TOM FRANCIS
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Non-Problems Of The Obscenely Over-Privileged

The planets have aligned and my sign is in the “You Need New Stuff” part of the sky this month, and I’ve ended up with three different things I feel like I desperately want, all costing roughly the same chunk of money.

I can definitely buy one. I can buy two if I want to flinch with guilt every time I think about either of them. Technically, I could buy all three, but even if I was prone to that kind of opulence, I just don’t have the time to play with three complex new toys. So, I need some advice. Which of these will genuinely be a life-improving joy, and which am I just being stupid for even considering?

1. New PC Bits: £250
I currently rock an ageing AMD FX-60, and last week my PC broke hard. It’s currently unusable, and I’m not sure how much of it is salvageable. I hate trying to fix PCs, and it was horribly outdated anyway, so the smart thing to do is buy a new heart and soul for the beast.

You know the E6850, the Core 2 Duo CPU that was, not long ago, indistinguishable in performance terms from the fastest gaming CPU commercially available, despite being a quarter of the price? Just lately, it halved in price. I don’t know if that price-slash wave has hit the UK listings I’m looking at here, but the upshot is that the fastest chip I could want costs less than I have ever paid for a new CPU: £120 ($240, but think of it as $160 because electronics always cost 50% more over here). With a motherboard, heatsink, RAM and possibly a new case, that runs into the £250-£300 range.

Voice of Sanity Says: Oh come on, you’re a geek. Even if you bought new bits, you’d have this PC fixed before they arrived. And the truth is that before it broke, there was nothing that PC couldn’t do – except not break in the near future. The only game in the world it couldn’t run perfectly well was Crysis, which you’ve had no desire to go back to since completing it. If you did, your office PC eats it for breakfast. And it’s not like anything else is going to be remotely that demanding in the foreseeable future. Even the very latest stuff with absurdly high minimum specs, like Assassin’s Creed, couldn’t have run better on your old rig. PC gaming’s hardware race stalled long ago, no-one told Crytek, and they fell flat on their faces. Don’t join them, point and laugh.

I should add, before it becomes a thing, that my voice of sanity is slightly creepy and more than a little insane.

2. An Xbox 360 with GTA IV: £200
I watched Rob Taylor playing this in the office for a bit earlier tonight. He’s the Xbox World reviewer who gave it- actually I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say what he gave it yet, but a higher score than our own magazine has awarded in its fourteen year history. The word is that GTA IV is good in a way that previous GTAs have not been, and this happens to coincide with it being set in the only place I care about, starring the first character I don’t hate since GTA3, and me having an absurdly big screen to play it on. If it’s as good as it sounds, it’ll be something of a momentous event in gaming, and I want in.

Watching Rob play, a few things struck me:

a) It looks really fun to drive. Car chassis bounce around on their wheels like the Halo Warthog, and more importantly, you just smash through stuff. Everything smaller than you smashes and splinters and splats in your path, and it makes chases dramatic.

b) Dying is hilarious. When you hit something bigger than you, hard enough, you go flying through your windshield. Each bump and knock your ragdoll takes after that knocks off a chunk of health proportional to the force of impact, so you don’t always die. But it’s always a brutal, flinch-worthy slow-mo spectacular. This is really important. Trials 2 and N are really very fiddly, frustrating games, but the fact that every death triggers a laugh or a gasp completely alters the emotional rollercoaster of the experience into something you can lose yourself in for hours.

c) It really does look like the screenshots. At least, it looks like the only one I care about:

The burning sunset ambience – I was worried it wouldn’t come up in the normal course of play. It does. I love New York, and all I really want from this is New York at sunset, New York in the rain, New York at night,

d) For the first time in the six GTA games I’ve played, they finally came up with a non-moronic way to lose heat. It’s just a really smart, logical system that rewards you for the kinds of breakneck chases you’ve previously been doing just for the fun of it.

Voice of Sanity Says: You’ve never owned a console in your life, you hate every console game you’ve played, 360 games are ludicrously expensive, you don’t get them free from work, and you’re considering spending 200 on the latest in a series that you don’t even especially like. We all know it’ll come out on PC in six to eight months, and if you really want to role-play a vegetative, neanderthal teenager, you can even play it on your big screen with a gamepad sitting on your futon then. This ‘gaming event’ you want to be ‘in on’ comprises a gaggle of slack-jawed bloated twats dribbling over gibbering message boards about laughable gameisms as if they were James fucking Joyce.

3. An EEE PC 900: £300
It’s absurd that I don’t have a laptop: the two most notable features of my job are PCs and traveling. And my only priorities in a laptop have always been portability, durability and price. As you move into smaller models, Ultraportables they’re called, the price rises exponentially until there’s nothing worth having for less than £700. Then the graph collapses and there’s the EEE: smaller than anything, cheaper than anything, and entirely solid-state.

The 900 has a two-inch bigger screen than the first model, and a 20GB drive instead of a 4GB one.

Voice of Sanity Says: Here, try using this Time Phone to call the you of three months ago. Ask him about his laptop priorities. I’ll give you a clue: there was one of them, and it wasn’t on your list. Battery life. The new EEE lasts two and a half hours, slightly more than those high-spec gaming laptops you wrote off as absurdly impractical, and slightly less than the six year-old broken hand-me-down Dell lying unloved behind the futon you’re typing this from. It’s also great if you like keyboards too small to type on, screens to small to watch anything on, drives too small to install anything on and specs too low to play anything on. That’ll be £300, moron.

Update: Thanks, internet! As per the prevailing gist of your suggestions, I have put all thoughts of the EEE from my mind and splashed recklessly on the other two.

My delivery estimate for the 360 and GTA is Tuesday, launch day, though even if it comes then I doubt everything will go smoothly setting it up. I’ve been playing San Andreas on a gamepad in anticipation, and learned four slightly contradictory facts: a) standard-def resolution actually looks fine on my large display, b) San Andreas is artistically the most drab, ugly, poorly-lit game ever made, c) I actually enjoy driving with a gamepad more than with a mouse and keyboard now, and d) the gamepad support in the PC version really sucks.

Early that same week, I’ll have a heap of things that will eventually become a Core 2 Duo E6850 with 4GB of RAM, a very fast 500GB hard drive, and a neat black case. I went with my own research for the processor, Komplett’s bundle for the mobo and RAM, PC Gamer’s recommendation for the hard drive, and customer reviews for the case. We, PC Gamer, recommend a chassis that has its power supply at the bottom rather than the top, and I, Tom Francis, fucking hate that configuration. So I went for the cheapest one that had five-star ratings and a few people raving about how easy it is to fit.