PC Gaming Made Me Love Cars

"Shady Balkan Subject, Drives an Alfa" (bularmy) 10/05/2013 at 15:19 • Filed to: GAMING AND CARS

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I love PC gaming and I loved it for alomost 20 years now, but right now I hate it. I can't make a game run and it is driving me nuts(it is the very nice GTA look-alike Sleeping Dogs). I did everything I know, but the game just don't want to run properly. After a lot of swearing and reading every solution I found online, I told my PC that I will substitute it with a console to make my life easy and then went on playing NFS Most Wanted 2012. And I have never ever owned a console in my live.

And then it stuck me, why I love PC gaming and loved it ever since I was 4 in '95 when my grandpa brought a Texas Instuments laptop from his work with Win 95 and DOS. For some time I played Minesweeper and Solitaire till my father got from somewhere two particular games. I didn't know where he got them, but I spent hours playing them, because they were very special and printed some images in my brain, that will create my other passion in the future.

The first one was The Duel: Test Drive II and the other was Lotus Turbo Challenge 2( I found out how they were called over a decade later). I remember images from those games even today, like it was just minutes ago and not 18 years. I remeber fondly the Ferrari F40(for some reason I don't love the F40...) and the Porsche 959(...but I love the 959) of Test Drive and the vistas, the roads, the cracked windshield when you crash, the small window with the stick shifting. I even learned to use the manual option for changing gears. For my 4 years I also tought that this is the best looking thing ever, but my comparison was Minesweeper and Solitaire. It was a trully magical experience.

I don't have such extensive memories of Lotus Turbo Challange 2, because to me it looke inferior to the other racing game, even though it was released two years after TD and actually is superior on alomst all levels. Still, I remember the fuel limit that I certanly didn't understand back then. But still it was a cool game with a very cool Lotuses in it.

Recenty here we asked how and when we started loving cars and I couldn't remeber. I tought it was because of some old magazines, or because of the countless trips when I wa small with my father's Wartburg, but today it hit me after wanting to dump my PC and change to the the side of crapy gfx, no mods, inferior controls and no Steam. So yeah, I love you PC gaming, because you made me a gearhead.

Zipppy, Mazdurp builder, Probeski owner and former ricerboy > Shady Balkan Subject, Drives an Alfa 10/05/2013 at 15:45

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For me PC gaming and being a gearhead started young, back in 1996, I got a game from a family friend called Grand Prix II, developed by Geoff Crammond. I never played it properly, but I had fun seeing how bad the car could get wrecked.