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Ben's game reviews and
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When
I was a young lad (god now
I sound like my dad) One of the most up to date home PC’s
that you
could buy was an Acorn Electron. I moaned and whined until at last my
dad came home one day with one under his arm, only to realise that I
needed a TV to go with it as well. So back off to the shops again he
went. I loved that PC, You used to load the software in using a tape
player and I used to love and sit and listen to it as it screeched and
blipped until the software was loaded then it would throw an error
because the volume was too loud! It was temperamental and slow but god
it was great. A local newsagent used to stock the games so I saved up
my money from doing a paper round and at the end of the week, I would
buy the latest game which sometimes was as much as £5.99.I
would also
buy a weekly magazine and sit for hours tying in the freebie programs
only to find that when I tried to run the program it would throw an
error at line 2110 because I had missed an apostrophe or a full
stop...(Not many changes there then)
Now life has come full circle
and I have my own children, They are not content with playing games
such as Chuckie Egg and with having to wait for the tape to load when
they can put a game in the PC, Xbox or Playstation and be playing
within seconds with stunning graphics and game speed and on line with
any number of people via the Internet! there is no doubt that
technology has also come full circle, but there are certain pitfalls.
Both Children and myself have our own PC’s. We like to play
multi player
games on our network or against other people on the Internet. When THQ
released Company of heroes, for me it was a must have, the downfall was
that the boys wanted to be able play it as well on their machines...So
after duly purchasing another 2 copies of the game neither of the
machines would run the game due to issues with their existing graphics
cards...So off I went on line shopping looking for the most capable but
lowest cost graphics cards.
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I
am often asked to look at PC’s
& laptops that parents have scrimped & saved for and
given to
little Johnny for his birthday with a copy of one game or another and
all that happens is that after thinking of loading the game for 10
minutes, the machine throws a paddy and does not want to play...Little
Johnny is disappointed and upset that his dad has bought him a pile of
junk that he can’t play the games that all his friends play.
So before buying that PC that
everyone can use at home and Johnny can play his games on...Get the
highest spec machine that you can afford with at least 1GB of RAM and a
separate AGP or PCI Express Graphics Card. When Johnny is
reading off
his list of games that he would like etc, check the minimum and
required specifications before you buy it to avoid disappointment later
on & before playing the game, make sure that your anti-virus
solution is not running in the background and that your mum is not
logged in doing her shopping on line, Help and advice can be found in
our forum
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