Recently, while surfing the net on my laptop, one of the hinges holding the screen on just dropped off. Sensing this was an indication of said laptop's imminent mortality, I dusted off the old credit card and fired up the Curry's website. A couple of days later I was the proud owner of a refurbished Packard Bell EasyNote TJ71, with a 500gb HDD, 4gb of memory and some kind of AMD gubbins or whatever. I was reliably informed by Trev that it was a good machine, especially for the price, a cool breeze under £400.
So, after a couple of days of getting used to it, I signed up to Steam. Eager to see what the machine could potentially do, I quickly downloaded the
Mass Effect 2 demo, and fired it up. To my joy, and honest surprise, it played the game, out of the box so-to-speak, perfectly at it's default settings. Which is, to say, as good as the 360 version.
So yesterday I had a look on Steam again, and they were offering
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas at 75% off, a meager £2.49, so I got my wallet. Now, the game ran perfectly, it has to be said. With the detail set to 'Very High', there wasn't a stutter. The problems came when I decided to try out my 360 joypad with it. The right analogue stick wasn't detected, the triggers didn't work, and the game couldn't differentiate between the left analogue stick and the D-pad. Tried out a PS2 controller through a USB adapter, the game didn't even acknowledge it.
A quick search on the Internet told me that
GTA:SA was riddled with such controller issues, and downloading a program called SAAC would remedy it. So I did, but lo and behold, SAAC wouldn't work. Apparently it was made using Visual Basic 6, and when Microsoft brought out Windows 7, they decided that nobody in the whole universe would ever need to use that again, and thus got rid of it.
So I turned to a program called XPadder (which I had to download two versions of, thanks again to Microsoft making everything obsolete whenever they upgrade their OS), a program that allows you to map keyboard keys and such to another imput device, such as my XBox360 pad, which worked well enough. I fired up
GTA once more, and entered the controller set up, and copied the PS2 control scheme to the best of my memory. Finally I was cruising around Los Santos without cramping my hands over the touch pad and forgetting the functions of endless keys.
But the fun came when it came to taking a corner, as XPadder didn't cater for analogue controls, and as such a simple tap on the left analogue stick equaled to full-lock on the steering wheel. Conversely, on foot I could do nothing but sprint at full pelt. The triggers, too, only functioned properly if I fully released them between shots, which sounds obvious, but I guarantee you never actually do.
So, call me over-precipitous, but PC Gaming sucks a lot of arse. A whole night wasted trying to get an ancient game to run in a half-decent way, when a decade-old games console can handle it without complaint. Sorry, but I'm a console gamer.
