Tuesday, 1 May 2018

A video game that simulates building custom PCs

"PC Building Simulator" is ... kind of what the name suggests, yes? A sim in which one builds PCs.

I admit I'm intrigued. Sort of? As this review at Motherboard notes, the game has a "career" mode where you play the role of someone who inherits your uncle's PC-repair business, and is given increasingly complicated tasks ...

As you can see, my idiot uncle sold this poor guy a PC but forgot to apply thermal paste to the CPU. For this job, I had to open the PC, unplug the CPU fan, apply thermal paste, and then put the CPU fan back in. To make sure that the computer is working properly, I also had to install and run 3DMark, a real-life piece of software that tests a computer's performance by running 3D graphics demos.

One of the cooler things about PC Building Simulator is that it uses a lot of real brands. Some parts are fake, I'm assuming, because the developers couldn't get the necessary licensing deals. For example, PC Building Simulator seems to take place in some kind of utopian alternate dimension where everyone uses an operating system called Omega, which I'm assuming is a Linux distro that magically runs all PC games. But there are also a lot of real parts. I installed real EVGA GPUs and even worked on the Master Cooler brand PC case I have at home.

This is all fine, but I realized that PC Building Simulator really wasn't fucking around when it actually demanded I sit through the entire 3DMark test before I could finish the job. Poor DR Waterman only got an average 8 frames per second, but the PC was working now so it's not my problem. Besides, since this job is the repair shop's fuckup, I'm not even going to get paid for my time here. Thanks a lot, uncle Tim.

The only question I have is: Can you play a simulated version of "PC Building Simulator" on one of the PCs you build inside the game?