I dont see why console games systems are so popular, when compared to PC games. On a PC you have over 30 keys (commands) and that number is doubled and tripled with the shift/Ctrl/Alt keys. Not to mention the wonderful usefulness of the mouse.
I play IL-2 Sturmovik and can’t imagine playing that on a Playstation or X-Box. A better example would be the Command and Conquer series of games. I bought a bunch of those games (Red Alert), and to get proficient at them you would have to use to mouse (to select units in a timely manner).
Some first person shooter games I’m sure would be fine to play on a console but the ease and option-rich nature of a having a keyboard seems to far outweigh a console controller with, what, 15 buttons max?
The online aspect of gaming is just as strong a point for me. If you have an internet connection (a relatively fast one), why not just stick with the PC version of any game?
In other words, why should I buy an X-Box or Playstation to play [Delta Force] when I have a PC that is much more efficient to use with my cable modem equipped PC?
The question should be, why do you want to start this insipid, overplayed fight? Why is it important enough to you to care why some people might like to play consoles versus PCs, and some people play both for the depth of different games?
One of reason is probably ease of installment. No installing on a console, it’s load and play. I personally haven’t had a console since the original 8bit nintendo. Computers are just for people who like to tinker.
Yes, thank you. That brings me to a very important second point: Patches!
PC game purchasers are always able to upgrade[fix] their games via a simple download from the company’s website as soon as they become available. Not to mention unofficial mods and varius upgrades…
[QUOTE=BrightSmite]
Some first person shooter games I’m sure would be fine to play on a console but the ease and option-rich nature of a having a keyboard seems to far outweigh a console controller with, what, 15 buttons max?
Option-rich, yes. Ease? That depends, really. If you’re playing an FPS, for example, you don’t really need all those buttons. To play a RTS on the console can be difficult though, and I certainly only buy RTS’s for PC.
A lot of games don’t have an online component. And some consoles, mainly the Xbox, do.
As Burrido says, ease of installing; there isn’t any. Then there’s the performance of your machine; as time goes on, games for the PC become more and more graphics- and memory-intensive, so you have to upgrade or buy a new computer. With a console, you have no problem - you can play any game for it during the console’s lifetime, with no reduction in performance. There’s often multiplayer-capable games (as opposed to online ones), and they’re much easier to play on consoles than PCs.
Recently both me and my brother got the lastest Elder Scrolls game, Oblivion. He has an xbox 360 and a wide screen hdtv, i have a 5 year old homemade computer. At first i was jealous, the game is a work of art on his setup while i had to do voodoo to even get my computer to run it. He didn’t have to hunt down drivers to make his video card run the game, he didnt have to delete several other games to get enough room to install the game, he had a gorgeous experience right out of the box. A week and a half later hes already ran into bugs that will require a downloadable patch and due to the lack of modability of the 360 version the games inherent flaws have already driven him away. Meanwhile im having even more fun now than i did at first after downloading several mods that greatly improve the game. I can’t wait to see what the mod community will make of this game, some great things are already out there and they have barely scratched the surface of whats possible.
This is a big one for me. As both a long-time console and PC gamer, I can vouch for the irritation of tweaking graphics settings to make a game run properly on the PC. You have to play around with anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing, resolution, fog effects, particle effects, model details and all kinds of other parameters, and figure out how many frames per second you’re willing to trade for each. When a new game comes out, you’re always worried that it won’t run properly on your hardware.
With a console, it’s different: you buy a game for your PS2, you know it’ll run just fine. No need to mess with detail settings. “It just works”.
Patches - consoles with hard drives (XBox / some 360 models) allow patches to be applied just like PCs. In the case of the 360, the patch gets downloaded and installed immediately from XBox Live - no registering for download sites, no unzipping and installing.
There’s also the ‘applianceness’ of consoles. They’re like toasters - you just turn it on and make bread. A PC is inherently, and by design, a multi-purpose machine. If you want to play games, you probably need to kill other apps you have running (unless you like getting “new mail!” popups when you’re trying to kill the Combine in Half-Life 2). PCs also require a while to boot up and be ready for play. Consoles are much more “instant on” - good for a quick gaming “fix” if you don’t have much time.
Lastly, there’s less chance that a family member will bug you when you’re playing on your console that they want to “look something up on the Internet” or “check their email” !
Amen - you never really know what you’re actually going to get with a PC game, because so much of the performance, look, and experience is wholly dependent on your hardware configuration. It seems like PC games are increasingly aimed at the hardcore builder/tweaker market, so that you literally have to have the latest $500 graphics card released THIS WEEK (or two of them, running in SLI) if you want to achieve the actual look of the game that you see on the box or in ads. If I buy a PS2 game, I know that I’m actually going to be playing what I bought, not compromising for a jerky version with half of the textures and effects turned off just so that it will run on my “ancient” six-month-old machine.
The real nail in the coffin for me was seeing my friend trying to run Half-Life 2 when it first came out on a machine that he had expressly built in anticipation of the game - and watching him scramble to disable lighting effects, shading, and textures just so that it would run on hisbrand new machine - at which point it looked about as impressive as Half Life 1 did in 1998.
I’d agree with you, if console advertising didn’t take the box art and other promotional screenshots from the pre-rendered video segments. Remember commercials for games like Final Fantasy VII or God of War? How about the countless games where screenshots are rendered on developer kits with tons of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering at one frame-per-second and then called “in-game”?
The console marketing machine cheats just as much as that of the PC industry.
I come down on the pro-computer end of this spectrum, partly because it’s just what I’m used to and partly because I love tinkering with computers, not to mention the patches so that if there are bugs, I can fix them. But I will say this for consoles- they’re fun at parties. If I get a group of friends together and we want to play a console game, it’s far easier to set up. Whereas a LAN party is a major undertaking, where we have to all haul our entire setup and then network it all together. Console gaming works better for parties.
The problem here is that Neverwinter Nights and Final Fantasy are representatives of two very different genres, both of which, for historical reasons, have the same name.
Another point in favor of consoles, I suspect, is the controller that comes with them. Many games play better with a video-game type controller (though certainly not all: Some rather demand a keyboard or mouse). Now, I’m sure that someone makes such controllers to plug into a USB port, but they’re one more thing to get. With the console, they come with it as standard equipment.
Increased complexity isn’t a good selling point. Elegant and simple interfaces are often much better than having 30 different commands or even more complex keystrokes that you have to memorize in order to do well. This is the kind of thinking that gives you toolbars that take up half the screen when having a more minimalist approach would make a computer program easier to use, which often results in getting things accomplished faster. Compare Microsoft and Apple user interfaces for instance. Windows is perfectly usable, but Apple wins awards and acolytes for their design choices. Besides, having limits sometimes forces game makers to implement better design than they would if they had more options to work with.
I play games on both computers and consoles, so I don’t think there has to be an either/or situation. Some games feel much more natural with a mouse and keyboard, where you can interact with objects, palettes, and menus non-linearly. Some games feel much more natural with a controller.
I now prefer playing shooters (Halo, Ghost Recon) with a controller, even though I used to feel as you do that the mouse-keyboard combination was better. Third-person games (Tomb Raider, Splinter Cell) feel much more intuitive with a controller as well. I like mouses for role-playing games (Baldur’s Gate, Warcraft) and other interactive games (Sims). Obviously, anything that requires drawing or gestures (Black & White) is better with a mouse than etch-a-sketching it with a controller.
There aren’t many strategy games on the console, are there? I love playing the Total War series and the Civilization games and they are exclusively for the PC only.
