If it was a later release, released with say an expansion pack or as a “Game of the Year” edition, it will be whatever the current version near the release date. If it’s the original release, it’ll be the earliest version. In any case, you can patch the game to the latest version fairly quickly.
For instance, I have two copies of Master of Orion II. (I lost my original copy, bought a replacement, and then found the original.) One is marked DOS/Win95 and is the earliest version and the other is marked Win95/Win98 and is a later version with some changes (mostly in the picks screen) as it was re-released as part of a “classics” series as just the game in a jewel case.
I also wanted to add that some software has actually caught up with the processing power. Be this due to bad programming or what, I don’t know. Some games such as Supreme Commander have such high system requirements that even with a “Top End” gaming system of several thousand dollars, it has issues running. Supreme commander according to several reviews is before its time and even with top end systems runs slow. Give it a few years and it will run ok, but if it runs slow on a top end system, it will likely not even run on my computer. (I don’t have a top end system, unfortunately as I am a student and relatively poor)
Heh. Welcome to the gaming industry. For PC games, the first thing you do when you open the box at home is go to the website and download the latest patch. Many games are almost unplayable as released.
As for what version of the game you’d get if you went down to Target and picked it up today, well, that depends. Often it will be the original 1.00 version. Sometimes you’ll get new editions that ship with a later version. But that doesn’t matter, because the first thing you’re going to do no matter what is download the latest patch.
And of course, games like this have expansion packs. And since the second expansion pack for Civ IV is out, often they’ll release the original game bundled with the first expansion pack. And after the second expansion pack has been out for a while, they’ll bundle all three together. When I went to buy the second expansion pack for Civ3, it was actually cheaper to buy Civ3 Complete which bundled Civ3 and the two expansion packs than it was to buy the stand alone second expansion pack, despite the fact that I already owned the first two.
So yeah, go ahead and buy Civ IV, or wait till you can buy a Civ IV + Warlords bundle, and it should run fine on any computer less than 5 years old–as long as you download and install the latest patches.
Funnily enough, the phrase you’re looking for is the “law of diminishing returns”. You can always throw more money at a problem, but the gain per dollar drops off sharply.
FYI, my nephew works for one of the famous gaming PC companies, and he say that there’s no overlap between the customers who order $10K+ systems and the customers who order fancy paint jobs.
My boss bought two of these for the office and during the build time the SO used them for a day or so running a nice little LAN party with some friends–I tellya what, with Windows XP 64 running these things everything plays at the highest settings available without a bobble. Even the one acting as server for the rest was screaming right along. Battlefield, Unreal, I can’t even remember a tenth of the games those idiots went through in the course of a day!
No, not a cutting edge system, to be sure, but it works and you can’t beat the price. XP 64 is low overhead and stable as hell, which helps a lot, although drivers can be a pain in the ass and forget any Bluetooth support… Google for the mobo specs, it’s a nice all around board for the money they’re asking. I love ASUS boards, and those AMD X2s are amazing when you give them an OS that takes advantage of the processing capability.
I just bought one for the SO because I can’t bear to hear him crying every time he has to build a fun system for somebody else and allow it to go out the door–besides, once it gets here it frees his old system up to be the media box it really should be and I can stop running the TV off my laptop–yeah I have an ulterior motive, what of it?
I think gaming systems are the computer analog of the penis envy truck…
As pointed out, it’s mostly the premium for being cutting edge.
Pulling numbers completely out of my ass, a 2.5 ghz processor might cost $100, a 2.6 $150 a 2.7 250, 2.8 400, 2.9 650 3.0 950.
Obviously going from 2.5 ghz and $100 to 3.0 ghz at 950 isn’t linear. The price/performance curve can be pretty steep. You’re paying several times the price for a moderate increase in performance. Those high end systems use cutting edge everything to appeal to people that have to have the best. Conversely, you can get most of the performance out of a much, much cheaper system if you build it yourself and research the best price/performance value on the market at the time.
And if you’re technically inclined you can overclock and tweak the cheaper components to give identical, or better, performance than their much more expensive counterparts. A few years back I had an athlon XP marked for 1.3 ghz (cost me $60 or $70) running at 2.2 ghz (which at the time was bleeding edge - if I would’ve bought a CPU marked for that I think it would’ve been $600+, 10 times as much, but I got identical performance).
And for that I am jealous. I finally got into raiding, only to discover that my computer can barely handle it. I’m getting 5 fps and the raid leader is like, “Um, why didn’t you sheep the star and why is your dps so crappy?”
I’m not sure how common this is, but I only know a couple of people with high-end gaming machines. Thing is, they spend a lot of time, money and effort tweaking, overclocking, modding, upgrading, benchmarking and optimising, and hardly any time playing the games they’re supposedly maintaining this system for. Weird.
That’s not really high end. Try something along the lines of this:
Of course, you can go more expensive if you’ve got money to burn.
Oh, and because someone else mentioned it, I’ve found that building a computer saves me about 10% over buying it prebuilt, unless I get into the really expensive stuff, like the 5k prebuilts can be made for yourself for 4k-4.5k (or less, if you use different brands)
That’s pretty much my experience as well. I’ve built plenty of systems in the past, and to me, I’d much rather pay that 10% extra to have someone put it together for me, provide a warranty, and give me tech support.
