I haven’t bought a game for my PC in a long long time. I’m more of a console gamer now, so I never play games on my PC anymore. But yesterday I decided to buy Call of Duty 2 because I’d been playing it multiplayer during lunch at work and it’s a great game. I thought it would be cool to take it for a spin on my machine at home, and check out the single player mode.

It doesn’t run. Something about my video card not supporting dynamic textures. Which really ticked me off. I can’t take the game back because I’ve opened it! To prevent this exact scenario, before I bought the game I checked the minimum system requirements. 1.5GHz Pentium 4. Check. (Actually, mine’s 2.5GHz, so it’s even better than minimum.) 512MB RAM. Check. Graphics card must have 64MB of RAM. Check. In an NVIDIA card, it must be at least a GeForce 4. Check. (Mine’s a GeForce 4 MX 440.) So my machine should run this game just fine.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that I tried to play a game on my PC. I know how bad this can be, seeing as how installing a total of 4 games totally screwed up the machine my kids use, but I thought I’d give it a chance.

Now I’m left with a decision to make. Do I sell the game at a loss? A brand new game that cost me $60Cdn? That I haven’t even played? Or do I throw more money at it, and upgrade my video card? I’m not exactly made of cash, so this option doesn’t appeal to me very much.

But I really wanted to play that game!

Crap.

Crap. I can’t wait for my PS3 to arrive, when I can play games with this quality and I know they’ll just work.