Pat Wendig is a novelist, film writer, and mercenary penmonkey. Helium's graphic for the pen-and-paper RPG diligence for over 10 years, and is the developer for Hunter: The Watch. He is represented by Stacia Dekker of the Donald Maass Literary Means. His site and blog is Terribleminds.