COH and GFWM's Fall

I picked up Company of Heroes almost two years ago when I heard the same developers that created Homeworld and Dawn of War were having a go at the often over used World War II setting. The game was a great iteration on DoW's game play mechanics of squad based selection and upgrade, versus single unit selection. The further developed cover system and destructible environment set it a part form its predecessor though. It looked and still looks like the future of real time strategy games. Well until Starcraft II releases that is.

My initial play through of the game consisted of finishing half the single player story. Playing a few games online before the hot key memory bots took over and trying desperately to get my friends to drop $50 on a game they didn't know the lifespan of. No one bought it and I put it away to collect dust for a year and a half. When I got a new video card for my birthday in December of 2007 it came with a copy of COH. In January I gave it to my friend Brian (aka Swiss) so we could play some comp stomp together.

When we finally figured out a night to play we spent it patching and trying to get our routers setup. The next night by some miracle I could host games and he could join them. We played for a solid four hours and vowed to do the same the following night. Whatever fairy dust I'd sprinkled on my network the night prior was gone because we could not play with each other anymore. Feed up with putting near six hours trying to play and only four hours actually playing we gave up on COH.

Two months have passed since then and I have a clean windows install and a gaming itch to fill. I have reinstalled COH, patched it up and I'm playing through the single player again. This long winded story isn't supposed to be my autobiography of COH. It is about my frustration with the PC platform on the whole. Since the release of Call of Duty 4 in November and my exit from WoW at the start of this year I have started to ween myself off of the PC. It is a two pronged attack that is pushing me away from the machine I love.

One I have mentioned previously is the hardware requirements and constant upgrading. Not knowing if a game I buy will run at all or run properly (like the screen shots) is a major headache and hang up. Numero two is a related issue, but causes a different kind of heartburn. Dealing with configurations out side of graphics, mostly network, is a royal pain. In the case of COH it runs like a well oiled machine graphically, but in order to play with friends I have to spend a day speaking in tongues (opening ports) to my router.

This was all sparked by the news I read last night of the cancellation of Games for Windows Magazine. I subscribed as part of a Christmas present and only received one issue which turned out to be the final one. My options right now are to shift my subscription to EGM (I'm already subscribed) or PC Magazine (I don't want it). Thankfully GFW radio, the reason I got the mag in the first place, is still around, but I don't think I will be frequenting 1up.com for their PC coverage going forward.