A PC gaming gripe

The idea that PCs crash constantly is as old as Windows 95 is and almost as relevant. PC gaming isn't without its problems, though. I downloaded the demos for Risen and Twin Sector this week. My computer runs on a resolution of 1900 x 1200. What resolution did these games pick for me? 1074 x 768. Thanks guys.

Now, I happen to know quite a lot about PCs so it was the work of a few seconds to sort this out but imagine, for a minute, that you're someone like my girlfriend who is new to PC gaming. You load up a game, it looks shit because it's running in a resolution that's just over half of the native res. Is it reasonable to expect her to be the one to go through the games settings to find out what's causing the problem?

Even if an amateur had the inclination to do such a thing, they'd run into a related problem. The numbers. Anyone sane who hasn't spent their lives with these big unintuitive boxes will look at them and wonder: What the hell do these mean and what is the best one for my computer?

1024 x 768, 1280 x 1074... none of these numbers actually mean anything and serve only to confuse and annoy people who haven't spent an unnecessary amount of time learning them.

This problem annoys me particularly as it's one that just doesn't need to be there. The game just needs to look at the desktop's resolution and use that as the games settings, Bang, problem solved. In the absence of that, auto detect the settings. A hundred and one games do this, why can't all of them?

Having said all this, things are much better than they were back in the day. Anyone who remembers the original Discworld or Heretic or Descent or Fatal Racing or Indiecar or Mortal Kombat or Screamer or pretty much any game for the 486 remembers the horror of getting the damn sound card to work properly. We had to scroll through lists of meaningless shit selecting which DMA channel to use and what IRC we wanted. I didn't know what any of that meant at the time and I still fucking don't. I remember doing a little dance when Windows 95 came along simply because it auto detected the computers soundcard so I wouldn't need to go through that shit any more.