"A PC-building game could have easily turned out to be tedious"

February 7, 2019 6:53 PM

"PC Building Simulator, which is now available on Steam after a period of early access, gives you the experience of being a one-person PC-building workshop."... It even has an original soundtrack, including a rap song about building the ultimate PC.

What it says on the tin.

posted by saysthis (21 comments total)

I want to play this but I need to build a better PC first.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:11 PM on February 7, 2019 [9 favorites]

Although the song is new, is this not a double?
posted by CynicalKnight at 7:14 PM on February 7, 2019

In order to play this game, you should first have to beat Combing Tom's Hardware Reviews For Days Simulator as well as Spending Hours On NewEgg Trying To Find The Best Parts And Then Comparing Prices With Amazon Because It's The Early 2000s And You Don't Have To Pay Taxes On Amazon Purchases Yet But NewEgg Rips You Off On Shipping And "Handling" Simulator.
posted by panama joe at 7:33 PM on February 7, 2019 [37 favorites]

I played the Remove Your Video Card While Your PC Is Running Sim. It was not good.
posted by vrakatar at 7:52 PM on February 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

Can you faff about with the IRQs? Not buying if that's not included.
posted by slater at 7:55 PM on February 7, 2019 [17 favorites]

I want the Legacy Edition with a full copy of Computer Shopper and simulated blood on those sharp metal cases
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:20 PM on February 7, 2019 [28 favorites]

I couldn't find the rap. Just instrumentals. What am I missing?
posted by davejay at 8:21 PM on February 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

The flash your BIOS with the wrong binary side quest is a little to realistic as it renders the computer you're playing it on inoperable.
posted by Space Coyote at 8:22 PM on February 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

the second and third links both go to the game's steam page, i think one of them was supposed to link to the rap?
posted by JimBennett at 8:56 PM on February 7, 2019

If you want to relive that period, you can always get Linux!
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 10:48 PM on February 7, 2019 [5 favorites]

I couldn't find the rap. Just instrumentals. What am I missing?

Not much.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 11:59 PM on February 7, 2019

Hell, I still manage to bleed every fifth or seventh PC I have to disassemble, and I have no idea how I manage it since cases these days aren't usually sharp.

The great god Bit, it which is both one and zero simultaneously, from whom all blessings of computation flow, demands blood sacrifice I guess.

As for the game, I can totally see myself playing it. Which is a bit embarrassing, but there you go.

slater Oh gawd. IRQ settings, manually fiddling with jumpers, losing the tiny little jumper, then editing the config.sys and autoexec.bat files, hymem.sys and all that EMS vs XMS crap, often spending literally hours just to get a damn modem set up.

First CD-ROM I got took me a good two or three hours of fiddly little settings to make work.

Things are so much better these days. Sure, it's frustrating when a plug and play device fails and the reason is opaque because you can't actually dig in like you used to be able to, but for 99% of the stuff it just works with no hassle. They even finally got rid of having to dink around with jumpers on hard drives after the great migration from IDE to SATA, and hard drive jumper settings were the last stand of the jumpers.

These days I only have to muck around with a jumper if I need to clear a mainboard password or some other incredibly uncommon thing that only people who do it for a living need to bother with.

Jumpers always annoyed me because I'm not especially manually dexterous, and I've got thick fingers so just holding on to the damn thing and trying to get it onto the right connectors was a pain, and I never did it **QUITE** often enough back then to find it worth the expense of buying a specialized tool for holding them, so I'd just make do with needle nose pliers or a pair of tweezers in a pinch. These days I have one from a toolkit I bought a while back, and I don't think I've touched it in years.
posted by sotonohito at 5:21 AM on February 8, 2019 [7 favorites]

For realism, half the game should just be progress bars and loading screens.
posted by MrVisible at 5:21 AM on February 8, 2019 [5 favorites]

Ok, but once you build it, can you log onto it, download steam, and then play this game in the game?
posted by solotoro at 6:29 AM on February 8, 2019 [4 favorites]

I would like a game that simulates browsing and commenting on Metafilter on a CRT monitor in your underwear in a small, cluttered apartment, circa 2003.
posted by killdevil at 6:47 AM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

Jumpers always annoyed me because I'm not especially manually dexterous, and I've got thick fingers so just holding on to the damn thing and trying to get it onto the right connectors was a pain

Add a congenital tremor and you have exactly why nothing makes me cuss louder than dealing with hardware. (or 1x1 lego blocks. fuck those things)
posted by DigDoug at 7:01 AM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

There are so many highly talented nerdcore rappers that could have made a great track about this game (like YTCracker, or Frontalot, or Dual Core) but instead they got MC Milquetoast.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:29 AM on February 8, 2019

beigeboxing
posted by thelonius at 7:42 AM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

I want the Legacy Edition with a full copy of Computer Shopper and simulated blood on those sharp metal cases
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:20 PM on February 7 [28 favorites +] [!]

I have a scar on my wrist from a bungled internal Zip drive installation circa 1998
posted by davros42 at 8:41 AM on February 8, 2019 [5 favorites]

Oh boy, can I finally build that tricked-out IMSAI 8080 I've been dreaming of?
posted by ckape at 3:12 PM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

does it come with a driving sim for when you have to return the defective ram dimm to fry's?
posted by wibari at 9:29 PM on February 8, 2019 [2 favorites]