I'd still pick a console over a PeeCee for gaming

The Game Room
1

Appropo of nothing, and to start a conversation, I figured I’d relay my recent experiences with gaming:

Wii: put in Wii Sports, start playing (yeah, got it on opening day, still only play emulated games and Sports)

Xbox360: put in game, start playing

PC: Purchase nVidia 9800 GTS+, nominally for video transcoding and Folding At home. (and dirt cheap at $125…8 months ago it was a $400 card!)

[ul]
[li]Power Down computer[/li][li]Insert card[/li][li]Power Up computer[/li][li]Download Beta Windows 7 Drivers (probably my first mistake was assuming Windows 7 would be happy)[/li][li]reboot[/li][li]Download Demo to show off game, stop when the download service is abnormally stupid (sign up and for 3 euros, get uncapped unlimited downloads! Here, install this ActiveX download helper and search bar!)[/li][li]hunt around trying to find a legit download service… finally notice the 3dMark2006 download is complete[/li][li]Try folding at home app. It works. Cool.[/li][li]Try a demo, find I need directX installed, surpisingly, don’t need a reboot. Demo fails. Reboot.[/li][li]After reboot, folding at home app doesn’t work.[/li][li]Install 3dMark2006, run it. First demo looks AWESOME… Application craps out trying to show second demo.[/li][/ul]

I was roughly 90 minutes in before I saw anything remotely cool looking. The the system blew up.

[install XP, patch to the hilt, download drivers, install DX9&10, redownload demos.

So…the Doom 3 demo looks…good. It does the native resolution and turns on ALL of the effects…but it doesn’t look, I dunno, earth shatteringly better. It’s comparable with a good game on the '360 with the Big Screen.

And XP is much more stable…but bland. And the two day experience (interspersed with running a family) is a real turn off.

This doesn’t include the sad realization I lost the registration code for spore. :frowning:

2

It’s so weird, I have to follow this exact procedure every time I so much as load up a game of minesweeper, yet somehow I keep coming back for more.

And if you think XP is bland, Vista tastes like cardboard. Yuk.

I used to lose registration codes too, until the invention of the pencil and paper.

Wait, was I supposed to take the OP seriously?

3

That’s not really surprising, considering Doom 3 predates the XBox 360 by about six months. Why are you using a five year old game to show off your shiny new graphics card?

4

To be fair, I imagine a fair number of dopers have had to deal with red-rings of death on the Xbox, so its not all happiness and light in console world either. It just took me more then 3 months to get Microsoft to finally replace my gfs brothers defective Xbox 360. And each step in the process took an hour or more in Indian call center hell.

5

You’re complaining about a beta OS not working properly? Or that a 5 year old game doesn’t look that amazing?

:rolleyes:

6

I think he’s saying that playing on a console is easier than having to fuitz with any hardware configurations.

7

I’ve had six, so far.

8

I’ve had none. (Well, actually its my girlfriend’s console, but since she’s a law student, I’m usually the one playing it.)

9

That’s a good distinction, my first reaction was that he was comparing playing a console game to playing a PC game, not messing around with hardware. I think playing a PC game is more enjoyable than designing architectural schematics for a football stadium, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like going to watch football games.

10

Or for that matter, using a 3D benchmark to have fun? Bit like comparing Pikmin with a nice evening in with Excel pivot tables.

Plus, if my experience with the 360 is anything to go by, the OP left out half an hour of jabbing at the disc drive with an unfurled paper clip in the vain hope of getting it to open, followed by 15 minutes of closing it with the machine held at different angles, to try and convince it to read the disc. Then 15 minutes trying to find your ear mufflers to drown out the noise of the jet engine that is apparently taking off in your living room. :slight_smile:

Anyway, if you want PC spiffiness, go and buy Crysis. It’ll piss all over your poor graphics card, but even without maximum settings it’s still got the most incredible graphics I’ve ever seen. Absolutely jaw-dropping (particularly in the later stages).

Just got my first upgrade for 6 years, and it is sweeeeeet. Although in the intervening time I appear to have lost all talent at FPSs…

11

Only if you know exactly what his point is, then can you explain it to me?
I’m not sure why installing a new graphics card and setting up his OS has anything to do with actual game play. As far as a can tell, besides downloading an old demo, absolutely nothing.

12

That’s the main thrust of what I was going for. Honestly, I didn’t expect a beta OS to be perfect. I alluded to that in the OP. While it’s pretty easy to pick apart everything I’ve said with ‘golly, I write stuff down’, and ‘hey nimrod, that’s an old skool game’, really the point was that it was a PITA compared to ‘slot the game, play it.’

I picked Doom 3 because a)I’d played it on the older hardware so it was a good reference point, and b)I had it. It was also known for being more game than most hardware could play at time of release. 3dMark200_6_ sure looked spiffy. Once things got stabilized.

To be honest, My first 360 gave it up in the first ten hours of use, my second one is going on two years knock on wood. Six? that’s some serious stick-tuitiveness you’ve got there.

Of course, with a little time for thought, I can gripe on Xbox Live too. :wink: 20 minutes listening to teenagers with aspergers for 60 seconds of gameplay…then they they boot me partway though the track (Forza)

I am impressed with the encoding ability…40 fps for high quality h.264, up from 10-12…but then again, it looks like I’m going to have to pay for the app to do so. It doesn’t look like Handbrake and VLC are GPU aware.

ETA: the card came with a demo for Warmonger…it didn’t seem any better than what the consoles are providing. Does that count as a current gen title?

13

I’ve had one and I play the everloving shit out of mine.

14

Warmonger was released in 2007, so it’s closer to “current gen” than Doom3 is, but it’s really more of a physics/tech demo than anything.

15

I sorta see the OPs point, but at the same time… I put my PC together roughly 2 years ago now, and have had zero hardware issues, one minor virus scare, and a few annoying network issues. I have many games that I can play, both old and new, since its backwards compatible as hell. In fact, I just recently finished a diablo 2 campaign, and didn’t even have to rebuy the game from wii’s store.

I’ve downloaded and played dozens of mods for games such as half life, and participated in making a few.

If I were less scrupulous, I could have every single NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Atari, etc game ever made, and play them all with a minimum of fuss. Theres even websites where I can go to download favorite old abandonware games. Chuck Yeagers Air Combat? Hell yeah!

I’ve played an ungodly number of silly, yet fun, flash games over the web. What is it about those that make them so addictive?

I’ve purchased many games from Steam, meaning I don’t even have to bother keeping discs around anymore. My house could burn down, and I still have those games.

Heck, i’ve even participated in forum based pen n paper RPGs, and varieties of other games such as a simple, yet oh so satisfying and funny Picture Fight.

On the flip side, I have had a few games that were glitchy, or just plain didn’t work properly, or were impossible to network.

Consoles have an edge in simplicity of setup, and general quality control when it comes to the games themselves… Theres no graphics settings to tweak, and if there is MP, it generally works right, with few exceptions.

But PCs have an astounding lead when it comes to sheer variety and capability.

16

I downloaded the Crysis demo. At 1024x768 medium, it looks pretty good. I’ll wait til it’s dark out to give an update as that room is too bright to see anything (what is it with FPS that have two colors, black and light black?)

I’m willing to write off my experiences as new hardware syndrome…that growing pain period where you have to figger out what it wants and it figures out what you can give it…

17

Hmm, odd - don’t know what level is in the demo, but half of Crysis takes place on incredibly lush forested islands. There is a (nearly) monochrome bit, but for a very good reason that I won’t spoil for you.

I would’ve thought a 9800 GTS could manage a bit better than 10x7 at medium, too; crank it up, go on. :slight_smile:

18

The fact that you can replace your video card *at all *makes the PC the superior gaming system, IMO. It means that two years from now, when Sony decides to put out a new console, your PC will still run the latest games (albeit with slighter lower settings) without having to purchase a completely new system.

19

It also depends what sort of games you play.

I like Civilisation, Colonisation, CSI investigation and other turn based games.

Do consoles do this stuff? I thought it was all shoot’em’ups and sports action.

20

Hmm, in theory. In practice, PC gamers seem to completely replace their systems at about the same rate that console gamers do. Video card upgrades, CPU upgrades etc. have an annoying habit of requiring the motherboard and everything else to be upgraded. Sure, you can restrict yourself to older games and run the same PC set-up for many years, but the same is true of consoles.
On this question (i.e. leaving aside the other pros and cons), I call it a draw.