Speaking of SMAC, can someone tell me what The Human Genome project gets you? I haven’t played in so long that I’ve forgotten what you get!
I’ve been a PC gamer for more than fifteen years, and only a console gamer since the latest generation of consoles (although I’ve got all three of them, now). I have to say, while I see a lot more good games coming out for the console than for the PC, I haven’t seen any games yet that I’d classify as “great.” Halo was cool… but it wasn’t Half Life. Metroid Prime was cool… but it wasn’t System Shock. Knights of the Old Republic was cool… but it wasn’t Torment. I realize a lot of this is personal taste: I don’t like driving games, but I really liked GTAIII. If I liked the genre, I probably would have been as orgasmic for it as everyone else was, but as it was, it was an amusing diversion for a while, but I got sick of it long before I was able to finish it. (And I got tired of Vice City even quicker). On the other hand, the number of console games I’ve paid for that were unplayably bad is vanishingly small. The number of PC games, especially if you count games I bought when I was young and easily marketed to, is legion.
So, for me, at least, I’m going to stick with consoles for a more reliably pleasant gaming experience, but keep my PC tooled up for that oh-so-rare amazing gaming experience.
That you so much for your snarky comeback. Tell you what; I am unimpressed with “Shaping up to be.” When I see it and play it, I’ll decide if it’s worth the praise. I heard the same thing about Asheron’s Call and Dark Age of Camelot.
I am sure there is a decent game or two in the pipeline, but it’s hard to deny that the golden age of PC gaming isn’t now. The level of originality multiplied by technical possibilities reached a peak between about 1990 and 1997. It just hasn’t been as impressive in the last few years.
That was exactly my point. There have been hundreds of FPS games; how many are geniunely original or provide a somewhat different experience? “Half-Life” for all its charms was basically just “Doom” with a better story - or the pre-“Halo” as it were. The odd ones does come up with someone interesting; Half-Life presented an unusually sharp story at the time it was released. You have the line of “sneak before you shoot” games from Thief to Splinter Cell. But I’ve seen few geniunely interesting FPS’s in recent years.
Savage is a FPS/RTS hybrid - one player on each team acts as the commander, giving orders to the men. As a soldier, you can follow orders like a soldier or harvest gold for your team like a peon, if that’s what you want. Another similar example is Natural Selection, the half-life mod. As a marine you follow our commander’s orders, guarding locations, bulding things, etc. but as an alien each player gets their own resources to help the team in their own way. I’ve certainly found these two games to be considerably more innovative than doom - normally I despise FPS multiplay.
Natural Selection brings up one reason why PC gaming will never die for many people - modding. Compare what you like about the two platforms, but you will never ever ever not in a million years see Neverwinter Nights on a console. Game mods, and games based largely around the capability of mod creation, is IMO just now coming into its own. Perhaps that is where your missing innovation lies.
I’ll put in another vote that SMAC deserved every single point of its 98% rating. I buy a lot of games, but there are only a few games that I seem to keep playing, and this is one of them. In fact, I have a game going right now where my University forces are desperately trying to hold off the Manifold Usurper’s forces long enough for me to roll out enough of my newly-developed aircraft to turn the tide.
Others on my personal list would include:
Master of Magic (still my personal favorite, and this dates back to 1995(?))
Master of Orion 2 (Really a variation on MoM above)
Half-Life (The graphics are dated, but this is what I look for in a FPS game)
I remember when I bought Civ3, I played it for a while, and then wondered why they didn’t make it more like SMAC. It seemed a bit of a letdown.
PC Gamer seem to have a habit of later apoligising for high scores that previous editors and reviewers have given to game that are not not seen as being quite as “kewl”. They rated Myst in the high 90s, and then later tried to say they were sorry. I’m no fan of the Myst series, but leave the ratings where they were for the time you made the review. I’m sure that Doom’s graphics would get roundly panned these days too, but that’s hardly fair to deduct it from the score it got when it first came out. Mind you, since their numerical ratings are mostly arbitrary anyway, I find the written reviews normally are much more useful.
I’ve always considered “PC Gamer” to be a console gaming magazine accidentally written towards a PC. Their reviews, writing style, layout, approach, everything, is catered towards the sort of player that is interested primarily in slick presentation and increasingly flashier iterations of the same simple game. PC Gamer is, largely, directed towards the projects with the highest budgets. Consoles have been taking over that market, from both the PC and arcades, since the release of the Playstation, and they have it locked down into the future for plenty of perfectly understandable reasons.
The Alpha Centauri score makes an interesting exception, but as it sounds, their reader and editorial response since then point it out as an anamoly for them. Not to say that AC doesn’t deserve it – in my opinion it has every right to be listed with the best games of all time – but it doesn’t belong in PC Gamer’s worldview, where form matters infinitely more than substance.
So, don’t use them as your gauge for the state of computer gaming, if you’re looking for originality and inherent quality. It still exists, and it’s not really much harder to find now than it has been (and it always has been). Troll the demo sites and try out everything that sounds interesting. Automatically ignore any reviewer that says anything beyond a single sentence about supposedly “dated” graphics. Dig through the bargain bins, you may have missed some gems a year or three old the first time around.
As for trends, I’m a cynical type and I still see no long-term problems for computer gaming yet. There’s been an increasing wave of non-American developers popping up, with small budgets that force them to distinguish themselves with quality rather than marketing. The movement of the big ticket flash items to consoles leaves more room for good niche products to be heard - quite a lot gets lost in the thunder over the mediocre glitz games of the year. Furthermore, PC gaming is still going strong in the areas that have always been its true heart: simulation, tactical and strategic war games and dungeon crawls.
But then, I guess I don’t really see any reason to complain about lukewarm titles like Half-Life, Diablo, GTA, Starcraft, and so on, potentially moving over to consoles. They belong there anyway, they’re exactly what constitutes a “console game” in my mind…rehashes of older, better games, distinguished only by a huge development budget.
Sheesh. Could we please for the love of Og not sound the death knell for PC games every single year?
Every freaking console that comes out is the one that’s going to kill the PC game market. Yet PC games are still here. Considering nearly every home has a PC now the notion that PC games are going to dry up is just silly. Slow down from time to time yes. Good developers fold up but the talent floats around joins other projects and blows you away with their next game.
As for lack of innovation that’s something that’s said about every medium. No new music, no new movies, and no new games. Really everyday old genres are perfected and new genres and hybrid genres appear constantly. The ones that don’t work fade away while the good ones gain presence and soon people will be whining how there is only clones of that type of game anymore.
Now back to playing X2:The threat. I’m thinking about buidling a new wheat farm. Or maybe a crystal fab loop to feed my power plant. Or maybe trade some Silicon. Kill some pirates. Do some mining. Buy a Destroyer and take it into a Khaak Sector and clean it out which I can do personally from the cockpit or just order my ships in remotely. Or whatever whim strikes me.
Man, I see this all the freakin’ time. Way back in the early 90s, I read a load of articles on how the RPG was dead. WHOA, they moaned and wailed, the RPG is dead! Ne’er to return…
And then Diablo hit. Followed by Meridian and Ultima Online and Baldur’s Gate and Everquest and the World of Darkness and DnD 3.0 and and and…
I have a PC I keep up to date, an XBox, and a PS/2. The only time my XBox gets any use is when I’m asked to do a review on it…cause yea, I played Halo for about an hour…and then I went back to CounterStrike. And I’m playing a pretty good PS/2 and XBox game now called Wrath Unleashed, but you wanna know my main thought? “Why hasn’t anyone come out with a frickin’ mouse for these?” Given a choice, I’ll take the PC game every time.
However, I think gaming is going to be more like the movies (and has been for a while). You’re going to have the Major Player and then the Indies. The Major Players are going to fall all over themselves copying each other, then one of the Indies will release something cool that takes off big time, and the Major Players are going to fall all over themselves copying that.
Innovation, though? Well, I guess that depends on where you’re standing. The next generation of MMOs, especially Worlds of Warcraft and EQ2, are giving me lots of hope for the future. Unreal Tournament 2004 is the best shooter experience I’ve ever had. Spellforce: The Order of Dawn was an interesting fusion of classical RTS gaming with the usual RPG character building stuff. Adventure games (remember when they were dead and never to be made again?) have been making something of a comeback, though there’ve been very few great titles there. But there have been some sales, which should inspire more releases. Strategy is another “dead” genre making a comeback and the guys behind the Europa Universalis titles are about to release a new one, which should be pretty darn good. Speaking of dead genres, Napoleon’s supposed to come back in something called Empire In Arms.
Future looks good to me.
Uh, all of 'em, for the non-picky gamer. I think that was sorta the point.
Deus Ex was different than Half-Life was different than Jedi Knight was different than RTCW was different than Hitman 2 was different than Soldier of Fortune was different than Ghost Recon was different than Serious Sam was different than Medal of Honor was different than Chaser was different than…
I don’t think I need to continue.
And, frankly, as I sit here still in amazement at the fun of Far Cry, I simply need to laugh at people who claim that games aren’t as good anymore… when they need to realize that THEY simply don’t like the games as much anymore.
Totally agree about modding.
Neverwinter Nights is still on my harddrive, while I barely play Temple of Elemental Evil anymore. Why? NWN has an incredibly dedicated, and in many cases very talented mod community. Temple only has one story (well, the dice rolling is also sketchy), and it doesn’t tell it very well.
There is some amazing content out there for NWN. Witch’s Wake, for example, or Book of Shadowe are both top-notch modules, better than the original story the game shipped with, and edging out the expansion campaigns (which hugely improved over the original’s).
Heck, people are still playing Half-Life mods, and how old is that game now?
Also, Leonidas, I’m with you. SMAC was a masterpiece.
Blizzard makes great games - they go otu and they make the very, very best game they can conceive of in a genre. Heck, they practically made and perfected the “Diablo” genre in one go. WoW will be the ultimate MMORPG, in as much a they can make it so. Does it offend you that they are making things in genre’s already there?
Moreover, how is this supposed to be different from consoles? I haven’t seen a console game that impresed me in a long time. Every such game on the PS2 seems to be a copy (sometimes good, sometimes not) of another game. Big deal. The 'Cube has nothing at all but rehashes and sequals, most of which suck. And the XBox is sort of a micro-computer, anyway.
No, KotR was made concurrently for PC and X-Box. It happened that the PC version needed a bit more debugging. It still looks better than the Xbox version.
Quite frankly, I hear the game just wasn’t shaping up very well.
No, you don’t, unless you buy crap every year. I buy a new PC - and it’s always a second-tier system - every three years. I buy a 3d card every 1.5 years. That’s it. You don’ty need anything more unless you absolutely must have the best graphics. But if that’s the case, then console graphics will look like crap to you.
Tell that to Blizzard…
What made Half-life so great was that it looked simple but realistic,. was brutally accurate, had great AI (hell, its still better than any game I’ve played since), and was a blast to play and you could mod the heck out of it.
Its the ultimate FPS, yeah. But why is that a bad thing?
I do think PC gaming is in a decline, but I don’t think it’s the death knell of it. And I’m not certain it ever will be. Every year, it’s just a little longer before any games are available for freelancers to review/preview. But it always picks up in spring, fades a bit in summer, and then picks up in fall and winter. Winter is so busy that if you want to begin reviewing computer games, that’s the time to contact the magazines (though you need to do it early enough that they haven’t allocated all their budget already).
Adventure games were on the decline; so were RPGs. Both have bounced back rather well. And if you don’t think there are a ton of adventure games out there, I will have no choice but to beat you with a banana peel. I played Midnight Nowhere dammit, and that should give me unlimited banana peel beating rights. The only genre that hasn’t bounced back yet is flight simulations, and that genre still gets the occasional title.
New genres will always be slow to take. In the thirty years that computer games have been around, we still only have a dozen different genres. Several of those genres were created (or at least made popular) in the last ten years (FPS, RTS, action RPG). A few of those genres have become less popular (fighting, flight sims, side scrollers).
I’m very excited about the games coming out. So what if a lot of them are sequels? I love sequels to good computer games. This is my list of titles I want when they come out (except Geneforge 2, which is already out).
Doom III
Half-Life 2
The Sims 2
Dungeon Siege 2
Geneforge 2
The Movies
Beyond Divinity
6 out of 7 of these are sequels. But the great thing about computer games is that a sequel doesn’t have to be just a rehash of the plot (unlike movie sequels). A computer game sequel is almost always better than the original (Deus Ex 2 being a notable exception). Now, when publishers don’t consider sequels to be a viable option, then we can consider the PC gaming industry dying.
i don’t know about the PC gaming industry, but i do know i’ve stopped buying magazines because i can get better (and updated) information online.
I’m surprised that some people are saying that since Starcraft, RTS games haven’t been doing much.
Hello? <i>Rise of Nations</i> anyone?
This has got to be the single most innovative game lately, and hey, it’s pretty darn fun too. I too think that PC games are simply in a slump right now and I’m confident they will get back on their feet.
Everybody, please note that “dead” is your term, not mine.
Actually, I didn’t mention “graphically stunning” either (I’m sitting on a GeForce2 that came with this system). My contention is this: over the past four years, by looking at the amount of space dedicated to PC games at Best Buy (even accounting for the smaller boxes) shrink from a full 2 double-sided shelves to 1/2 of 1 side of the same shelves, by seeing how the gaming magazines went from 300+ page issues to 125 page issues, by seeing how the PC gaming public itself is at least as interested in old games as they are new ones, and by seeing the dominance of sequels in the best seller lists, I came to the conclusion that the PC gaming industry is in a slump… a big one. If it weren’t for the consoles holding revenues firm, I’m thinking we could be looking at a crash akin to the video game/arcade bust of 83-85.
I didn’t care for Civ3 because it felt like “more of the same”. And I bought the $65.00 tin! 
Good point… since PC Gamer is the one mag I subscribe to, it is my primary source for information devoted exclusively to the PC gaming industry (I read the Wall Street Journal as well, and it also has the more-than-occasional article about the gaming industry). If you’re right in your contention that they only cover “big” games by “big” developers/distributors then there is an entire world that they might be missing.
FYI, PC Gamer was started by a British publisher who had a long-time UK PC games magazine. In 1994, they started an American version of the original mag. So while it might look like a console mag converted to PC’s, it didn’t start that way.
The big overwhelming difference between the electronics game industry and the film industry is that the film industry is not platform dependant. Take a projector, a strip of finished film, and a white wall and you have entertainment - and it’s been like that for over 100 years. Electronic games are totally different: the platform of 20 years ago is either discarded or so relegated to minority status that serious game development has gone elsewhere.
The PC is different, yes, but it’s not that different. Sure, it’s been around for 20+ years, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be around for another 20. Face it: these things are bulky, unwieldy, complicated, expensive, prone to problems (both innocent and malicious - who tries to hack your console?) and obscelescence (sp?). For your body, using a PC isn’t the most comfortable or ergonomic of positions, especially when doing so for hours on end, and for a lot of us we do enough PC-sitting at work. Somebody, somewhere (or somebodies, somewheres) will come up with a better answer and that will really be that.
So there’s that: the shelf life of the PC as the major computing platform is very likely closer to its end than to its beginning. Just ask Mr. Mainframe. He’s still around, but you don’t hear much of him and surely very few games are being written for him anymore. 
Oh, no need to tell me that. There’s no way I can play games the way I used to before children and career started taking their demands… what would you rather spend your time on: playing Hardball or tossing a baseball around with your little girl? I know I’ve changed, but I also can tell that the games really haven’t.
Which kind of proves my point: if a 7 year old AI written for a P-2, 200MhZ with MMX technology can beat out every single AI written since, then there is a genuine creative slump in this industry. Thanks!
Btw, where is Knoxburg? I live in Knoxville, are we close?
It was a 2 year subscription… I’ll probably let it drop. However, you can’t read your online article while sitting for lunch in some Mexican restaurant.
Btw, to answer what games I play I prefer turn based strategy (Civ, Colonization, MOO, HOMM), a little bit of real-time (Homeworld, Starcraft), and lately space fighting games (found Starlancer at Electronics Boutique for a mere $1.99 the other day). I also go for the occasional RPG, but not in a while - see above re: little girl - who wants to spend over 100 hours finishing up a single game? And, of course, MAME… it, uh, prevents me from having to waste electricity by firing up all those arcade machines (and their ROMS) in my basement. Yeah, that’s it. I’m not very good at any of them… I play for relaxation, not because of some innate need to prove my manliness against some game designers version of hell.
One area that I can see that PC’s excel is online gaming. Yes, the newer consoles have extras that you can buy to play online games, but it seems more natural on PC’s. Almost everyone’s home PC is online at some point. Few consoles ship with online attachments. And online gaming seems to be pretty popular these days.
On the other hand, this can also be seen as another type of gaming decline – the reduction in games that can be played stand-alone (not online). Or perhaps a better way of putting it (as DeadlyAccurate did) is that some types and genres are losing in popularity compared to others. What are the teeming million’s opinions on standalone games – are they losing ground to the online games, or are they standing strong?
My opinion is that some of the genres – particularly the RPG (my personal favorite) – are shifting online. But that’s just my opinion, and I don’t have a lot of data. What does everyone else think?
Consider that part of the reduced shelf space could be the reduced box size. Maybe they have the same number of games but because the boxes are smaller, it looks like fewer games. I don’t know, because when I buy games, I almost always buy them online.
I really think that it is a real reduction in the number of games carried by BB, Circuit City, and others, one that was already in evidence before the box changes occurred.
However, in a case of where the obvious is so obvious one doesn’t see it, I didn’t think to account for online sales at all when thinking about BB and their shelf space. :o (I wish : wally : would work).
That’s your reasoning? Rubbish.
First of all, many new PC games do not require shelf space. You can download them Geneforge 2, Savage, Natural Selection, buy them directly Savage, or the games themselves are free Natural Selection. Consoles do not have this advantage - as mentioned earlier, internet connections are far from standard, and the vast majority of the console market (teens) generally are not allowed to order online. Thus more console games are purchased in brick and mortar stores, meaning the stores naturally give more shelf space to accomodate them.
The gaming magazines laud consoles more for a similar reason. The PC gaming market consists of a much larger segment of the adult population. Said adults are considerably less likely to buy themselves a $5 magazine for a 4 page review than they are to buy their kids a $5 magazine, even though 4 pages is all the kid wants. Again, naturally, magazines want to cover consoles more, regardless of the state of the respective industries.
And you’re comparing this to consoles? Tell ya what. You’ve probably got a gamecube. How many games do you play on your N64? Your super nintendo? Your NES? Your Atari 2600? I still regularly play games that would have been gathering dust on any console system years before. Because of that, I get retrospective. I can look at starcraft and think “damn. this is much more fun than warcraft 3!” That never happens on consoles. Old games fade away, no matter how well made they are. Graphics aside, Chronotrigger is likely better than 9/10 console RPGs you can name. Yet no one ever plays it any more, because that would mean dragging out the ol’ SNES and hooking it up, all for one game. Me? I just pop in a CD. Or a floppy. Or start an emulator. I can look back and compare my games, to see the old and the new side by side. Consoles don’t, so everything looks new and fun. I have a library. You have a magazine.
Rubbish to you. Off the top of my head:
Midway Arcade Treasures
Activision Anthology
Legend of Zelda: Collector’s Edition
Zelda: A Link to the Past (GBA)
Super Mario Bros 3 (GBA)
Sonic Mega Collection
Atari Anniversary Edition
PS2 Backwards Compatibilty
Animal Crossing
Final Fantasy Anthology
Final Fantasy Origins
Super Ghouls and Ghosts (GBA)
Should I keep going?
There are plenty of ways to keep playing console games long after they’ve “faded away.” And then there’s a super great easy way to play console games in their original form:
AV Switcher, $10 at Radio Shack.