I know that sometimes buying a new game only to find out that it does not work can be, to say the least, frustrating. So I thought that I would give people some tips and advice to follow when buying new games. I’ve been playing games for about 14 years and over the years I have learned through trial and error to follow these rules. Although I think these rules are pretty simple and that this is something you should do on anything you buy, I have found that there are people out there that simply skip these.

The first thing I do is try to find a review from a source that I trust-I have found that PC Gamer and Gamespy work well for me, but I am sure there are hundreds more out there. If the game just hit the shelf, this may be hard to do as most games don’t get reviewed for a least a month after coming out.

Second I would suggest finding the official forums or a gaming forum. If the official forum will let you view the tech support forum then you should be able to see what other people are complaining about. There are occasions were for one reason or another the official forums will not let you access the tech support. Although this is rare, it happens. In that case fine a gaming forum that has discussion about the game in question sometimes you can find members there that already have the game and see what there saying about it.

The next thing I would suggest is that if you buy a game and your system only meets the minimal requirements, then don’t expect to not have problems. Set all game setting to there lowest this will help improve things. But try to keep your system specs above the minimal for any game you buy. This can also be said about your hardware. make sure you know what you have and that you know a little about it. A good example of this is Nvidia MX series cards although they were new as it turned out my older Nvidia Geforce 3 outperformed the MX. This is one of the reasons why I never got one.

Basically it all comes down to research and asking questions. This doesn’t mean that you have to do this. There are some people who go and buy without do anything. They see they want it they go and get it, but more often than not their next stop is the tech support forum. Remember that very few things in life are a sure thing. If you do your research before you buy, you can save yourself a big headache later but there are no guarantees-even I buy a bomb every now and then. If you have any questions about games, feel free to ask here. I keep up to date on most of them. I’m more than willing to help out.

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If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.