Dear Future Gamer,

Great mag (insert sycophantic drivel here)...

I would be interested in some sort of budget review section, though I agree that inserting one would mean losses elsewhere.

I cannot afford a 3Dfx card, and suspect that buying one for my P166 would be a waste of time anyway as most new games, (X-Wing Alliance for example), now have a P200 min spec. So I'm having to turn to the budget section for my new PC gaming experiences. I remember reading a few issues ago about annoyance for the ever-increasing PC spec marketing model.

So show your support for people with lower spec PCs and review games we can actually play. I'm not saying full reviews - maybe just a score and a few lines, and a release date (similar to the brilliant Score Card bit) for the week's top few titles.

Maybe the industry might start to take notice and slow down its race to develop for the latest spec (though I doubt it). After all, the PlayStation seems to have survived and produces games that are consistently more advanced, without the basic hardware changing, for at least the last three years now - when a P166 was pretty much state of the art.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy reading about these latest games, and I do own a PlayStation, (I chose it over a 3Dfx card and feel I've made the best choice as it is nowhere near being obsolete, two years later).

Kind regards and keep up the good work,

Steve Brindle

FG: I suspect the problem with spiralling tech specs on PCs has much to do with lazy programming. The game is visualised and someone sits there and says 'it's going to look like this, but if we're to get it running fast enough we can aim it at PCs with a spec of XXX'. It's the easy route. In the old days of programming, and to a certain extent in today's console programming world, the programmers know exactly what hardware limitations they've got and work to them. Think of Gran Turismo - it plays on your bog-standard PlayStation, not a PlayStation with a 32Mb RAM upgrade or special graphics card. Unfortunately though, it's a self-perpetuating thing, people want to play the latest, best-looking games and they're quite prepared to upgrade to do it. Until they stop, why should the programmers?