Thread: Planet Halflife: 200 Reasons to Love PC Gaming

My favs are:

20. Old games on new hardware
The first thing you do when you buy a new graphics card? Install your old games to marvel at the frame-rates and resolution. That's why we still keep Far Cry and Crysis nearby.

27. Backwards compatibility
Everything was fine until Vista came along. Boo to Bill Gates and technical progress.

28. The sniper dot
"You've got red on... oh."

31. Quickload
F9 is our second best friend.

32. Quicksave
F5 is our best friend

35. Gaming photography
Because there is no better desktop wallpaper than the sun setting on the majestic savannah of Far Cry 2.

36. Talking to your mates while you play
Because IRC chat is almost as interesting as an extended European land war.

37. The '~' key
It's called a tilde, and it lets you turn the gravity off. Win.

38. Drawing boxes around tiny men
When all else fails, Select All and right click on your problems. If only this worked in real life too.

40. High definition Gaming
We call it 'using a monitor', and we've been doing it since 1992. Catch up, consoles.

41. Dual monitors
Because we can watch TV and play games at the same time.

46. 196 Million PC Gamers worldwide
We're not a hobby. We're a nation.

52. Voxels, texels, Megatextures, et al
The more buzzwords, the better the game. Fact.

54. Call of Duty 4's ending
Price! Noooo! Clearly, he'll be back. But, Nooooo!

56. Screensavers that save the world
Do you leave your PC on all night? Don't, you're killing the planet. But if you must, download Folding@Home, a screensaver that uses your PC's idle time to analyse the protein structures that may cause cancer. Hit snipurl.com/d8ae2.

58. Morals defined entirely by killing
Because "I was good person. I let Anna Navarre live" is a great way to get funny looks on the train. Also, she was kind of hot.

61. The end of A:/
Now our PCs begin at C. This amuses us.

64. Overclocking
Voiding your warranty for extra frames per second gets easier every year. It's almost like Intel want us to burn through our processors.

69. The BFG
Because nothing says "f*** you" like a giant bogey to the face.

70. Crab walking
Enable disguise. Crouch. Look up. Waltz.

73. Being the last man alive
All eyes are on you. You know the spectators are cheering. Will you survive?

74. Building your own PC
For under £600, you can buy the bits for a PC that will handle any game available today, or the rest of the year. And putting it all together is stupidly simple. We've put a PDF file with a feature showing you how on Issue 200's DVD.

76. Case mods
Because every PC needs a blue LED.

81. Sky-hopping in Battlefield
Battlefield 2 might be a frantic and fearsome shooter, but it's also a hysterical sandbox, waiting to be exploited. If you ever tire of shooting, get a few mates together and try some jet-stunts. You can jump from a 'copter to a boat while jumping through a dam, or swap planes in mid-air, fly upside down under a bridge, or reach 150ft using just det-packs and try to hit a passing helicopter.

82. The gravity gun
Because a toilet hurled into the face is the new "hello".

83. The portal gun
An elaborate solution to an age-old problem: not being able to see your own bottom.

84. Splinter Cell's Booby Trapped Doors
Setting the whole scene up takes far longer than just shooting the guy in the face, but it's worth it. But still, attaching a miniature mine to a door-frame, alongside a remote camera (so you can watch the whole dread escapade) and then whistling remains one of the funniest ways to make an entrance. "I AM SAM FISHER. MASTER OF STEALTH." Try it for yourself in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

86. Throwing chickens at helicopters
Crysis wasn't just a high-tech first-person shooter. It was a game about playing a superhero; about dashing up to oblivious soldiers, decloaking, and punching them into orbit. For more of that feeling, try the excellent Predator: Heat of the Jungle mod, available from www.snipurl.com/avp97.





And this article is only part 1, can't wait for part 2

201. PC Gamer going from 350-page novels to 50-page leaflets yet maintaining the same price point.

Wait, what?