PC Gaming

Warcraft III. Voodoo2 wasn't cutting it, upgraded to a GeForce4 MX420.

.... which still wasn't really cutting it, so I spent every penny to my name and upgraded to a Radeon 9700 Pro like 6 months later.

Man, I loved that card. Used it for years. To this day I think it was the card I held onto the longest.

Doom - we upgraded to 16MB of RAM so we could play it through Windows 95.

Win95 wanted 4MB and Doom wanted all 8 that we had, so we had to exit, reboot, and go to DOS then run it manually.

World of Warcraft. I was on Windows XP with 512mb of RAM and who knows what graphics card but I was lagging so bad when WotLK came out.

With all the people standing at the entrance to Naxx I had to basically aim myself for the portal and lag my way in without being able to see where my character was walking due to the lag.

Quake 4. I remember running it on a very cheap GPU and following tweakguides to get it running properly. The game that actually got me to pull the trigger on new hardware was Battlefield 2142.

Not sure if this really counts, but I was given a copy of 'The Movies' when I was younger. Turns out it needed a DVD player to read it, but at the time I only had a CD player, so had to go out and buy an external DVD player to use it. Besides a few very lightweight PC games, I played on console most of the time and never got a true understanding of 'specs' until later in life.

Quake1 after voodoo came out with transparent water patch. It's so good it felt like cheating knowing some players have no idea that I can see through water. Resolution upgrade is a big enough advantage as well.(from 320x240 to 640x480 )

Then Quake 3 I upgraded to nvidia's TNT card.

I think most of time I stay roughly with the upgrades(usually 2nd place card) with the exception during the bitcoin/covid time.(I stick with my 1080 oc version until I can buy 6800XT from amd direct.)

Battlefield 2. My dad and I went wild building our first PC together. Good times.

Probably Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

Edit- It was a Tandy Color Computer 2 circa 1986ish, went from 16K to 64K ram.

Half-Life 2. I remember being completely blown away by early source engine, even on low graphics to keep the frame rate above the 20s. I watched the weird little graphics benchmark animation probably a hundred times to dial in the settings. If you told me that in the future I'd be capping the framerate on highest settings to keep it from hitting the default limit of 300 I'da called you a liar.

Officially- Bioshock Infinite.

I was still rocking my windows XP old faithful, and Infinite required the upgrade to windows 7. My motherboard didn't support 7 though, so Old Faithful finally met its match

Doom 3. It's still the only game I've upgraded my PC explicitly for.

Blade and Sorcery, because my PC with a Ryzen 3 1200 and GTX 970 at the time could hardly run this and a lot of other VR games. And also Cyberpunk 2077, to a smaller degree.

Neverwinter Nights. I was scraping by on the 800x600 resolution and lots of slowdowns. 2006 I built a new computer with a 1080x1080 LCD and turned on that glorious high resolution text option.

I mentioned in another post that Unreal Tournament 2004 was one of them for me.

Later on down the road, after I built my first gaming pc using an XFX 8800gts with a whopping 640mb vram - I tried to max out XCOM when it came out. Next thing I heard was a pop, then I smelled the smoke that was billowing out of my GPU. It was time to upgrade again!

X-Wing vs TIE Fighter. Got a 3Dfx Voodoo add on, going to real 3D was such a big difference.

Heretic.

I bought a used hard drive at a yard sale in like 1996 or 1997, that contained Doom II and Heretic. The 386/40 that was my personal box wouldn't tun the latter, and I wasn't going to set it up on the family's rapidly disintegrating Packard Bell Pentium-100.

Duke Nukem 3D. I had a 486 SX 25 Mhz processor, but upgraded to the DX 100 Mhz processor. Can't remember if that helped and I just needed a Pentium to run it properly, but I think it worked.

The day I went from console to PC. Game, no clue.

SWTOR. I did a whole new build so I could play it.

It was Quake, but I didn't have the money to actually make it happen. That would come years later.

I can't recall exactly which one of the two it was but it was either Quake 4 or Doom 3. I remember I managed to squeeze out like 14 fps using RivaTuner on the family computer. I got my first job not long after that and put together my first PC.

Age of Conan. Got one of the first quad cores. Game only designed for 2. Had to build another eventually.

Oh shit, I remember there WAS a game. I believe I bought a Geforce 2 MX or sth for it...could have been an FPS, possibly Unreal Tournament.

Plenty of games have made me say it, but I can't think of a single one that got me to actually do it.

I do know that Half-Life 1 was the first time I ever looked at the requirements and was floored that my computer didn't even meet the minimum. It was the first game I tried when my family got a new computer like 2 years after it came out.

Red Faction. It's the game that made me buy my first Video Card way back when.

Minecraft. It was probably the inspiration for my entire career path, to be honest. When I first played it, it ran horribly. I had an Athlon II and 4gb of ram running Windows Vista. After a few months I bought some AMD gpu that was waaaay too big for my Dell SFF case. I tried modding (read “hacking up”) my case, but couldn’t get it to fit. Wound up building an entirely new computer about a year later after scraping up all my birthday and Christmas money. After that I bought a high refresh rate monitor, then a better mouse, keyboard, and you know how the story goes from there.

Kena: Bridge of spirits.

It's such a gorgeous game and I loved playing it. But the fight scenes would drop frames so badly that I couldn't finish the game because of one boss battle that requires solid timing to win.

Witcher 3. I played the first two on my old laptop but waited to upgrade for that one.

Morrowind, specifically the Tribunal expansion, and then I played it anyways at like 10fps and fucking loved it lol

Metro 2033. I used to play it on my Dad's slightly more powerful machine until I could upgrade my machine. One of the best examples of art direction and great graphics being utilized together. Last Light looks like a PS4 game no matter what platform you play it on. Easily one of the best looking games ever.

I think it was either Arena or Daggerfall.

I think that would've been the first Crysis.