Consoles trumping PC in gaming
By HoboGamer • Mar 26th, 2008 • Category: FeaturedVideolamer discusses the interview with the Epic Games crew about the declining popularity of PC gaming, for some reason Mark Rein’s speech inspires some hope in me, that the new PC-Gaming-Alliance can change things around.
I dunno maybe i’ve been won over by Mark’s marketing power.. regardless, we as PC Gamers should pray that this new initiative makes some progress, otherwise we’ll all end up trying to play FPS’s and RTS’s using an X-Brick 360 controller or even worse some Nunchucks…
Bruce getting frustrated at Mario..
Unreal creator Tim Sweeny highlights a pretty good point:
Intel’s integrated graphics just don’t work. I don’t think they will ever work.
Amen to that Mr Sweeny, i feel what you’re saying, you’d think a Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz + 1GB DDR spec laptop would run Vietcong 2 (specs) right? WRONG, one word - Intel Integrated Graphics (O.K three words..)… but hey, atleast i can still play World of Warcraft on my laptop, no seriously i can.
Don’t get me wrong, i don’t mind consoles heck i even enjoyed, no.. loved Goldeneye on the N64 (and it’s an FPS no less!), but give me the flexibility, tweak-ability, and power of my Gaming PC anyday.
HoboGamer is a devout PC Gamer, who loves his budget hardware and getting the most bang for his buck, i.e cheap-skate.
Email this author | All posts by HoboGamer
I love pc gaming also, I enjoy console gaming to. I think they’re both equally fun.
Yeah i’m not anti-console at all, i ‘ve owned an Atari, Sega Mega Drive, SNES, Nintendo64, PS1, Dreamcast and more recently my gf bought me a PS2 for Xmas. One of my favourite FPS’s is GoldenEye on N64, and i actually mastered that unwieldy N64 controller to kick the crap out of all my buddies on N64 nights
There was a Goldeneye mod for Halflife, but for some reason it didn’t feel right playing it on a keyboard + mouse.. i’m starting to get an urge to check eBay for some 2nd hand N64’s.
Consoles are also definately better for fighting games like Street Fighter and Tekken, i used to play the Street Fighter 2 PC port back in the day, i think it was an underground one too so there were modified things like ultra fast fireballs, it was wicked - picture Blanka doing his electric shock-aura-move-thing and add a flying ninja-star thing that shocks the enemy too. Hehe. Playing it on keyboard sucked though.
Not saying you were. I think i’m the only one posting on ur site.
Cool, i was only stating that because sometimes people may think i am one of those hardcore PC fanboys, and yeah thanks for posting here (it gets lonely), hopefully it gets busier here
No problem, you got xfire?
hey i saw your link via gametrailer and i like your web page with Bruce and his nunchuck replaced with a will chuck lool : )
http://forums.gametrailers.com/showthread.php?t=354656
Let me start off by telling you a bit of myself. I was a console gamer - like you i luv to play GoldenEyes on the N64 at a friend house, multiplayer match was everyone fav, we had like 6 friend standing in line to be the next player lool, that was when N64 just released and their awesome Rumble pack controller =]
NFL Blitz was freaking awesome , that was the game got us together to have a blast.
The next thing you know, i was at other friend house to stay over night and challenge him to GT2 and Madden NFL on the PS2=] That was like hmm many years ago.
Those game start to get bored fast, so we try something new. Doing modem to modem play with Age of Empire 2. That was when high speed connection was very expensive lol
I luv the PC gaming ever since, but i already like it the first time I saw Admin at my college playing TFC =]
anyway people evolved and I evolved to play on the PC, console is the thing in the past, for me anyway tehe
Heres me playing SF vs some KoF char. On the hardest mode on PC, using only the keyboard.
Just pay no attention to what i said with the comment below the video : P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mIXdpo7kqo
be sure to check my other video too… all played and show off via PC.
theres no way in hell a console users could does all those thing, unless they use a web cam lool. Not dissing console, just saying they lack stuff… and they’re consider a low standard PC version machine…
or not! : P
cheers and nice site. bookmarked!
This is ridiculous. Console gaming is bigger than PC gaming, because people who play consoles:
1) Never gave a fuck about gaming before it was dumbed-down and mainstreamed.
2) Weren’t PC gamers in the first place.
PC gaming isn’t dying, the other market is just bigger. Epic is just chasing cash first and foremost, and they’re trying to blame piracy because it’s the popular thing to do.
Blargh, wanted to also add that sure, consoles have a place - but they’re a casual gaming machine. I’m not a big fan of these terms either, but it’s the shoe that fits the best. Even the Xbox 360, and its games, are all designed for casual players. Halo isn’t a hardcore game - it’s the nature of the design, the way it was made, all to appeal to
I’ll say I used to not have a problem with consoles. Sure, games like God of War are just console-style games. It’s what they’re for. It’s really not the kind of game you’d ever expect to see on a PC.
My problem with consoles is that now they ARE killing PC gaming. PC franchises are now console franchises too, and have suffered in quality DRAMATICALLY for it. Games have become uber-dumbed-down, it’s very rare you see a game with any innovation any more, but most of these quality titles are still PC titles. The consoles are just machinations of unoriginal drivel, giant cash vacuums to feed people who don’t care about making good games, good storylines, deep gameplay, learning curves, or the like. They just care about a new car in their garage.
If anything’s killing gaming, it’s twats like Epic Games who try to recycle their franchise 4 times on the PC, and finally failed as us PC gamers wised up (about time…) and said ‘UT3? Make something new you retards’. Then they got a sore butt and blamed piracy and quit.
Imagine a scale, 1-10 on game quality. I like to imagine the PC up towards the upper end (or was at any rate), with extreme casual games (like Bejeweled, etc) towards the lower. Consoles used to sit in the 4-5 range. Goldeneye and Perfect Dark were fun, but as far as shooters go, it wasn’t a PC shooter. We had what? Duke Nukem? Screw Goldeneye.
With the Xbox now usurping PC games for their own use, and making them “reach a wider market” (which is marketing-speak for ‘dumbing down so Xbox retard fratboys will buy it’), the PC has slipped. They’re ‘meeting in the middle’, but that middle is still closer to the 5-6 range than 7-8. Bioshock was hailed as a masterpiece. By Deus Ex and System Shock standards, Bioshock was crap. It was mediocre at best, with maybe one or two high points. I’ll be nice and peg it at a 7.5 on my scale.
So to the Xbox retards who have only played a 5-quality Halo game, this was awesome! Well, they’re idiots, because there’s still better games out there to play. it wasn’t a 96%+ game. Just because you’ve never played any other game made before 2005 doesn’t make a game any less shit.
I’m tired. I’m going to bed. So there you go.
Hehe, yeah i played Goldeneye so much every single one of my analogue sticks got crustier than stale year old cheese, reminds me of my old ball mice, o_O
Did you ever play “License To Kill” mode? One hit one kill, combine that with the Pistols Only mode and damn, that was skilled fun! Seriously.. i’m gonna slap my brother in the head next time i see him for selling the N64 and ALL our games to his friend *shakes head*
My first real PC multiplayer experience was on Doom, which is probably why i love online FPS’s so much these days, but Red Alert 2 modem-to-modem brings back some fond memories too, i recall one match where i tricked my friend to attack the other 2 guys , i un-allied (and he didn’t notice!) with him and then proceeded to send my 2nd “secret” army to pulverise his undefended base.. cheap tactics i know but sadistic fun indeed, mwuahaha
Good ol’ KoF, i used to play KoF 94 i think at arcade back in the day, did you ever see the Fatal Fury movie? Had some KOF characters in it like the Bogards.
Nice vid, and thanks for heads up on the GameTrailer link.
Closing note: If you’re uncomfortable with the ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’ terms, think of another hobby.
Imagine car tuning and racing. I’m not one of these people who will spend hours trying to mount new headers so I can beat the 15’s. I do not know much about my car, except which pedals to push and where the gas goes. I don’t CLAIM to know anything about it either. I don’t tell people I’m a car tuner, or a street racer, or whatever, because I’m not.
To that end, think of PC gaming as the guy with the custom-tuned Mustang or whatever it is these kids drive. He knows what he’s talking about, and when it comes to racing, he experiences the real thrill.
The guy with the console is the guy who bought a Honda Civic with neon lighting, a spoiler, and a turbo blowoff valve to make noise. He likes to think he’s racing, and will brag to his other Civic-owning friends, but when he tries to ride with the guy with the Mustang, he’s just out of his league.
And then of course, there’s the retard who just bought a $140k sports car from Alienware, but still doesn’t know anything about it. They’re just pathetic.
1) Never gave a fuck about gaming before it was dumbed-down and mainstreamed.
2) Weren’t PC gamers in the first place.
Mostly agree with both your points, i’ve known plenty of console gamers who fit one and/or the other descriptions, but stereotypes don’t apply to all, in some cases i have won some of them over to PC gaming (which they thought was crappy because it had no controllers).
..consoles have a place - but they’re a casual gaming machine.
Good point, but ask yourself this, what’s your definition of a “Hardcore Gamer”, IMO, it’s some one who REALLY gets into their games, who play it constantly so they understand every facet of the mechanics of the game they LOVE, gamers who research, discuss, and read about their games in avenues outside of the game itself.
Now ask yourself this, can this apply equally to Console gamers as much as PC gamers? As you say, console game design itself may not generally be “hardcore” but does that mean the gamers who live and breath their “casual games” are any less Hardcore about it?
I can completely understand your frustration about PC Games getting pulled down to cater to a wider market/audience because i feel the same way about it. The myriad of sports titles released every year by EA where the only real gameplay updates are the athletes names and sticking an incremented year to the end of the title. And all the other vanilla game types that go through the “Same-shit-different-title” generator to cash in on a once innovative game design. I wonder if the console boys see us as a whingy lot, oh well, we have Excel (remember that easter egg that got you into a flight sim game?)
(or OpenOffice Spreadsheet).
Love your analogy about the sports cars, i was LOL’ing in my seat, and to continue on with it , i’m not looking forward to the day those Honda boys throw in a supercharged V8 under the hood.. they’ll still never beat my time-traveling De Lorean though o_O
nice discussion there guys, i too Lol’d in rl with the nice analogy of the sport cars and switching side in red alert 2 =]
I believe PC wil be the gaming future, as long developer start rolling in great muliplayer game like TF2 and COD4.
I heard TF2 run crap on the x360 it lack so much stuffs compare to the PC version.
Valve are know for their love for PC and their long ass statistic tracks on what we player really want and hates sepecially what hardwares we currently using and making games that run with the mininum of encounter low FPS or unable to run at all due to high end requirements. Valve are the PC future, just take TF2 for example, it took em 12 years to make an awesomely fun and balance game.
While epic toss in a pos GOW port and start blaming the integrate video card users without putting much effort into investigating that game require a high end system to run, so at least either optimized it to run on low end system and add some new feature so old players won’t get bored of a crappy unoriginal covering sytem on a third person bulky butter balls steriod shooters on ham-void
Well companies like dell, acer, hp, compaq could put more emphasis in having at least some manner of low end card as compared to integrated graphics in the machines. Would at least have a decent baseline to go off of. At the same time, developers should slow the crazy engine requirements down since they’re outpacing their own market.
yea I believe those companies back in the years use lame tactic to rack in quick cash, they know those integrated card won’t last a user 3 months or less before they had to upgrade to a better one, that would forcing player keep on upgrading.
No company wanna put up a pre build system with graphic card + cpu that making the user able to play every games on high setting and lasting em 4-5 years : ) those companies would lost money!
Thats where AlienWare come in and stupid people actually pay 3-5 grands for a $900 PC if they would invest and build one themself.
Or alot would try an alternative for their gaming need if their current crappy PC couldn’t handle a game that run on medium setting, so they choose a console. Its easy, compact and you can buy it at any stores just like a cheap hooker on the street, then think to themselves “thats the best gaming system out there for me!” and start doing fanboy mr feel good in their tiny pond of ignorance.
But when you ask: who would win a FPS match if let said you put a PC user vs a console user via online match? what do yall think their reply gonna be? =]
anyway i have no idea why im writting this :L
[b]Good point, but ask yourself this, what’s your definition of a “Hardcore Gamer”, IMO, it’s some one who REALLY gets into their games, who play it constantly so they understand every facet of the mechanics of the game they LOVE, gamers who research, discuss, and read about their games in avenues outside of the game itself.
Now ask yourself this, can this apply equally to Console gamers as much as PC gamers? As you say, console game design itself may not generally be “hardcore” but does that mean the gamers who live and breath their “casual games” are any less Hardcore about it?[/b]
It comes down to the market. A console gamer who is hardcore about their games is still playing console games. To go back to the racing analogy, a guy who is hardcore about street racing but owns just a stock Hyundai Sonata isn’t really a street racer. You can say he’s passionate about it, I suppose, but I think we’re operating with two different definitions of ‘hardcore’ and ‘casual’.
I don’t mean these definitions in terms of time devoted or how much you enjoy it. I liked God of War as much as the next guy, and so did the guy whose PS2 I borrowed to play it, but that’s the only game he’s ever played, whereas I’ve been playing games for over a decade. Just because I liked it doesn’t make it a ‘hardcore’ game, and just because he liked it doesn’t make him ‘hardcore’ as a result.
As I said, use the racing analogy. A hardcore race driver is a guy who is racing in NASCAR or drag racing, or whatever the hell. He’s getting the REAL racing experience, what racing is really about. The cars cost a lot more money than anything street-legal, and it takes a lot of know-how and skill to race like that, but the experience is what’s more hardcore, than someone who just drags in their Mustang at street lights when someone looks at them funny.
My definitions of hardcore and casual are a little unconventional, but they work the best. To that end, I consider PC gaming the ‘hardcore’ gaming because not only are our games usually longer, better, ’smarter’, but most PC gamers know more about the ‘behind the scenes’. You have to. Even something as simple as hardware specs is more or less way over the head of a console gamer. The average actual-factual PC gamer knows specs, stats, he can build his own machine, he takes pride in fine-tuning it.
To take it a step further, PC gamers are all the ’smart’ ones in terms of behind-the-scenes in GAME development. There’s a billion trillion mods for every game imaginable (much the chagrin of companies trying to sell DLC). You *CAN* mod Xbox’s and PS3s, but clearly that’s not something owners of such consoles care to be interested in, or it’d be a lot more widespread.
Hell, putting custom tracks in Guitar Hero is the easiest thing ever, and most console owners don’t know how, or in my case once I explain it, was told he didn’t care because it sounded like too much work. (For the uninitiated, custom GH tracks = ripping the DVD, adding the track off of whatever page you get it from, then reburning it).
Oh and it’s always adorable when a console gamer ‘converts over’, because they start asking how to play Battlefield with a 360 controller or something absurd, and their computer melts and dies with viruses in a week
Awesome points there man, i suppose another analogy that could work here, one that i can relate to:
The console gamer is like the guy that has mastered Guitar Hero, playing hours on end to fine tune his “craft”, jamming to rock classics against virtual Van Halen and Jeff Beck, burning up his lounge room and dazzling his friends with his AC/DC solo. He thinks he’s a guitar *VIRTUOSO* and carries a pick around in his wallet (Yes, i’ve *SEEN* this before). Then we have Eric Clapton, who is a true guitar god, he’s knows REAL music in great depth, played and jammed with the best, experienced the real music life, that’s hardcore.
I love dumping on Guitar Hero players, ever since i saw them show off their “awesome skills” at a convention. I bet most of these guys don’t even know a real chord, yet if they spent as much time learning virtual guitar as they did the real thing, they’d probably be half decent at the latter.
Like a friend pointed out to me recently, the Guitar Hero pack cost’s as much as a real guitar, but Guitar Hero is easier to just pick up and play, the real guitar takes dedication, knowledge, real learning and skill to master. Replace “Guitar Hero” with “console gaming” and “real guitar” with “pc gaming” and now i can see where you’re coming from.
I think carrying a pick in your wallet no matter WHO you are makes you a certified moron. What are you going to do? Find a guitar in the street and be like “OH MAN I CAN TOTALLY PLAY FREE BIRD!”
And of all things, a pick? Are you going to get diseases from someone elses?
found your site on del.icio.us today and really liked it.. i bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later ..