A dust-capped Alienware Aurora whirrs underneath my desk. It arrived with turquoise accents, onyx plates and an array of parts pre-assembled by the boutique manufacturer. I’ve never constructed my own machine by hand. For many years, I did the majority of my gaming on a laptop, which was packed with so much tech that it felt like hauling a cement block around in my backpack. But in 2020, I decided to take a formal jump into the hobby. The Aurora is a no-doubts-about-it gaming PC. At last, I had finally seen the way, the truth, and the light.
So why did I still feel like a bit of a fraud? Because I knew that the purest distillation of PC gaming – its Platonic Ideal – has nothing to do with the games themselves. To truly feel like I belonged I needed to piece together the guts of a machine like Lego blocks, snapping the graphics cards and RAM into place, before the moment of truth where I pressed the power button and hoped that everything fired without a hitch. A prebuilt, on the other hand, remains anathema to the lifers.
BATTLE LINES
Confirmation of this bias is everywhere. On the r/PCMasterRace subreddit you can watch ASMR-tinged videos of RAM installation. A meme on the forum claims that prebuilt machines are overpriced, and could burn down your house. This dynamic has persisted across generations of gamers, despite the fact that Alienware owners and Newegg snipers have almost everything else in common. How did they learn to resent each other?
Esta historia es de la edición August 2023 de PC Gamer US Edition.
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Esta historia es de la edición August 2023 de PC Gamer US Edition.
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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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