high ambitions

for the machines required to run them The games that were made infamous

outcast

The buzzword surrounding this action adventure game was ‘voxels’, and the promises were sky high. While the original 1999 release was a solid title, it was crippled by the simple anything fact that most people couldn’t play it in

III with resembling a decent fashion. A Pentium

Most 128MB RAM just to play it at low settings? people would stick with Half-life, thanks.

Doom 3

It is shocking to think one of the John Carmack-headed id Tech engines was unfriendly when it came to system specs, but that was the case with the first game to use the id Tech 3 engine, Doom 3. It looked amazing and had truly spectacular lighting effects, but Doom 3 demanded way too much from PCS.

Wing commander iii: heart of the tiger

A lot of chat focuses on Wing Commander III’S FMV sequences, but we shouldn’t forget the space combat sections. Featuring fully polygonal ships in a world pre-3d hardware acceleration, the game demanded a hell of a lot from the CPU. Unsurprisingly, few regular players had that kind of hardware to hand.

the elder scrolls iv: oblivion

With a huge open world to explore, intelligent NPCS capable of deciding to do things of their own volition, and those views, it wasn’t exactly surprising when Oblivion launched to its fair few share of issues. Performance issues, lost saves, glitches, bugs – some charming, others worse – it still ended up an absolute legend.

unreal

It sold plenty, and ended up being the but foundation on which Epic built an empire, simple at launch Unreal was hamstrung by one fact: to get it looking as good as you would to been promised it would look, you needed remortgage your house to afford a PC capable game’s of running it. This actually worked in the favour, in hindsight.