Maybe my perspective is off but I get the ginklin' that most game developers fear that people won't find their games worthy if those games don't require four top-of-the-line video cards cross-firing, six core processors, and an generator yard in the local vicinity to link up several main frames to your computer to run those games.

So optimization is out the window and everyone is doing everything through Sculptris instead of Blender and only bother to check the poly counts to see how they can increase them if said game's requirements are not uber enough.

Some indie developers, even though they're promoting something that could be ran on a Nintendo DS are over-exaggerating requirements to give the casual buyer suggestion of awesomeness.

Hey, I know most people can afford to buy a new computer three times a year but there are some of us out here that have a harder time upgrading.

Do massive system reqs really equal a good game?

I just want something lengthy with replay value - it doesn't need to cause a city-wide brown-out to make me feel like I got my monies' worth.

Not at all. I have a decent system but it's rapidly going out of date and it always gets on my nerves. GOG.com has loads of great examples of games that prove you can get a decent game without amazing graphics & I have many fond memories of older games & frequently go back to them. I still much prefer quality 2D games to 3D.

1st person games though I like to have as much graphical quality as possible as I feel it helps the immersion but more scalability in such games would be nice for the lower end user.

Honestly the last time I worried about system requirements was... for Crysis 1 and even then, when it was released it was already the exception. In recent years, unless a game is programmed by monkeys (i.e. Rockstar) it will run on nearly almost anything decent, heck I upgraded my PC recently but for once it was not because of gaming but because I wanted better performance for VMWare and all the games released nowadays still runs perfectly in 1920x1200 on my 3+ years old previous computer.

Personally I think that the performance race that games developers and hardware maker used to make is, like PC exclusive, mostly a thing of the past.

The only justification I could find today to have a "killer" gaming PC is if you have a 30" monitor or if you want to do things like 3D or EyeFinity.

Not at all, but it would show them to be "cutting edge"

Personally, I prefer something scalable to something that requires the latest and best to just run.

The games that I'm most fond of were designed to look like a PS3 game BUT there are enough graphics tweaks and options so that you can drop the game down a notch to look like a PS2 title.

I mean, yeah, I do like eye-candy to a point but if I'm allowed to drop the graphics down to something reasonable it makes the game worthwhile for everyone.

For instance, with Drakensang, on top level and maxed - it looks like a PS3 title. I dropped it back to looking like a PS2 title and if you're REALLY hurting, you can kick it back even lower and closer to PSOne visuals.

PS2 quality visuals are fine by me.

Same with Alpha Protocol. Uber graphics on max but you have enough options (ie; turning off crap like motion blur) to be able to manage the game on dated hardware but still keep the aesthetic appeal reasonable.

And I have to say, I've never had a problem with jaggies and demanded anti-aliasing, my eyes are not good enough to see jaggies in the first place.

I think you are blowing the issue out of proportion, if anything the last 3-4 years, PC gaming has stabilised in terms of hardware costs, hardware demands and hardware requirements.

In fact, I don't think any game I have ever seen needs as you describe, 'four top-of-the-line video cards cross-firing, six core processors, and an generator yard'. On the contrary, most games now use a three year old card which was never top end. Crosffire and SLi are near meaningless in their usefulness, unless you worked hard enough to pay for them. ATI (and Nvidia) have worked damn hard to significantly lower the power needs for their cards, my current Ati 5750 consumes less power then a former high end card, the 3870. This despite being a much better card.

This power saving moves to CPU's as well, AMD launches specific CPU revisions with a 'e' which consume less power whilst matching the same performance. Intel cuts down power aggressively too, the new CPU line have nice power savings.

However, the wealth of third party tools and programs to under clock your components so they consume even less power cannot be ignored. My Phenom 2 X4 is under clocked by 700mhz 90% of the time, the other 10% is when I need to video transcode.

You mentioned in the past the very outdated computer you have. When your computer is less powerful then a xbox 360, then I think it's time to upgrade.

Other then that, invest in a console, since that is the only other way to play games decently.

This is true, I'm running 4gb of RAM, 5 hard drives, Nvidia GTS-250, Quad Core Cpu (overclocked) along with about 10 usb bits & bobs (inc-keyboard,mouse,external DVD/RW) on a decent 380w power supply.

I love my hardcore gaming machines but since I started living on my own, electricity bills have become something I'm more aware of so now I'm always looking for the best balance between performance and power requirements.

What game does require this exactly?

I understand what you're saying, but I think that we're thankfully moving away from that mindset. I can't think of a single game on the horizon which is really going to require mind blowing specs.

My biggest complaint is with the sloppy way that developers are abusing harddrive space. Every game is being allowed to take up gigs upon gigs of space simply because people are equipped with terrabite size HDs now. I feel that a little bit sharper coding and development could drastically reduce their digital footprints.

Coding has nothing to do with it. Its the quality of the content that takes up so much space. I for one, prefer lossless audio to be used, not some piece of shit ogg encoding or similar crap, and high quality, non-jpg-compressed textures. Size doesn't really matter, the quality of the content does.

I'm over-exaggerating obviously but do I think it's seriously silly that there are games in existence that require two processors to run.

Not a clue, I've been modding it and switching out parts for 5 years.

You mean two cores, not two processors. Oh, and why is it silly? The advantages of multithreading are enormous. ;)

Watch this game play footage and then look at the minimum system requirements and tell me if that seems a bit silly:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/49320/?snr=1_4_4__13