[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I know the vid card issues are legit, but I've seen some nutty or just ignorant complaints, too. People complaining that they can't play anything bigger than a small map without experiencing lag ... when they have only 256 meg of RAM in their system and onboard video. That was too little to run Civ 2 without hitches, years and years ago. Some people also expect to max out their visual settings in a game and crank the resolution to 1600x1200 and can't believe the game doesn't run smoothly when they do.

[/ QUOTE ]

All my graphics resolutions are set to the lowest possible setting, running it on a year-old Pentium (admittedly not one made for gaming) with a gig of ram.

I'm not bitching about not being able to run really large worlds on it -- not much, at least. I *am* bitching that there were a bunch of assholes pre-patch claiming that the reason it wouldn't run had nothing to do with Firaxis screwups, that it was all us. Yeah, I get dark terrain playing the normal game, but in the global editor I can see everything just fine . . . sure, all my fault. Shees.

BTW you could run CivII on 256meg of ram -- or even less -- without many problems at all. I know I did. This new puppy is a hog. Fantastic game, though. All my old strategies just got tossed out the window . . .

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm with you on the crap that fanboys spew about there being nothing wrong with a game as long as they can run it. Game fanboys are among the most degenerate species of mankind, not quite as bad as child molesting priests, but they'll probably grow up to be them or, if already adult, probably admire them.

Not with you on the 256 RAM being okay for Civ 2 though. I ran it on a very nice machine for the time with a gig of RAM and still found very notable hitches when panning across the screen. A gig of RAM for strat games with lots of units, and RTS's, has been standard for years now, since well before Starcraft.

Many people claimed basically if there machine wouldn't freeze up totally that it ran any game fine. These buggers were accursed wretches when they joined a multiplayer game online and bogged it down to a crawl, claiming it wasn't them and their machine was fine. For a huge number of people, admitting their machine is underpowered is tantamount to publicly broadcasting that they have a tiny penis. This is as it was, is, and ever shall be.

I seriously wouldn't expect smooth play out of any game these days with less than a gig of RAM, and that prescription goes back all the way to my Total Annihilation days in what, 1997 I think. Now that is one long, long ass time, centuries in gaming years.

Back then computers still had a touch of the DOS to them and had a geek and afficionado vibe, not a mom and pop thing nearly as much as today. It hadn't been long since computers were a totally geek thing. People expected you needed some savvy and a good system to play games. Now I think it's more common that people just assume that any computer can play anything and even get angry at the game if it doesn't. Me, when I see Civ 4 recommending 256 megs of RAM to play, I laugh. And at the recommended specs, I'm still laughing.