The internet is flooded with “how-to” videos on building your own PC, but is this necessarily a good thing? Yes, many of them have good advice, but for the average Joe (or Jane), deciphering between professional counsel and amateur ego can be very difficult. Tutorials are great, but what’s really needed is a complete guide to building a gaming PC.

People generally have three fears when it comes to building a PC:

1. Will my hardware components be compatible?
2. Am I putting this together the right way?
3. Am I really getting the best Performance for the Price?

This guide will put those fears to rest. But before we continue reading, let’s make sure that building is right for you. Honestly, building ISN’T for everyone, and you DON’T need a custom rig to be able to play today’s most demanding games.  If you aren’t that interested in building, you just don’t have time to put into the process, or you get confused setting up a folding chair, then my recommendation for you is to go out, buy a ~$500 PC with a good processor in it, upgrade the graphics card, and be done with it.

However, if you ARE interested in reaching the limit of the Price/Performance threshold, if you ARE interested in owning a fully customizable and future-proof machine, if you ARE interested in telling people that YOU built your own computer, then this ‘Guide to Building a Gaming PC’ is exactly where you should begin.

This guide will consist of 5 parts, the last 3 of which will contain video tutorials:

1. Building a Gaming PC — Part 1: Deciding to Build
2. Building a Gaming PC — Part 2: Selecting the Hardware
3. Building a Gaming PC — Part 3: Building the Rig
4. Building a Gaming PC — Part 4: Starting Up for the First Time
5. Building a Gaming PC — Part 5: Disassembling for upgrades

Good for them. That’s a significant number considering they did not use any copy protection schemes like many of the other developers have been implementing recently. I actually haven’t bought this game yet, but it has gotten such good reviews, I think I might have to.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

When Vista came out it was buggy and annoying: programs were not compatible, popups to “allow” your programs to run appeared every 2 seconds, etc. So people decided that Vista was no good and stuck with XP. I however did not. I continued to use Vista and after a few months of updates and patches, Vista and I had become quite good friends. Of course by this time rumors had spread that Vista was a load of crap and now even people who had never even used it would rather die than ‘upgrade to Vista’. Here’s my message to you: “Stop acting like you’re 90 years old and open you mind to change and progress.” Remember when browser tabs came out and we thought it was annoying and weird…imagine living without tabs today. Change is good, and progress will never come without troubleshooting the bugs (of course, this should have been done by Microsoft, but that’s in the past)…… Anyways, Vista provides support for DirectX10, looks amazing, and has many useful features that after a few weeks of useage you won’t be able to live without. If you’re a PC gamer and have avoided Vista because of the rumors, it’s time to reconsider.

As the title would suggest, AndersonGaming.com is publishing a list of game development/publishing companies who have turned there backs on PC gaming. When the going got tough, these companies got going…either by giving up on PC game development altogether, not porting games to the PC, or by switching their focus from the PC to the console platform. These companies deserve a good shunning in my opinion.

Important information about the list:

1. The list begins with the worst of the bunch and ends with the least worst.

2. The list probably isn’t exhaustive since these are just the ones that I’ve noticed in the past month or so. I’ll need your help in tracking down the rest. (Leave Comments)

3. None of these companies are written-off by any means. They will be welcomed back to our good graces the moment they return to their “roots”.

From the mouth of the Ubisoft CEO himself: “it’s easy to pirate PC games. So what do we do? Well, it’s better not to invest a lot of money on that particular platform…we prefer to focus on platforms that maybe have less piracy and where more customers are actually paying for the content they consume…We greatly reduced the number of people working on PC games…” I am ashamed of Ubisoft. They made some of my favorite PC games (Battle Realms, Far Cry, Prince of Persia…) and now instead of standing behind their loyal fans and working on a solution to game piracy, they have turned their backs on us and fled to their comfortably unchallenging consoles. For shame, Ubisoft, for shame. ~shakes head in disappointment~

Read the rest…

Three pretty cool new developments I’d like to share with you:

Instant Action

Instant Action has done a great job creating free, browser-based games. Not the 2 dimensional Flash games you’re used to seeing online, but genuine 3D games that are on par (graphically) with PC games released a few years ago. Yeah, it’s no Crysis, but definitely worth checking out, and if they continue to develop this idea, we might be on the doorstep of a new gaming revolution.

.

JACT

Hey, anyone out there wanna get payed to play games? And not crappy games either. I’m talking CoD4, WOW, TF2, etc. Well JACT is doing that right now. The catch is that they pay you in JACT BUX, which can be used to buy things from the JACT MALL. Not to worry though, the JACT MALL is filled with plenty of good stuff like video games, pc components, and much more. How can they afford to do this you ask? “JACT service is funded through its initial investors and traditional site-based advertisements as well as a new, innovative product placement method in the JACT Mall”.

Nvidia: The Force Within

Apparently, the Geforce 8-series GPUs came with special physics processing abilities called PhysX that I (and many others) were unaware of. Fortunately, drivers have now been released that can take advantage of this new technology and they are available for download here. Even more exciting is that Nvidia is also distributing (for free) a bundle of games, demos, and other media that showcase the new PhysX technology.

.

.

.

Grand Theft Auto IV will be released for the PC on November 18th in the U.S. and on November 21st in Europe. Many are complaining about the 7 month delay between the console and PC release dates, and although it does bother me, lets not forget that many games don’t even make it to the PC at all. So let’s concentrate our rage on that issue……for now.

.

.

.

.

Expect this game to be a real hardware hog. I’m guessing it will surpass Crysis as Sys Req king (unless someone else does it first). Even more important to us is that the pc version of the game will “support significant visual improvements over the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions” according to an article in Wired Magazine. So yeah, I just want to say a big thank-you to our friends over at id software.

.

.

I seem to remember a rosy, uplifting speech from John Schappert (the VP of Microsoft Live) about a month ago that spoke of great “opportunities and growth” with regards to Microsoft’s involvement in the PC Gaming industry. I personally believed him. After all, their “Games for Windows” slogan is plastered on many of the computer games in my apartment, a slogan which does not cost game publishers one cent. And keep in mind that the Windows-based PC is still the largest gaming platform in the world.

So I have to ask: Why is Microsoft’s “Fable 2″ being released in October of this year as a XBOX360 exclusive? The original Fable was very popular among PC gamers and I see no logical reasoning behind excluding the PC market. How can you make a great game for the PC, and then make its sequel exclusive to a different platform? AND THEN CLAIM THAT YOU ARE “INCREASING YOUR FOCUS ON INVESTMENT IN WINDOWS GAMING”. Are you really that dumb? The normal reasoning behind making a console game exclusive is to encourage a boost in hardware sales, but Microsoft shouldn’t be competing with the PC market, THEIR NAME IS PRACTICALLY SYNONYMOUS WITH IT.

I have a suggestion for you, Microsoft. Either stand behind your word and be TRULY dedicated to PC gaming, or put a tighter leash on your Vice-Presidents, who obviously don’t know the direction that the company is taking.

.

.

And I think I have alot of computer games now. Back in the days of the Apple II gs I had literally hundreds of them (all on floppys of course). I don’t even know how I got them honestly, I vaguely remember that my dad knew someone from work who gave him bagfuls of these games, but he certainly never played them.

Anyways, some of my favorites were “Mission Impossible”, “Conan”, “Marble Madness”, “Wings of Fury”, “Hardball”, “Winter Games”, and “Mean 18″ to name a few. Hopefully, the pictures in this post will bring back some great memories for you as they did for me.

And if you’re feeling depressed right now since you’ve obviously upgraded your pc since then and can no longer play these awesome games, head over to Virtual Apple where you can play many of those old favorites on their online emulator. Read the rest…