Sims 3 burned up a laptop I had at the time.
I will never forget the sounds of that laptop struggling to stay alive, and the extreme heat radiating from its cheap hull.
But since I started building desktop PCs again, I haven't had any problems.
Some game destroyed a desktop PC I had in like 2002, but can't remember what it was.

Only thing close to this I can think of is huge physics explosions in Crysis causing my poor 2007 PC to crash.

Baba is You:

Custom level (designed for this purpose) with:
* A baba and a flag
* Baba is You (means that you control that Baba)
* Baba make All (meaning that, every move, each baba makes one of every object in the map, meaning one new baba and one new flag for each baba) (Or it may have been All make All, which would mean the flags are also making everything)

Testing the custom level, after a while, everything that's created (including every player controlled baba) has to be processed every turn, causing the game to become incredibly sluggish, until the game just gives up with a Too Complex! error (that you can undo out of, if you need to)


Also, I hear that Morrowind's Racer Recursion mod (spawns 2 Cliff Racers every time a Cliff Racer dies) can overwhelm even modern systems. Just get a big area spell that can kill Cliff Racers, and once there are a lot of them, casting this spell can grind the game to a halt, until it eventually runs out of memory it can allocate (32-bit app, unless you're using OpenMW) and crashes.

No, but I still feel funny about playing the original XIII to this day because while I was playing through it for the first time, my PSU blew a capacitor.

The Sims 3 with maxed out graphics settings used to make my previous GPU extremely hot.

When my main GPU was broken, I used integrated graphics card to play TES IV: Oblivion. It wasn't a good idea, gameplay looked like a slide-show.

Sims 3 was one 64 bit patch away from being really good.

I find that hard to believe. The scene made you buy a new graphics card? You didn't wait, you immediately powered off the PC and went to buy a new card? No additional tests, other games, plain old patience?

The scene caught me off guard too, but not enough for me to immediately reach for the power button. I would have waited at least a minute or two and then tried the good old ctrl alt delete if it had frozen or crashed for real.

I can't find any information on them toning down the scene online. When I replayed it a few months ago, it seemed to be the same as I remember from over a decade ago.

In either case, that was a good scene. More games should do that. The only other game that I know with such tricks is Eternal Darkness, but it is old and so its effects are also made for old CRT TVs.

The first PC-Version showed error logs about failing memory banks.

Steam never got that version, it was replaced very quickly by a version that did show the same graphic errors as the console version did.
If I'm not mistaken, Batman 1+2 only arrived on Steam after GFWL went down. I still got Batman AC on GFWL with some DLCs.

As I said, it was a lot more convincing. And I had seen smilar errors in the past when the card really WAS broken. And in that past something like that could damage more than just the card. So yes, I switched off the PC in that moment. And no, I didn't buy one instantly, only after it happened several times. And as I said, I was about to buy a new one anyway.

Do you still have your original CDs? They these without any update.


There are a couple of games that break the fourth wall, but not many.
You mostly find references about someone controlling the character in point and click adventure games ("why did you do that?" "Don't know, it is as if someone with a very sadistic mind is controlling my every move".

And then there's of course Deadpool the game, where Deadpool knows that he's a fictional character and actually goes to a computer games company so they would create a game about him. And he keeps talking to the player.


And there's at least one game on the XBox that effectively does affect the real world. If forgot which one it was, could have been Fable. Because they had the problem, that the memory kept filling up, at some point when leaving a town or something they would show a rather long loading screen. During that time they rebooted the console with a custom boot script that would then boot directly into the game.

Yes. This one LITERALLY burned up my system.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/254440/Pool_Nation/

Literally. As in flames. Not kidding. I was playing, the phone rang, I paused it, answered the phone, and while I was on phone (no more than 5 minutes) the graphics card apparently overheated so badly that it caught fire.

I had to replace everything except the case (had some marks but was till functional), CPU and hard drive IIRC. What surprised me the most was the hard drive ended up being okay and working some time after that. I never tried the RAM... it didn't look to healthy lol. The graphics card, mother board, and power supply were literally black. Burnt. Yet the CPU survived, and as I said the hard drive did as well.

EDIT: I should add though, that I assume it was this game that did it. I can't remember when it happened (it was years ago) but I posted on these very forums immediately because of how it happened. You see, the way this happened was like this. It was 1:30 AM. Okay, 1:30 in the morning. (or thereabouts). I answered the phone because... 1:30 in the morning something's wrong right??? It was a recording about a time share opportunity in Florida. Now I've gotten those kinds of telemarketing calls all the time, including the time share ones. But never, EVER, for me at least, did I before that nor since that get one at some god awful hour like 1:30 AM. So I have one of those wireless landmine phones that you press a button to talk and to hang up. The second, I mean the very SPLIT SECOND I pressed OFF to hang up that phone, that's when the flames shot up. It was like pressing a remote and turning on a gas fireplace. I hit that button, and the flames erupted.

I thought then (and still wonder TBH) whether that phone call somehow had something to do with it.

every single event described in this thread is a cautionary tale in maintaining your PC properly: removing dust, making sure coolers have proper contact, ensuring proper airflow etc, and running any kind of game would never cause an issue.

The Baba Is You example that I gave, as well as the modded Morrowind example, would not fit that description; they're really just cases of the game engine being pushed in a manner that, thanks to an exponentional explosion in the number of entities, will slow down even high-end modern systems to a crawl, and possibly cause memory to run out.

No, there is the possibility that games can't detect hardware that is too weak to run it, and will allow it to run on hardware that is not capable of it. I maintain my PCs quite well, and Oblivion, in a matter of a few hours fried the GPU. Not because it couldn't cool enough, but because it reached critical mass.

In general, modern processors are build in a way that it could be compared to a race car engine that can be rev up to high peaks, but it is only recommended for a rather short period.

In comparison old processors was totally save even at 100% load, because in general the "huge" architecture and much lower density was less sensitive to damage. It could be compared to a tractor engine which is always at 100% load but will never overload at this condition.

So, in general, because the density and the extremely high energy which is being pushed through those chips was increasing year after year i would not consider any chip, when permanently under full load, in a "safe operation" anymore.

And "safe operation" simply means that a chip got maybe between 50 and 80% load but never above 90% for extended period. No matter the cooling, the chips simply can not really handle it anymore. In my mind, the current technology is slowly reaching a limit in which the handling of the energy and heat is the true limit, not the raw performance of a chip.

And it does not really matter if the chip is 4 times smaller size as long as the same kind of energy for each mm2 is being pushed through those transistors. So a 150W chip with 4 times smaller die is not more safe than a 4 times bigger chip with 600W. What truly matters is simply that there is not to much energy being pushed on each mm2 of that die, not the total amount of energy,

Heat is always playing a role but nowadays by design, it is almost impossible to cool it down below 70 C at high loads, and even at 70C... i would worry using a chip permanently at loads above 90%. Even OCing is pretty much over because all the chips... somewhat funny, already comes OC out of the box and in many terms even with crazy Volt added...

The industry apparently loves to blame customers for burned chips... and all what matters is that the company got the "performance lead"... no matter the cost; and the cost is usually payed by the customers. I think this is some kind of crazy competition and for the first time in history i may even recommend to "underclock" a hardware in order to have it more safe for endurance.

Anyway, if a hardware is being run with full clocks, i do recommend to use a Hz(FPS)-limiter, this is very important. The limiter should be tuned according to the processors capabilities, so the processors will stay in some healthy range for the loads.

So, in general a hardware should not be run at max load anymore, which means... a sufficient hardware is not sufficient anymore if it only handles the required performance at max load. The performance-overhead is simply here so it wil never go down to its knees if a lot of stuff is happening for a short period. Although, in term a processor is always under pressure without any "breathing" anymore... then it is nowadays surely always in a critical condition over time.

Regarding topic: So far i think nothing was burned because of overload, but i can say for sure: If i did not try to protect my hardware from excessive loads... i think it would surely happen to me already. No matter the cooling... a modern processor can even die because of "to much energy" for a extended period.

That's not how it works though. Games have no way of asking how much they can push the hardware before it blows up, nor is it the game's responsibility to do so. Thermals and power are managed by the relevant chips and their firmware plus drivers.

What happens when your hardware is underpowered is either 0) game doesn't start at all 1) game runs with bad framerate 2) game may slow to a crawl and/or freeze or crash. None of this requires your game to understand anything about hardware.

If your hardware is getting fried, that is 100% a hardware/firmware/driver problem (this includes overcloking, which involves all three).