Using An Old Speed-Running Trick On A Computer Game (To Get A Playable Frame-Rate)

Well, I thought that I’d talk briefly about using an old speed-running trick to make first-person perspective computer games – where the frame-rate is too low, even after you’ve messed around with the graphics menu – run faster. This trick isn’t a magic bullet, it might not work for literally every game and it’s a bit weird, but it might make the game run at a vaguely playable speed if things are too “busy” on screen.

I am, of course, talking about the old technique of just looking at the floor.

If you just look at the floor whilst moving, then there’s usually less detail that the game has to render and the frame-rate might increase as a result. I can’t remember exactly where I heard about this trick – I think it was an article about a speed-runner using it with the classic Nintendo 64 game “GoldenEye 007” (1997) – but it’s still surprisingly relevant in this day and age.

Case in point, back in late October last year, I started playing the 2023 “Aftershock” expansion for the retro-style sci-fi shooter game “Ion Fury” (2019). As someone who only really buys games from GOG and whose PC is rocking some of the hottest integrated graphics that 2013 had to offer (Yes, Intel HD 2500 – but I shouldn’t boast), those in the know can probably guess that – when I review this expansion – some parts of the review may be a bit cynical. Seriously, the developers did NOT want people like me to play this expansion!

This is a screenshot from “Ion Fury: Aftershock” (2023). It’s a… really… cool expansion but, if you were a low-spec gamer and/or you only used GOG in October 2023, you probably just felt your whole body tense up with anger at the mere memory of those grim days.

For context, the expansion was begrudgingly released on GOG more than three weeks after it was released on Steam and the “3.0.0.9” version is also missing some graphics options that the original 2019 launch day version of the original game had.

[Edit: Well, at least overtly. One of the developers later pointed out that you can change the renderer with console commands. Press “Shift” + “¬” during gameplay to bring up the console, then “setrendermode 0” for software rendering (use “setrendermode 3” to go back to OpenGL). Seriously, switching to software rendering literally made the game run about three times faster 🙂 ].

Add to this the fact that, on my computer at least, the expansion would sometimes freeze before it got to the main menu (sometimes a full restart of the computer or signing out of Windows seemed to jog it into life) and it crashed during gameplay sometimes and I was just glad that the GOG launch day build of it ran… sometimes.

It ran, but – before I learnt about the console commands – it ran like utter crap, even at 640 x 480 resolution. If there was lots of detail or monsters on screen, then I didn’t need a frame counter to know that the frame-rate was in single digits. It looked like a slide-show. Ok, by the time that this article goes out, they might have updated or optimised it better. But, on it’s GOG launch day on the 26th October 2023, it was NOT a game for low-spec DRM-free gamers like myself.

And, yes, in the very first level alone, I had to remember this old trick. Don’t get me wrong, the actual expansion itself is seriously cool – with some amazing-looking areas, stellar level design, an awesome hover-bike, tons of humour, new power-ups, a “photo mode” which is useful for scouting out what is ahead of you, new monsters etc… – but in order to actually play parts of it at a playable speed, I literally just had to stare at the ground and only glance upwards occasionally. So, yes, this old trick still works.

Again, it might not work for literally every game and it certainly isn’t the best way to play a game. But, if you can’t do other “low-end PC” tricks, like altering the config file or using a window-resizing program to set a custom resolution, then it is better than nothing.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂

DRM-Free Gaming On A Low-Spec PC – A Ramble

Well, I thought that I’d talk about gaming on a low-spec PC and avoiding games that have online DRM too. This was something I ended up thinking about after watching some PC building channels on Youtube and realising that the 3GB graphics card in the video which was supposedly “showing its age” these days would be a ridiculous upgrade for my PC.

For context, I use a second-hand small-form factor PC that I got in late 2018. It has Windows 10, a Core i5-3750 processor, Intel HD 2500 integrated graphics, 8GB DDR3 RAM and a 1TB HDD. And this itself was a massive upgrade from the old Windows XP machines that I used between 2006-2018. These had mid-2000s integrated graphics, a single-core Pentium processor (2-3GHZ) and maybe 2GB RAM at most.

I’ve also made a point of avoiding any game which has online DRM (eg: “Sign in to let us give you permission to play this single-player game you’ve bought…”) since about 2015 or so. I also pretty much exclusively play single-player games as well.

Yet, I still play computer games. And, no, I don’t use cloud gaming (since I consider it to be online DRM. Or “You don’t own what you’ve bought”). So, I thought that I talk about PC gaming on low-spec computers without using online DRM or online multiplayer. Because you can actually still play games in a situation like this. Yes, certainly not every game – but you’d be surprised.

In short, older games, open-source games, some indie games and games with good options menus are your friends here. Sometimes, you might have to get creative too – for example, in order to play both “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Special Edition” (2016) and “Tormented Souls” (2021) – at a vaguely playable speed, I actually had to find an external window resizing program (called “Sizer”) in order to lower the game’s resolution below the minimum that the game allows. Likewise, in order to get “Dreamfall: Chapters” (2014-17) to run at a playable speed, I actually had to manually edit the game’s configuration file in order to get it to run at a lower resolution than the game allowed.

Still, you shouldn’t expect to be able to play the latest “AAA” games. Computer game “FOMO” – fear of missing out – is something that every low-budget player has to deal with in their own way. It’s something that you get used to after a while, seeing modern games almost as if they are something from another world. Remembering that even the “trendiest” players don’t have the time and/or money to play literally ALL of the popular games can also help here too. Being glad that you’re avoiding the many pitfalls of modern games – such as mandatory “updates”, greedy micro-transactions etc…

Most of all, it makes you think about games differently. You focus less on popularity and more on quality and fun.

There are absolutely tons of older and/or lesser-known games that will run on low-spec PCs and are ridiculously fun to play. Whether this is older “AAA” games like “Bioshock” (2007), “Fallout: New Vegas” (2010) or “Saints Row: The Third” (2011), or whether it is lower-budget retro-style indie games like “Amid Evil” (2019) or “Alisa: The Developer’s Cut” (2022). There are an absolute ton of games that will run on low-spec computers. Just because you can’t play the latest “AAA” games doesn’t mean that you can’t play games. And, of course, if you’re a fan of some older games – like “Doom II” (1994) – then there’s also a huge modding scene online, which extends the life of these games pretty much indefinitely.

And, again, not being connected to the hype or modern culture surrounding games means that you’ll have different priorities with them too. Some of the best games I’ve ever played are ones that have objectively “terrible” graphics by modern standards, but it doesn’t matter because the actual gameplay is fun, because there’s actual creativity behind the game, because of good art design etc… Games are games. Literally the only major practical difference between modern “AAA” games and old games/ modern low-budget indie ones is the graphics.

And, on a side-note: This is one of the things to remember if you’re buying a PC. Unless you are planning to play the latest “AAA” games on it or edit videos or something like that, then you’d be surprised at what you can get away with for basic tasks. Once, on the old mid-2000s computers I was using as late as 2018, I briefly tried using “Puppy Linux”, a tiny free open-source operating system. Aside from gaming, I could do pretty much all of the basic stuff with it – web browsing, writing documents etc… if I remember rightly, it even had a “MS Paint” style program for very basic image editing/digital art. If you stick to older or open-source software, then – except for literally a tiny number of things – you don’t need a “powerful” PC.

As for avoiding online DRM, this will limit the games that you can play. Thankfully, there are shops online – such as GOG and Itch.io – which make a point of not including online DRM in the games that they sell. Likewise, proper honest old-fashioned freeware games are also a thing too. Yes, you’ll mostly be limited to older games and/or indie games, but there are still tons of really fun DRM-free games and there are some advantages to sticking to these games.

You can make a backup of them, ensuring that you always have your games. There’s no middle-man who, like Steam did with Windows XP computers in 2019, can suddenly decide that your OS is “too old” and prevent you from playing the games that ran perfectly fine before this decision. There are no forced “updates” (putting you in control, especially if updates remove stuff from the game or add unwanted stuff). And with no requirement for online connectivity, games can’t force greedy things like micro-transactions on you either. You actually get a proper, honest game – just like in the good old days.

So, yes, even if you’re running a low-spec PC and despise online DRM, then you can still play computer games. The selection might be more limited, but this just forces you to focus more on FUN than on popularity. And, honestly, gaming always finds a way. Again, I was using ancient mid-2000s computers as late as 2018 and I still posted game reviews on here back then.

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂

Four Tips For Playing Horror Games On A Low-End PC (Intel HD 2500)

Well, for this article in the second season of my “Horror Videogames Series“, I thought that I’d offer some tips about playing games in this genre on a low-end PC.

Although it still seems a bit futuristic compared to the old mid-2000s PCs I was using before early December 2018, my current computer would be considered at least somewhat “low-end” by modern standards.

For reference, it’s a second-hand early-mid 2010s small-form factor machine with a quad-core i5-3570 CPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB HDD, Windows 10 and Intel HD 2500 integrated graphics. It was “low-mid range” back in about 2013 or so – and was built for reliable office use, rather than high-performance gaming – but is probably considered very “low-end” these days.

The upgrade options are also fairly limited, given the PC’s physical size and low-powered proprietary power supply – not to mention that I’m still using a VGA monitor too – so I eventually decided to “work with what I’ve got” with regard to gaming.

And, given that I’ve literally spent the best part of a year in total writing about and reviewing them, you can certainly play horror games on something like this. Yes, not the absolute latest “AAA” games and don’t expect “4K 60FPS” gaming either, but you’d be surprised at what will actually run on a computer like this. So, I thought that I’d offer a few general tips about playing horror games on “low-end” computers.

1) System requirements and modern 3D games: This is a bit of a tricky one, since some modern 3D horror games will run better below the “minimum system requirements” than others.

Whilst Youtube footage can help you to check this – not every game has online footage of people running it on “low-end” computers (and even then, it might not be exactly the same “low-end” computer as yours – so be sure to look at a hardware comparison site to get a more accurate idea of how your integrated graphics stack up against theirs). As such, any more impressive-looking modern 3D horror game can be a bit of a gamble on a low-end PC.

Not only that, some games also have better graphics options than others. If you find one with a good “settings” menu, you’ll be heavily sacrificing graphics for performance here. As a rule, pre-emptively lower the resolution and any other available graphics settings as much as possible. Even then, it can be a roll of the dice.

For example, one of the first games I got for this PC was the “AA” indie survival horror game “Remothered: Tormented Fathers” (2018) – which barely ran when I first tried to play it. Luckily though, the graphics menu had a resolution scale option (where it renders the game at a much lower resolution and then expands it to fit the screen) and things like a FOV slider etc… So, I was able to get the game up to just about a playable speed, albeit at the cost of blurry graphics that sometimes looked like something from the early-mid 2000s… or the original un-patched Switch port of the game from what I’ve seen online.

Another good example was “The Evil Within” (2014). This old “AAA” survival horror game was released a year or two after my computer’s CPU/integrated graphics were, which worked in my favour. I was actually able to get it running at a playable speed – albeit with some mild-moderate slowdown in a couple of more intensive parts – thanks to the fact that the developers actually included some “old” resolutions in the settings menu 🙂 I could play it in 640 x 480! If in doubt, lower the resolution as much as possible.

Some “modern but slightly older” horror games can actually work really well on relatively low-end computers. A great example of this is probably “Outlast” (2013). I think that I had to lower the resolution and graphics settings a bit, but the game still looked reasonably decent and ran fairly well on my PC. Again, my computer’s CPU and integrated graphics are from around 2013 or so, so this probably helped.

But then you get a game like “Tormented Souls” (2021). When I first tried to play it many months ago, it was borderline-unplayable thanks to the incredibly limited graphics options. At it’s lowest resolution of 720p, the game was just barely semi-playable when you were walking around, but would turn into an unplayable slideshow whenever any monsters appeared. So, I had to get creative.

In order to actually play the game, I eventually had to download an external window resizing program called “Sizer” and use it to manually change the game’s resolution to 640 x 480 whenever I entered a new area of the game. And, yes, there are tricks like this that you can do – there’s a whole Youtube channel called “LowSpecGamer” which used to be dedicated to this sort of thing – but they can be hit and miss. Some games respond better to this sort of thing – and give you more room to do this sort of thing – than others. Again, it’s a roll of the dice.

2) 2D and “Retro style” indie horror games: Back when I was still using an ancient mid-2000s PC, I used to rail against the system requirements of modern indie games that look like older games. “A dual-core?! Back in MY day, a game that looked like this would run on a 486 and take up less than a megabyte of space!“. That sort of thing. Seriously, I even actually made a sarcastic comic about it about five or six years ago…

“Damania Relaxation – Bloatware” By C. A. Brown

However, many of these sorts of “retro-style” games are surprisingly playable on 2010s-era low end computers 🙂 Yes, there are some weird exceptions – like how the 2021 demo of “Risu” ran a little slowly.

Even so, whether it is modern indie horror games with cartoonish 2D graphics – like “The Coma Recut”  (2017), games that rely heavily on FMV elements – like “Dark Nights With Poe And Munro” (2020), PC games that were originally designed for mobile devices – like “Simulacra” (2017), a game with 1990s-style graphics like “Alisa” (2021) or… most…. of the “PS1-style” horror games that can be found on itch.io, your “low-end” machine is more likely to run a game if it looks like an older game.

Still, remember how I said “more likely”. There are exceptions to this, but they’re fairly uncommon though.

3) Console games: If you’ve got both an old games console and a legitimate physical copy of an old horror game for it but don’t have the technology to directly capture footage or screenshots from your TV for the purposes of commentary/review, then some people may consider finding – somewhat convoluted – ways to unofficially run the game on a PC (in order to use any screenshot/recording tools that the computer has) to be a “Less than perfect, but better than nothing” option.

Honestly, playing your old console games on the original intended hardware will always be better than running them on a low-end PC but, if you absolutely need to do this, then how well do low-end PCs run them? Well, whilst it depends a lot on your individual PC’s graphics/CPU, it seems to be a little bit “hit and miss” with older and low-end computers from the early 2010s onwards. I’ll only be focusing on Playstation games here, since this is what the bulk of my research into this topic has focused on. In short, many… but not all… PS1 games seem to work well. However, things appear to get a bit more complicated when you move into the PS2 era.

Some games, like “Siren”/ “Forbidden Siren” (2003-4), might cause occasional graphical glitching that makes them borderline-unplayable at times. Some old “demo disc” demos might just outright refuse to run at all. More graphically-intensive PS2 games can also cause slowdown on low-end PCs too – sometimes partially (like both the cutscenes and menus in the 2003 game “Resident Evil: Outbreak“) or sometimes to the point of being virtually unplayable (such as the 2005 game “Resident Evil 4“). Some appear to run perfectly though.

It’s a roll of the dice but, since you’ve got the original console and game disc anyway, not a complete loss if it doesn’t also run well on a low-end PC. And, if worse comes to absolute worse, you can always use the dreadful old-school technique of literally pointing a camera at the TV screen to take screenshots. The results are usually a terrible blurry mess, at least if you’re also using an old-school/low-end digital camera, but it’s better than nothing I guess.

4) Old horror games: You would think that this would be a slam-dunk, and sometimes it can be. However, be aware that physical copies of really old horror games won’t always play nicely with more modern operating systems.

This was something I found out when I stumbled across an old CD-ROM copy of the PC port of “The House Of The Dead” (1996) that I bought ages ago. It would not run on modern 64-bit computers. Likewise, a CD-ROM copy of the PC port of “Dino Crisis 2” (2000) also glitched out pretty badly when I tried to run it on my current computer.

The safest bet is, ironically, to go for modern digital re-releases of these older games – if they even exist. Yes, some sites optimise them better for modern computers than others, and some sites have a better selection of games than others. Still, be sure to check things like user reviews to get a sense of how compatible the game is with modern PCs. If in doubt, either don’t buy it or wait until it is heavily discounted. Most modern games sites have frequent sales and special offers (although, if you’re looking for one specific game, you might have to wait weeks or months until it goes on special offer).

Still, if properly optimised for modern operating systems, then older horror games from the 1990s and 2000s will usually run excellently on computers that are considered “low-end” these days. But, be sure to research this before buying though!

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Anyway, I hope that this was useful 🙂