You Haven't Truly Experienced PC Gaming Until You've Done These 8...

When I look back on my years of PC gaming, I realize they're punctuated by a bunch of you had to be there kind of moments. It's the type of experience that, for better or worse, makes it an instant PC gaming classic.

I'm immediately reminded of my early days in Rust, back when I naively wandered into open structures and fell victim to trap bases. It took several embarrassing deaths, but eventually I realized there's a whole strategy around building fully-furnished fake shelters to bait, trap, and kill rival players. Sometimes they run out of the basement and blow you up, sometimes they just leave you to starve. Either way, I can't mind my business and I'm paying for it.

It's the perfect encapsulation of the creative antagonism that both infuriates me and makes me cry with laughter, but so quintessentially Rust. And the more I try to explain it, the more I realize it's a scheme so diabolically goofy that you just have to see it.

It's the type of absurd PC gaming phenomenon that makes you fast friends with thousands of other poor souls who instantly relate, and something you have to experience to get it. As I reflect on my poor sense of danger and how that fared in Rust, I've asked my colleagues to recall similar scenarios that cemented an experience as a PC gaming classic, and they delivered.

Joshua Wolens, News Writer: Everything is in perfect balance. Your game is a tottering assemblage of upscaled textures, overhauled levelling systems, user-created quests, and fan patch after fan patch after fan patch. Getting everything just right has taken the better part of a weekend and multiple instances where you simply had to wipe your entire install and start over. You hit launch, get to the main menu, then… all desire to play evaporates.

This is PC gaming, baby. A wise man once said, "You know for me, the action is the juice." The same thing applies here, but you have to understand "action" as 'the process of spending many hours painstakingly installing mods' and "the juice" as 'the enjoyable part of a videogame.'

This hobby attracts tinkerers like a magnet draws iron filings, and sometimes we realise that what we actually wanted to do, when the urge struck us to fire up Skyrim playthrough #16, was give ourselves an excuse to download Mod Organiser 2 and see what the state of the game's Nexus Mods page is. Embrace it. It's part of what makes us what we are.

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Source: PC Gamer