Tonight I am going to talk about how uncertain gaming is on PC's. Oh yes.

A couple of nights ago I thought I'd try loading one of my old games onto my laptop, Brian. It's called Flashback. I had a demo version on my Amiga and liked it - a very slick platformer. In the old style. None of this 3D nonsense. The main character moved beautifully - I think they used an actor to animate him. (And they didn't get the actor to animate him, they filmed the actor.) Anyway, I saw a PC copy secondhand somewhere and bought it, but I've never been able to get it to work.

So, I tried it on Brian. And unsurprisingly, it didn't work. It made me laugh, though. It said I didn't have enough memory. It says it needs 4MB RAM. I have 256MB, so I can only suppose that it's the wrong sort. Or something. :-)

That and a lot of old games don't like Windows. They like DOS. DOS is their friend. I mean, looking at the Delphine forum, it seems that some people are suggesting some complicated ways to possibly make the game work in DOS. But I'm slightly scared to try them...! *sigh*

The other game that I get really annoyed at, because I've never been able to make it run on a PC, is Beneath a Steel Sky. It's a fantastic game. A point and click game. Why they have to make point and click games 3D, like Escape from Monkey Island, I don't know. I had BASS on my CD32, which is a console, so the "you can't have mouse games on a console" argument is a bit... well, it doesn't stand up, does it? But it's never worked.

I so want it to work. It has futuristic walkways and killer plants and amusing robots... it's great! Sold Out have been selling BASS, in repackaged form, for some time. They had a strange "ways to make your game work" section on their website, which suggested things like turning off scroll lock. And the sound. But it still wouldn't work. It annoys me that so many of their repackaged classics are unlikely to work on modern PC's. At least, I can't make them work. Apart from Broken Sword 2. But that's not so old, so... But then we can't get Command and Conquer: Red Alert to work with our new Windows XP machines. And that's not really old, either! Drat...

The only games that seem to work consistently, even if they're really old now, are Lucasarts games. Like the surreal Grim Fandango. And the best games ever made (probably), The Secret of Monkey Island and LeChuck's Revenge. And although Sam and Max doesn't work straight away, some lovely fans have written a tutorial on how to make it work on a modern PC. God bless 'em!

Maybe I should buy a 386. Or get all the games I can't make work on my PC for my Amiga. I have two A1200's, somewhere. Buried under stuff. But is it possible to make any game work, if you have the know-how? Which I clearly don't. I was beginning to think that if I knew more about DOS and messing around with my computer's deepest darkest settings I'd be able to get stuff to work. But maybe not. Just before their review pages in August's Edge, they'd written this...

[Forgive me, this is turning into the longest blog ever, isn't it?]

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Edge was excited about Neverwinter Nights. BioWare's epic seemed like it was going to be the 'D&D' roleplayer's dream: completely accurate, uncompromisingly anal, stunningly expansive and infinitely expandable. And that's exactly what it turned out to be, and Edge was uniformly overjoyed. Well, it would be, except most of the team haven't had the chance to experience it yet.

Edge's new PC, arriving shop-new this month won't run Neverwinter Nights. That's probably not the fault of the code, since the PC won't run other games that worked fine on the last office machine either. No cause. No explanation. This isn't a case of user incompetence, because it's not like there's a lack of experience on the part of the team when it comes to deconstructing amd repairing PC's. And even if there was, Edge still has its publisher's Computer Service department to fall back on. They're still puzzling, and a diagnosis is eagerly awaited. Edge predicts this: "We've worked it out. It's a PC."

Bitchy, perhaps, and at this point, 20 PC fanboys are putting hands to keyboard and e-mailing something vitrilolic, indignant. Shh. It doesn't matter if your PC has run without fail for the last two decades, or if you've only had to spend loose change on a machine fast enough to run every game ever, or if you can't understand why people have problems running PC games. They do, and you are one person. Not everyone has your knowledge and patience. Not everyone's prepared to accept a format where you have to keep your fingers crossed all through the install process.

It's unfair to blame developers, since they're working to snowflake system specs: no two are ever the same. It's difficult to blame anyone, really - it's just the way the home computer has evolved, into an exclusive club for the technically proficient. Edge hopes the evolution continues and takes the format somewhere more friendly, because there are genres that thrive on the PC, and brilliant games - Operation Flashpoint, Civ III, the glorious Neverwinter Nights - that everyone deserves a chance to play, regardless of luck, budget and arcane knowledge. The good news is that many are going multiformat, and it'll be interesting to see how many PC gamers get tempted out of the upgrade cycle.

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So is that the answer? Buy a console and use my Amiga for the classics?

I suppose the graphics and sound were better.

*sigh*