Sons of Minesweeper

So is PC gaming hosed? That seems to be the case for games that a) are not massively multiplayer, b) don’t have “Sims” in the title, or c) aren’t played by your mom.

But it’s not really as dire as all that. Mass Effect actually made it to number 2, and Sins of a Solar Empire to number 9, on the current NPD PC sales charts.

Those numbers, however, don’t reflect where PC owners are really gettin’ their game on: with casual games. Remember when you would say you were a PC gamer and people would say, “Yeah, me too,” and you’d ask what they played, and they’d say, “Minesweeper and Solitaire.” And you’d chuckle. Good times!

I still laugh to think about it, but now it’s a painful, strangled (nay, rueful) laugh, because the Sons of Minesweeper are now dominating the PC gaming industry. I actually like casual games, since they load fast, fill a few minutes that might otherwise be spent strangling editors, and go away quickly.

If game manufacturers are wondering why their once-loyal PC gamer hardcore fan base is finally throwing up their hands and/or certain fingers in disgust and frustration, they need only read their own boxes. Remember Crysis, the game that would knock your PC to the ground and pound its chips till it cried for mommy? Well, Crysis was a PC-only game, and its minimum specs were a Pentium 4 2.8GHz or comparable, 1GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT or better (Vista specs are higher). And that was for people who liked to watch slide shows. The system capable of playing Crysis at full-res with solid frame rates is currently busy running the new supercollider.

Now along toddles the PC version of Assassin’s Creed, which Xbox 360 owners finished and sold back to GameStop about a year ago, and the minimum system specs make Crysis seem like a girly-game: Pentium dual-core 2.6GHz, 2GB RAM, 256MB DirectX 10.0 card. Recommended specs for people who want to, you know, actually interact with the game in real time? About twice that.

Screw that. Where’s the link for Bejeweled?