Some Rare Good PC Gaming News: 2k9 Coming for PC

Well, how about that. In a rare reversal from the standard trend, NBA 2k9 will be available for the PC later this month. This is largely heralded as the better of the 2 sports franchises (the other being EA's Live and Madden series of sports games). If I am not mistaken, this will be the 1st time a 2k game will be available for the PC. The system requirements were released, and seem to be relatively low, to be on par with the XBOX 360 version, which will be out in a few days.

I am an old-school PC gamer, and 2 of the saddest PC moments in my life were when I found out 3DFX was bought out by nVidia with Glide no longer being supported, and the other was when I finally had a powerful Windows computer the same year EA took a vacation from PC Sports game (around 2002). Hopefully this will help reverse the trend.

I am wary, however. While my last PC game purchase, Command and Conquer 3, was generally a pleasant one, since then DRM has had a major impact on the already floundering industry. Spore, and soon Red Alert 3, will both seem to have DRM that overwhelmingly impedes on the possible value of the games. If the 2k series turns out to have a similar policy, I will again be forced to pass on this, despite its availability.

Perhaps there will be a min-Renaissance in the computer gaming sector, with the power of on board graphics sufficiently increasing (such as AMD's Puma platform). But for the time being, I will be taking a wait-and-see approach.

It looks like my 8800GT will be my primary video card for a long long time with the current trend in computer gaming. I have already passed on SLI simply because there are not games out there worth investing in the second card.