[houltmac]

Over the last few days I have been toying with PC gaming again. From the day I played the original Wolfenstein I was hooked, working my way through Duke Nukem to Unreal Tournament. I was a huge PC gamer when I grew up and it's really what got me involved in the computer industry (though I had loved gadgets and technology since I first layed eyes on an LED).

Anyway, last week I decided to go out on a limb and purchase two games. I chose Unreal Tournament 3 and Painkiller: Overdose. These are sequels to two of my favorite PC FPS (First Person Shooter) games ever. I was very excited. Since I didn't want to risk BootCamp following my trials with Leopards "full" version of BootCamp for clients I decided to use the copy of VMWare Fusion I had purchased "just in case".

I installed Fusion and then Windows XP SP2 in minutes using the disk image backup I had made a while back. All was well. Since I didn't need a network connection (this is for gaming only after-all) I decided to forgo the indecency of updating Windows and went straight for the jugular. I installed UT3 and ran the *.exe. Crash. Again. Crash. Research. Again. Crash. No CD crack to test. Crash. Uninstall. Re-install. Crash. More research. No sound, more game driver adjustment. Crash. Game updates. Windows updates. Crash. Forget it.

I install Painkiller... and it loads! Settings reasonably high (this is a 2.6GHz C2D with a 512MB 8600M GT and 2 allocated GB RAM after all). Time to play. It's just a jerky mess. I can't even bring myself to check the frame-rate - it's utterly unplayable (and not in a "I need 900FPS minimum!" kinda way either - genuinely unplayable). I restart the machine, the VM, adjust the game settings down. No change. I try everything I can think of, reinstalling the game, VMWare tools, allocating more RAM. No change.

Maybe VMWare isn't up to it like Parallels has been for friends I think to myself. I couldn't find my Parallels disk image and can't be bothered to download it, so I decide to try BootCamp, now determined it's not going to be a waste of time and money. I partition off 17GB of space - more than enough and leaving a nice round number for OS X. Insert the original XP SP2 full retail disk and the machine restarts. After what feels like forever the installer has loaded. I choose the BootCamp partition to install to and let it continue as Apple intended. The machine restarts... and crashes. I am not removing the EFI partition and re-creating the Windows partition like I have before: I am not risking the reliability of my brand new machine and the capacity of my lovely new hard drive.

I finally admit defeat.

After a whole weekend of messing around with the dark side, trying supposedly sound, full version iterations of technologies designed to run these retail games (of relatively low hardware requirements) I can't so much as complete a demo level. Even given the huge anticipation of these giants of the FPS world, and my adoring love of the genre, I cannot waste another frustrated second on the futile attempt at enjoyment. I will stick with OS X thank you and I will complete Doom3 for the 700th time. I don't hate Windows, I hate everything it's made of, and all that goes with it.