Really, Skyrim was awesome. Huge world, good looking, heaps of fun. According to you, it’s crippled and stupid. Do I have that right? It worked for me, plus it was a good game to play while sitting on the lounge. Without-- I repeat-- shelling out for a PC that could play it. Damn fine game. And I still don’t care about mods, Jophiel. Maybe I will someday, but right now? No, other than the BUG mod for Civ IV. Did I mention that bastard won’t play on Win 7 for me?
The plain fact is that you can play some damn good games on a console. Mods, I presume, are just icing for most people who even know about them. Diablo III doesn’t support mods at all-- is it crippled and dumbed down because of that lack? Most of the D3 bitching I’ve read has been about the auction house, grind, and online requirement. The lack of mod support barely registers. There was a recent bitch thread on the subject in this very forum. I had a quick look over the first page and didn’t notice a single mention of the issue (just searched for “mod” is all). Diablo 3 - 2.5 months later. - The Game Room - Straight Dope Message Board
You couldn’t get a 2600 to play Skyrim. I know that you dislike the fact that major titles that sell cross platform don’t make full use of modern PC capabilities, but an Xbox is not the same thing as an Atari. Anyway, I’m getting confused… which is it, again? Are we living in a Steam-driven golden age of PC gaming fully realized by the miracle of mods and HD graphics or are PC games stupid-ass crippleware because of consoles?
You skipped my mention of licencing. Used to be that you couldn’t get some of the better sports/fighting/arcade franchises because they were licensed to consoles. Some franchises still are-- I expect some people bought the Wii just to play Mario or Zelda.
Speaking of the Wii, how are the PC motion controllers? I’m still looking for a good boxing game that uses motion controls. How many out there for the PC?
That’s about the price of a second hand Xbox, right? It’s also less than what I paid a couple weeks ago. SSDs are nice, no argument there. They just cost as much as a console is all.
In 2d platformers maybe. The RPG was born on PC as was the FPS. Western RPG’s specially flourished on PC while console gamers were still trying to jump to catch coins. Pc gamers were playing game sonline and in HD when console gamers were still stuck playing split screen in SD TV’s.
There hasn’t been a time in gaming history when consoles were superior to PC.
Sure, I get that. But that’s not much more of a defense than me saying that the Sega Genesis is just as good as the Xbox360 because I don’t care about [superior features]. The fact is that, again, you can do literally hundreds more things on the PC version than on the console versions. Describing the console version as inferior is completely accurate under those conditions. That you accept that inferiority and don’t feel it affects you is great but it’s still inferior.
Likewise, I’ll happily admit that the PC is currently inferior for motion gaming. I don’t care – we have a Wii that primarily serves as a Netflix box and dust collector – but, sure, if motion gaming is your thing you probably don’t want a PC for it… yet.
We do have a couple of devices out and a few coming out. One I’ve seen tracks your fingers in high detail, and there’s the Razer Hydra out, which does some neat things in Portal 2. It’s much more accurate than any of the console motion devices, but it’s not really supported by many games.
And of course we’ve got the whole virtual reality headset thing coming out and supported by the likes of Doom engine programmer John Carmack, Cliffy B, and Valve.
Until 2005, when Microsoft made the wired Xbox 360 pad PC-compatible out of the box, there was no guarantee that a gamepad would work with your particular PC or the game you wanted to use it with.
Secondly, did you ever try playing a PC platformer before the late 90s/early 200s? It was not an experience I’d choose to relive. The fact that consoles and PCs play those games about equally today does not change the fact that consoles did it much better in years past.
Sorry I was too busy playing engaging RPG’s, action packed FPS games, first of their kind MMO’s, mind bending adventure/puzzle titles, co-op and competitive onlien games to give a damn about mario whatever now with more raccoon tail.
2D platformers have only become interesting to me lately, with new ideas and even oldschool vibes with fresh mechanics/themes, and at the same time, the best have been making their way to PC (many of which are making MORE money on PC for their developers than on consoles).
That totally explains your attitude in these threads. We’re just going to have to agree to disagree because we have almost zero gaming interests in common.
Crippled relative to the PC version? Yes. Crippled relative to what a game could be with 2012 technology if we weren’t held back by having to make it work on decade-old hardware in an industry where processing power doubles every 2 years? Yes. The second criteria applies to the PC version too.
Sure, and Pong was pretty awesome in 1975.
The difference is a matter of degree. An atari is 30 years out of date, the 360 is 8 years out of date. (And even that’s sort of relative, as it’s not like they were high end gaming machines relative to their PC counterparts even on the day they launched).
The original Xbox and PS2 are considered outdated now, because there are machines that are far more capable than them available. In a year or two when the next generaton comes out, the 360 and ps3 wil be considered outdated in the same way. But it’s not as if technologically magically jumps every time a new generation is out - the next gen is already here in the form of PC hardware. The next generaton of consoles, which you’ll be oohing and aahing about, is going to be inferior to what PCs do today.
You’re implying I’m contradicting myself. I’m not. You’re attributing someone else’s statements to me. I’ve been consistent in saying that right now is the worst era in the history of video gaming relative to what it could be. The majority of games are lowest common denominator multiplatform shit that’s dumbed down and crippled. That doesn’t mean that every single game is that way, in particular digital distribution has really given a boost to the indie game market, but the mainstream gaming scene as a whole has never been worse.
Incidentally, you seem to be under the impression that mods are somehow a new thing, part of the current golden age you refer to - and quite the opposite. Generally speaking, games were more moddable in the past, and in fact several of the best games ever made were mods. Developers used to put more effort into making their games moddable back when PC was the dominant platform and they wanted their game to be the platform for the next Counterstrike or Desert Combat or Red Orchestra. Now many don’t make the effort to be easily moddable. While there are still some great modding communities, on the whole it’s been on the decline.
Well, it’s self fulfilling. Ignorance of the fact that PCs can use whatever control scheme you want gets people repeating the false dichotomy of console=gamepad, pc=kb/m. When enough people buy into that, all the sales go that way, and hence, the licensing/platform selection/etc. follows.
I really don’t know, the only motion controller I’ve ever been interested in is TrackIR.
So? As with all console advocates, you like to pretend that no one would own PCs if they’re not PC gamers, and therefore the entire cost of the PC is just based on gaming. So you frame the argument as “it costs $800 to a good gaming pc vs $200-300 for a console!” ignoring the fact that everyone on this forum is going to have a PC anyway, and it’s actually only the marginal cost over the PC they’d otherwise own that is the true cost of gaming.
Similarly, you ignore that having a speedy PC is pretty awesome for anyone that uses their PC. So an SSD isn’t just a gaming purchase - everyone who uses their PC on a regular basis should have an SSD, even if they aren’t gaming.
Eh, I was joking. You are arguably the most prolific (and sensible) defender of PC gaming whenever this thread topic comes up, which is about as often as threads regarding Israel/Iran/Palestine come up and FinnAgain serves a similar role in those threads, although more strident and citation-heavy.
I applaud your efforts, Gunga Din. I don’t know how you keep doing it, but as you say, its hard to abide nonsense.
Ah, yeah, I don’t spend much time in those threads so I wasn’t sure what that meant. I’ve mostly stayed out of the pc/console pissing match threads lately simply because I think I’ve made my point enough over the years, but sometimes abject nonsense (PCs just catching up to consoles, wtf?) can’t go uncorrected.
I honestly don’t even know what this means. There is a shit-ton of great console games that aren’t available in any form for the PC. That is plain fact. I like those games and I’d prefer not to deal with a PC’s quirks to play something similar, but not quite, as well as enjoying my gaming on my couch. Why is that so hard?
You are seriously missing out here. Certainly you are free to ignore them as you like but mods can make a remarkable difference in many games.
Skyrim out of the box was great. Skyrim with some mods is leaps and bounds better. Mods for Skyrim run a huge gamut from additions to the game (items or changes to how it plays and so on) to graphical improvements. The graphical improvements really shine here. As for the other mods pick and choose as you like. Don’t want a LOTR themed mod then skip it.
Better still Steam has helped streamline the modding process so if you have it on Steam finding and adding mods is simple (admittedly this used to be a tiresome and difficult process but they keep getting better at it).
Other games like Arma II came out three years ago and has recently gained a whole new life with the very popular Day Z mod.
Counter Strike was a Half Life mod that was so good Valve bought the rights and ran with it.
Team Fortress was originally a mod.
Fallout is mod happy.
Also, I like getting old games off of Good Old Games and recently got Planescape Torment (awesome game) and there are some great mods which make it work with widescreen displays and fixes broken missions and so on. Better than the day it came out.
Civ IV also has some cool mods (Fall From Heaven)
If you are an Elder Scrolls fan then check out the Morrowing Rebirth Mod which is great not to mention a (still in process) graphics revamp that is using the Skyrim engine for Morrowind! Morrowind is the best of the Elder Scrolls games and with a shiny new look it is worth a revisit.
Anyway, if you want to skip all that you are certainly free to but know you are missing out on more than just a mod to make women’s boobs bigger in the game (although those exist).
Try creating a folder at the root of your C: drive (e.g. c:\Civ4), grant the directory full access and install into there.
You did not specify your problem but that is probably worth a go.
[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
You are seriously missing out here. Certainly you are free to ignore them as you like but mods can make a remarkable difference in many games.
[/QUOTE]
Totally agree with this. Mods like Total War Total Realism and Distant Stars (for Sins of a Solar Empire) make great games even better…hell, they remake them into something better than the original. There are some great mods out there for PC games.
I believe he was trying to find some common gaming ground since you indicated that you didn’t care for FPS’ers, strategy games, CRPGs, etc and he didn’t care for 2D platformers.
Uh, wow. I can’t overstate how wrong this is. Are you not aware that a joystick was a standard PC peripheral from pretty much the beginning up until the dominance of the FPS? Flight sims and their actiony counterparts were a staple genre of PC gaming. Joystick support was more common and reliable than mouse support up until about Quake era (which also did joystick!), and if a game doesn’t support joystick input natively, it’s always been easy to translate stick input into key input. (I could talk about my FLCS, and later Cougar, flight rig, but that’s so far beyond the scope of any console-related discussion as to be laughable)
I mean, christ, a decade ago, because I was cheap and didn’t want to go buy an arcade stick that was actually intended for the PC, I spent $2.00 in parts at Radio Shack and soldered up a homebrew connector for my SNES arcade pad to PC parallel port, and I’ve been using it ever since for emulated stuff & fighting games. You practically can’t get any more non-standard that that, and yet, it’s worked like a charm.
Xbox controller as the savior of PC input, good god, kids these days. Gamepads aren’t a new thing; they fell out of favor in the PC market because they’re just plain not a good input system.
Both my TI99/4A and my Commodore 128 had joysticks. The TI didn’t even have a disk drive, it worked from cartridges and/or cassette tapes. CASSETTE TAPES, do you hear me? We used cassette tapes for programs and we were GRATEFUL. The Commodore was a vast improvement, because I had the option of buying an external floppy disk drive. Oh, the many hours I spent formatting disks, and notching them in order to make them double sided!
SenorBeef, I’ve messed around trying to come up with a response to your post, which I admit I find confusing. You have some peculiar blind spots.
I suppose that you’re aware that your opinion is completely out of whack with both the critical and user reception of Skyrim. Obviously, I can’t really say your opinion is wrong, but I think it is wrong-headed. You seem to be so intent on blaming consoles for some undefined crime against gaming that you level unwarranted accusations against a good game, simply for the crime of being cross-platform.
You also misstated Moore’s Law. What do you mean by “processing power”? Speed? If so, no. PC speeds don’t double every other year.
I’m nice that you thought so, but it’s irrelevant.
And a PC from 8 years ago would be called a relic, or at least Kinthalis would say so. The 360 is not “out of date”-- it is still fully supported by the manufacturer, games still are released. Can it do all the same things as a PC? No. Was it ever supposed to be? No.
Well, you’re right in that, yes, the current generation of consoles will eventually be replaced, but I didn’t fully appreciate that they weren’t made of magic until just now, so thanks.
Well, congratulations on your consistency across two posts.
See, this is another instance of your interesting blindness. I was contrasting your “consoles ruin everything” line with Alessan’s PC Pangloss act. You said you only came in to the thread to set some nonsense straight but failed to notice the pro-PC nonsense. And, unfortunately, you added nonsense of your own.
A prime piece of nonsense is that we live in a particularly bad time for gaming. I’ve got news for you: There have always been a lot of really shitty games. I’m talking complete crap. Sometimes they didn’t even work at all. I don’t have a lot of nostalgia for the early days of video games. It’s about a million times better now, what with the moving pictures and all.
And I’m wondering how you could possibly have such a misguided opinion, and it occurs to me: genre. It all comes down to genre. You can’t see that consoles completely ruled the sports genre for years because you didn’t care about sports games or you weren’t around to see it. You talk about a time when PCs were dominant, but they were never dominant in any wide measure; console titles have been the better sellers right through the decades.
But there have been niches where PC titles were dominant, but aren’t anymore, right? And it came to me, especially seeing your examples of Counterstrike and Red Orchestra. You’re talking about FPS games. At one time, the PC really was the dominant platform for that genre, just as it always was, and still is, for 4X strategy and RTS. So if we restrict your comments to that one genre, your opinions are less nonsensical. Maybe consoles really have led to a dumbing down and crippling of that genre, and maybe the majority of FPS games are stupid crossplatform shit made for adolescents. There are plenty of good games in other genres, though. You just don’t see them.
You did notice that I mentioned that I used a Civ IV mod, right? Or maybe you didn’t, what with the vision problems, but yeah, Civ IV is ancient. It came out the same year as the 360.
I think I first noticed mods back in Civ II days, and maybe that’s where I got my bad opinion of them. The ones I checked out were junk. Even with a modern game like Torchlight 2 most of the early mods are just cheats, IMO. Potions that let you redo your specs and shared stashes full of godly loot, stuff like that. Using that sort of mod just kinda… dumbs down and cripples the game, don’t you think?
Anyway, I’m willing to take your word on it that the capacity to mod PC games is less common now, although I suspect that again you’re really just talking about one genre. Seems to me that that means that customers don’t care that much about mods. I went and had a closer look at the Game Room D3 gripes thread, by the way. Four pages of complaints and not one mention of the lack of mods. Even the whiners don’t care.
So you’re saying it’s the PC manufacturer’s fault for not educating the market? Or maybe-- just maybe-- some games actually worked better hooked up to a TV in the living room where you could play with your friends? And they needed a way to control them, so over time, controllers were developed to play them? Really nice controllers, too, incidentally. The Xbox’s controller is a lot better than the early ones I remember. Even the N64 controller is pretty bad in comparison.
Well, to answer my own question, based on what I’ve been able to find, no, there aren’t any motion control boxing games for the PC. In fact, as far as I can tell, fans of boxing games are better served by consoles, just going by titles available and the fact that PC boxing titles tend to be ports. That’s always been the case.
Blindness again, or at least spotty reading. I said I prefer PC gaming right off the top. My main argument is that consoles may be the better choice, depending on factors like genre, budget, and playing preference.
And no, you don’t need a PC to be on this forum. You don’t need a grandpa box at all. People posting here are likely to be using phones, tablets, or employer-provided laptops that cost them nothing, but which are not meant for games. And have you ever heard of Macs?
And how often do we buy that $800 PC? Twice in the life cycle of a console? At least, right? Or are you saying that you’d be happy with a budget gamer PC from 2005? Yeah, right. So you have to pay that marginal cost at least twice.
A nice to have, not a must have.
Anyway, consoles have been, IMO, a boon to gaming in general. They’ve popularized the hobby and pumped in a lot of money. Millions have been introduced to videogames via consoles. Console manufacturers have introduced innovations like motion control. I don’t see how consoles have hurt PC gaming at large, and if you’re going to keep up with that accusation I’ll be asking for cites, please.
