Training Your Brain To Hate The Game

My dad is a retired man who doesn’t game much, but when he does, he loves to play Train Simulator, the old Age Of Empires games, and surprisingly, Colin McCrae Rally.

About two months ago, he told me that he had started getting a weird problem. His PC was randomly blue-screening. It was mostly whilst gaming, but not always, and the problem was intermittent; sometimes it didn’t happen for weeks, and sometimes it was multiple times a day.

This already sounded like my sort of nightmare parent tech support issue, but I said I’d help. My only clue was that my dad had said the blue screen mentioned a memory error. This clue ended up being a red herring that led me down the entirely wrong path.

I headed round with some spare RAM I had and replaced his RAM. A few days later, he called to inform me that the crash had happened again.

My dad also wanted a bigger hard drive, so I decided to get him a new SSD. I did a complete reinstall of his system and took his old hard drive out, wondering if that was the issue.

I got my hopes up that this had worked because I didn’t hear anything from him regarding the PC for nearly three weeks. Then, it crashed again, and I was back to the drawing board, frustrated.

Eventually, my dad went on holiday for two weeks, and I asked him to drop his computer off so I could finally solve this issue. I felt that I had to reproduce the error myself because, otherwise, I just wasn’t educated enough to fix this myself. But if I found out what the error was, then Google would be the hero.

So, I took the PC, loaded up Age Of Empires 2, and got to playing. I played that game for about three hours, but there was no crash. Weird.

The next day, I came back and tried some other games on his PC, including his ancient version of Colin McRae Rally — which, let me tell you, is utterly awful to play with a keyboard and mouse. Still no luck.

This was the moment I’d been trying to avoid. I was going to have to actually play Train Simulator to fix this problem. I steeled myself for the awful experience that was to come and began to play this cursed game.

I’ll spare you the details because man was not meant to endure that tediousness, but I’ll say that after a couple of hours, the PC finally crashed!

But it didn’t crash to a blue screen like I was expecting; it just turned off completely. Even more strangely, when I turned it back on, it immediately turned back off once it got into Windows. Immediately, I thought something in this PC must be overheating, but that was crazy because I cleaned the fans, heat sink, and power supply when I installed the new hard drive.

I installed some heat monitoring software, kept it on display on my second monitor, and jumped back into Train Simulator.

It was during some cursed turn in some Highlands Scottish railroads that I noticed the CPU was starting to get dangerously hot — and sure enough, the PC crashed moments later.

But the fan was working and clean, as was the heat sink. I was nervous that the CPU was busted or something because that’d be expensive to fix. But I decided to have a look at the processor physically. I’m not sure why because it’s not like you can eyeball a broken processor and diagnose the problem, but I went ahead anyway.

When I unscrewed the heat sink, I got a strange surprise. There was absolutely zero thermal paste on the CPU. I don’t know if there had been and it had degraded away or something, or the company my dad initially bought this PC from years ago just failed to paste it. In any case, there was absolutely no paste.

I didn’t actually have any paste, so I had to wait a day for some to arrive, but after that, I cleaned the processor, pasted it up, and put the PC back together.

That was when a depressing thought hit me. I was going to have to play Train g**d*** Simulator a final time to see if the problem was fixed. After four hours of Train Simulator, I concluded that I had suffered enough. Either the problem was fixed or I was giving up.

When my dad returned from his holiday, I gave him his PC back and told him to keep playing Train Simulator.

He told me recently that he’s been playing it an awful lot and hasn’t encountered any issues, so I’m nervously putting this down as solved.

There are still some mysteries around this that bug me.

What was the blue screen my dad saw? Was there actually a memory error I accidentally fixed during all this, or did he just get confused?

Why was it crashing a lot more frequently and in many computer games for my dad but only during Train Simulator for me? That one I think is because he plays his PC in a roasting hot attic — at least, that’s the answer that satisfies me.

But most importantly of all, the biggest mystery that still haunts me: why the h*** do people play Train Simulator?