PC vs Console

My move and settlement to Athens, Greece has finally been completed and I have some spare time to assault your eyeballs with another post regarding the PC vs Console debate.

I was inspired back into the debate by the release of the news that Left 4 Dead will be getting new DLC and the PC will be getting it for free but XBOX owners will pay (XBOX:0, PC: 1). Is this fair? Is there a reason?

Well it’s a big fat no, not as far as anyone can ascertain.

My guess is that Valve, in their glory and wisdom, realise that XBOX owners are a bunch of chumps who will pay for cat flavored peanut butter if there’s an achievement to be gotten, whereas PC owners are a bunch of thieving villanous bastards who’ll just download it from a torrent for free if money is mentioned. Taking this into account, I think it’s more of a cultural issue than anything technical or competitive.

He Owns a PC

What I have come to realise regarding PCs and Consoles is that you really need both. I own Call of Duty 4:MW on the PC and the XBOX360. But the one I play exclusively is the XBOX one. There is only one reason why, and that is because my friends play it there. I don’t play these games for the single player experience, if I did I’d still be playing it on the PC as the graphics are better and the mouse/keyboard combo is far better for me. But I have so many more laughs playing with my friends than being a lonely old git.

MMM, Cat flavored Peanut Butter!

On the otherhand, I have gotten back into my favorite game of all time: Eve Online. Which can only be played on the PC. The amount of pure brainjuice needed for this game is intense and is an experience I can’t get on the pick-up-and-play console. Neither can I go into it just for a dabble as it takes at least 30 minutes to do anything constructive.

2 years ago I would have been predicting the demise of PC gaming but recently I have had an epiphany (it didn’t hurt but thanks for asking). I have started work here in Greece in tech support of home PCs and have a very clear view of the situation in the PC market: XP sucks, Vista rulez. Most clients who have a problem are still running XP on a 3+ years old machine, the few clients I see with Vista and a newer computer I will see only once for a configuation change, not a technical error. And then I tried to remember the last time I had to hack my registry on my Vista computer, or edit the config.sys or do any of the million and 1 tweaks required to get XP limping along for another 6 months. And I haven’t; once my computer was setup, I haven’t had to change anything. In otherwords, it has become as stable as my XBOX360. I turn it on and it just works.

The only time a Vista machine should go wrong is if the dumb-ass user has downloaded a virus, installed a “free” game or any of the other stupidities that PC users are inclined too. Thererfore getting back to the problem now being that of culture. But as a gaming platform, it is still alive and strong and lends itself to games that the console doesn’t, and viceversa.

In conclusion….go get another credit card, buy yourself both platforms and default on the payments and cause another bank to collapse.

Street Fighter Post Prelude. My Oscar Nomination

  

I have a post in the making regarding my recent recognition of my fiero in the playing of Street Fighter II HDR. Until it’s done (there’s too much to talk about and I don’t want to bore you, so it’s taking longer than I expected) I have this little gem for you. It is Remy’s find, so I give the credit to him for finding the most amazing piece of film footage I have ever seen
…in my life
…ever.

Please vote for this at the next Oscars, Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards  for “Best Film Evar!”

4TW!!!11one

First off, let me say I love achievements. The reason why I’ve moved from being a rabid PC gamer to a sell-out console gamer has a lot to do with the lusty lure of achievements. They change the way we perceive games, they give a lasting physical presence to the time that we’ve wiled away mashing those 4 colourful buttons on the controller.

However, in game design terms, they have to be vary carefully written. A single achievement can add hours of extra gameplay or completely break a game. Remy has already gone into this and I don’t have much to add, so go read his post for more opinion of this fact.

I just wanted to make a comment about those scummy, loathsome individuals who have taken the achievements as being the be-all and end-all of their gaming experience, and thus fucking it up for the rest of us (at least for online play). Those people who are gaming online and dropping out of matches, or refusing to play with people who won’t help them with their achievement hunt. This has effectively made me realise that these people should be contained and allowed to only interract with each other so that the rest of us can be rid of them. Here’s my proposal how:

Design a new controller for gamers with this mindset. I call it the iWin controller:

iWin controller(TM)

 

 

These people can now play online only against other owners of the iWin. It works in any game and the game mechanic is this: the first person to press the patented iWin button, wins. Achievements can be unlocked such as 6,000,000 points for winning. But only other owners of the iWin can see the achievements of other iWin owners. The ergonomic design also comes with a keyboard to allow people to boast about their ability with shouts of “I win!!1! lol!!!11″

Effectively we will quarantine all these gamers into a neat virtual sub-world of petty assholeness that is essentially invisible to the rest of us who want to enjoy our gaming time online.

All controllers will have a small thermonuclear device hidden inside that will detonate once sales of the device stop, thus adding chlorine to the gene-pool.

 

A typical iWin loser

The Little-Prince of Persia

Sorry about the long absence from any sort of blog-tasties on my part. Remy has been keeping the ship afloat admirably.

As a start for me to getting back into the swing of corresponding for Agoners I stumbled across this little gem of a video clip. It’s the brother of Jordan Mechner who originally created the Prince of Persia franchise. Apparently this is what was used as a base for the gorgeous simulated movement of the original Prince from Persia.

Defection to the Enemy Camp – Console vs PC (again)

Sore Thumbs

I knew this was a bad idea to start a blog with Remy. Due to his persistent and insidious prodding I went out and bought myself a large hi-def screen and an <shame>xbox360</shame>
…
…
…
In my defense the screen is still technically a computer monitor (a highly recommended Dell UltraSharp 2707WFP 27)

So throwing off the chains of prejudice that I have been swinging around my head, usual aimed at console gaming and consoler gamers (aka: baboons), I booted up the machine (nb. to justify my purchase I’m going to use as much PC terminology as possible when talking about my Xbox). Mucho to my disgust I was already enjoying the experience. A few seconds later it was on, no passwords to put in or bios screens to negotiate. Even connecting it to my home network was a doddle. And I was so looking forward to failing at it so I would have a chance to gripe about it! Damn!

So sticking in my new purchase of Ninja Gaiden 2 it started up within a few seconds and the graphics are gorgeous! So as a PC user my first port of call is the options menu to start optimising the sound, graphics and controls to get it running as crash free and efficiently as possible. And what do I find!? Nothing! NO options, NO graphics sliders, NO control configurations…how do they play the game then?!?

Then suddenly it all made sense. This is why people use consoles. It’s gaming with no faff. It was such a liberating feeling. I dove straight into the game and loved the smooth controls, the lovely graphics and amazing animation (as in the first Ninja Gaiden game I played on the XBOX). It was already obvious that a lot more effort and detail has gone into this than any PC game in recent history. This elation with my new gaming experience came crashing down around my ears a few hours into it. First the graphical tearing, then the frame rate dropping and finally a complete system failure. I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or disappointed; happy that the console gaming experience wasn’t a flawless nirvana or disappointed for the exact same reason. At least resetting the game didn’t take too long.

My next experience was to try out Halolz 3. Again, beautifully cinematic. But the moment the gameplay began I forgave my clunky and expensive PC all its past sins. The FPS experience on a console controller is unbearable after playing at high levels with the mouse/keyboard. It’s slow, sluggish and awkward with no finesse (like a bicycling hippo). The fact that it requires assisted aiming means that it is the wrong way of doing it. With a different control input it would be fine, but with the standard game-pads it doesn’t work. I can now understand why Remy has never had a chance to get on with this genre of game.

So to conclude this extremely abridged comparison between console and PC gaming: they are both great and flawed gaming platforms. Some games work better on the PC and some on the Xbox.

However, this is a pointless argument as the best gaming platform has already come and gone. None are as awesome as:

Bow before my awesomeness!

Review of the Orange Box (for remy77077)

Since remy77077 was procrastinating about whether or not to buy the Orange Box I’ve decided to give a review of the whole zesty package. To do this properly I’d really have to review this compilation of 3 games (Half-life and episodes being counted as one) separately. So here’s my crash-course review.

Half Life 2
Starting with the least compelling game in the box, Half-life 2 (including episodes): Calling this the least compelling goes to show what is in store in this little box of joy. As a ground breaking first person shooting (FPS), back in the mists of time when Half-life 1 first came out (circa 1542BC), it was a dream come true. As an FPS it was fairly standard with pretty graphics, but the story line was emersive and gripping.

HL2 follows on from this with more of the same. Which therefore means not-groundbreaking although the storyline is pretty good. But the physics are ace to play with. The most entertaining thing to come out of it would be this: Concerned: The Half-life and Death of Gordon Frohman . Since I’m a PC Fanboy I’m not sure how it ports to console but I imagine some of what makes HL2 special gets a bit lost as the ease of manipulating the environs would be a pain with a controller.

If it was more free-roaming rather than how strictly on-rails it is, would have made this a much better game. I frequently got bored of running from one encounter to another and would amuse myself with trying to copy the Concerned comic and seeing how far I could fling Mr Freeman with a pile of exploding barrels and a bathtub.

Fun Factor – Medium
Opportunity to kill Freeman in ever increasingly ingenius ways – Very High
Replayability – None

 

Team Fortress 2
The 2nd Box Item in the list is the long awaited (although isn’t everything from Valve?) Team Fortress 2. A crazy, whizzbanger of an online shooter that is very entertaining but which should be funnier than it actually is. Bad thing first: it suffers from the Halolz factor. I.e. it’s full of prepubescent dimwits who only now how to cast aspersions on your sexuality in a stream of creative spelling errors. Bearing this in mind it does give a great sense of superiority when you play and bring a smattering of intelligence to the fight. Such as when playing as an engineer and using well placed gun turrets and spending your time kepping them maintained. Or actually healing people as a medic instead of trying to take on the entirety of the enemy team in a misguided attempt of proving Darwins theory by spectacularly removing the stupid genes from our gene pool by smearing your own genes all over the level.

Fun Factor – High
Sense of Superiority – Very High
Chance of Surviving More than 45 Seconds – Very Low

Portal
The most innovative FPS game with the exception of Wolfenstein 3D. More of a puzzle as there is isn’t actually any shooting to be had. So I am now going to coin the phrase: First Person Puzzler (at least the first person to claim coining the term anyway…Well, first person this year to do so).

See this video for what the game entails:

After the first fiew brain twisting levels you’ll find that as the migrain clears your use of portals becomes second nature.

My only criticism is that it’s far too short a game. I completed the standard levels in a couple of hours. It becomes more interesting when it came to the advanced levels and challenges. Trying to complete levels using the minimum number of portals I found particularly fun. I’m still trying to untwist my brain and control the insanely strong desire to own a portal gun because of all the cool stuff you could do with it.

Brain Twistiness – High
Fun Factor – Very High
Variety of Weapons – 1
Cake References – Mucho
Pie References – Not Enough (is there ever?)

remy77077: There’s just one problem with all of this for me, but it’s a significant one… I clearly am coming from a very different perspective on this to Nathan – or almost any reviewer of any FPS these days. I played the original HL more or less when it first game out, and it was far from any dream come true – I utterly loathed it! The moment I am dropped into an FPS environment, I have such a strong natural dislike for it, despite playing many many games and trying my best to get into it for years, that everything immediately feels ‘wrong’. The game needs to do something awesome to even jar me to a state of neutrality… HL never did this for me for a moment. The other trouble with the storyline is that I played the demo of HL2 on the 360, and you were just dropped completely in the middle of it, and I had absolutely no clue whatsoever what was going on in the story- and as such had no care or association with it whatsoever. Now whether that demo is a fair representation of the game or not I don’t know, but it has given me huge cause for doubt regarding story issues. It can take quite a lot to even get me to care about the storyline in a game anyway.

Regarding Portal: Are you sure about it becoming second nature? I watched this video and it’s done more to put me off Portal than anything else before it. It looks incredibly annoying and frustrating to me. I mean, I love the idea – but being forced to do this through the horrific interface and perspective of an FPS game looks like it will drive me insane. Heh.. I suppose this all ups the intrigue count though.

lordnaff: I won’t mention FPS again in the presence of Rik as the bile created is in danger of flooding Agoners HQ. Well the FPS platform is PC…not for stump-fingered Console-Utilising-Non-Technical-Simians

Street Fighter IV and the Casual Gaming Privy of Gold

Like remy77077 I’m very excited by the news and videos that are appearing around the production of Street Fighter 4. But this has been covered more eloquently by remy77077 than I could and since he’s the Street Fighter series guru around here (in this case meaning “slavering fundamentalist and twitch-demon from hell” (in this case meaning he kicked my ass in about 3 seconds last time we sparred in SF2)) there’s not much I could add to his insights into this game at this stage.

Except of course for a couple of off-hand comments that I’m seeing as a worrying trend in more and more games. All of these comments revolving around the term “Casual Gaming.” Which in itself is a harmless, great big, warm and fluffy market of gamers who like to dip into a game for a while and leave it at that. Which isn’t a problem, except for the fact that the population of said market is HUGE! Also known as the “Long-tail” in marketing terms, this is where the money is at and therefore is where all the game studios and publishers want to be. …understandably. The problem for us “Non-casual” gamers is that we get a market full of harmless, warm and fluffy games.

Take any MMO that has appeared in the last year. All of them have taken on the idea of consensual PvP or instanced PvP. Which has ruled out every one of them for me and for a lot of gamers like me who want the chance to lie in wait for an unsuspecting victim to ambush, rob blind and then squat up and down suggestively on their dead corpses. Or alternatively get revenge on somebody who had already subjected me to that treatment (one of the best experiences in gaming that I have come across!)

This is not limited to PvP. Nearly all forms of competition are removed from such “casual” games. A large part of competition is the ability to gain something when you win, or to be punished if you lose. Just knowing that I won or lost isn’t enough to forge that emotional connection with a gaming experience. I want to have a reason to win or to not lose!

So the jury is still out for me on what SF4 is going to bring. The fact that they already have started mentioning that it will appeal to the “casual” gamer has filled me with dread and makes me want to go dragon-punch all those house-wives sat at home playing Sims, thereby shafting any fantastic game concepts and resigning them to a fate of warm, steaming fluffiness.