{"id":9943,"date":"2023-05-10T11:37:27","date_gmt":"2023-05-10T09:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/10\/pushing-buttons-building-a-gaming-pc-is-painstaking-and-humbling-i-cant-wait-to-do-it-again\/"},"modified":"2023-05-10T11:37:27","modified_gmt":"2023-05-10T09:37:27","slug":"pushing-buttons-building-a-gaming-pc-is-painstaking-and-humbling-i-cant-wait-to-do-it-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/10\/pushing-buttons-building-a-gaming-pc-is-painstaking-and-humbling-i-cant-wait-to-do-it-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Pushing Buttons: Building a gaming PC is painstaking and humbling \u2013 I can\u2019t wait to do it again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In this week\u2019s newsletter: Consoles are plug-and-play, but starting from scratch gave me new appreciation for everything that goes into making games<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/info\/ng-interactive\/2021\/nov\/24\/sign-up-for-pushing-buttons-keza-macdonalds-weekly-look-at-the-world-of-gaming\">Don\u2019t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Next week I am going to build a gaming PC. I\u2019ve done it once before and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/games\/2021\/apr\/15\/how-i-built-a-gaming-pc\">wrote an article about what a nightmare the process was<\/a> \u2013 although the issue turned out to be with the USB stick I used to install the motherboard update patch and \u2026 well, don\u2019t get me started. The thing is, I figured it out because when you have played PC games for as long as I have, you know that figuring technical stuff out is a key part of the experience.<\/p>\n<p>While games consoles have always been pure plug-and-play experiences, PC games have definitely not. When I started playing in the early 1990s, they came on multiple floppy discs \u2013 The Secret of Monkey Island was on eight \u2013 and you had to keep swapping them in and out of the drive, like feeding a voracious robot. Not that you necessarily bought complete games back then. I first played Wolfenstein 3D when my friend got the first couple of levels free on a magazine cover disc. That\u2019s how a lot of games were distributed \u2013 the famed shareware model. Once you\u2019d played the sample, you were supposed to contact the publisher to get the full game sent to you. Comparatively few people had the internet back then, so as a distribution model it made a lot of sense. It\u2019s rumoured that there were once more copies of the shareware version of Doom (pictured below) on PCs than there were copies of Microsoft Windows 95. This was just another oddity of being a PC gamer \u2013 having a drawer full of magazine front cover discs crammed with shareware and public domain mini games.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/games\/2023\/may\/10\/pushing-buttons-how-to-build-gaming-pc\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><br \/>\n<img src=\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/a969fe5b80b180ec27d27ab70ff123444ce6d879\/0_1_5500_3300\/master\/5500.jpg?width=140&amp;quality=85&amp;auto=format&amp;fit=max&amp;s=793ac197abf944af8db899fa3073fddb\" title=\"Pushing Buttons: Building a gaming PC is painstaking and humbling \u2013 I can\u2019t wait to do it again\" \/>In this week\u2019s newsletter: Consoles are plug-and-play, but starting from scratch gave me new appreciation for everything that goes into making games<br \/>\nDon\u2019t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here<br \/>\nNext week I am going to build a gaming PC. I\u2019ve done it once before and wrote an article about what a nightmare the process was \u2013 although the issue turned out to be with the USB stick I used to install the motherboard update patch and \u2026 well, don\u2019t get me started. The thing is, I figured it out because when you have played PC games for as long as I have, you know that figuring technical stuff out is a key part of the experience.<br \/>\nWhile games consoles have always been pure plug-and-play experiences, PC games have definitely not. When I started playing in the early 1990s, they came on multiple floppy discs \u2013 The Secret of Monkey Island was on eight \u2013 and you had to keep swapping them in and out of the drive, like feeding a voracious robot. Not that you necessarily bought complete games back then. I first played Wolfenstein 3D when my friend got the first couple of levels free on a magazine cover disc. That\u2019s how a lot of games were distributed \u2013 the famed shareware model. Once you\u2019d played the sample, you were supposed to contact the publisher to get the full game sent to you. Comparatively few people had the internet back then, so as a distribution model it made a lot of sense. It\u2019s rumoured that there were once more copies of the shareware version of Doom (pictured below) on PCs than there were copies of Microsoft Windows 95. This was just another oddity of being a PC gamer \u2013 having a drawer full of magazine front cover discs crammed with shareware and public domain mini games. Continue reading&#8230;Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this week\u2019s newsletter: Consoles are plug-and-play, but starting from scratch gave me new appreciation for everything that goes into making games Don\u2019t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Next week I am going to build a gaming PC. I\u2019ve done it once before and wrote an article about what a &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/10\/pushing-buttons-building-a-gaming-pc-is-painstaking-and-humbling-i-cant-wait-to-do-it-again\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Pushing Buttons: Building a gaming PC is painstaking and humbling \u2013 I can\u2019t wait to do it again<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9944,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9943"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}