Hellforge Hitpoints Episode 003: Versus

Enjoying listening to you guys point on Console vs pcs ^^

I love consoles but i got to agree with Mafufu(srry if i spelling you tag wrong) comment how some games just great on pcs 
but for me i think it would be impossible for me to play an rpg on a pc it just wouldn't have that feel that playing on console would give you just doesn't feel right

p.s. i play fps on both PC and console im a weirdo but games like Counterstrike, Combat arms and games like those on pc but i just couldn't play fps like Halo and Call of duty modern arms on the pc been born on controllers for them and it wouldn't feel right doing it on keyboard and mouse 

 

Extremist! I'm so jealous you're on this one! Cool man!

Anyway, Sol, please post linkage for download if you don't mind :P

 

Here you go (same place as last time ;-D).

 

Not really, coz if I would use last times link, I'd download podcast 2 :P
But thanks!

 

*sigh* Touché

 

Nice. Snail sounds hot, and she's into gaming! The perfect combo.

 

This isnt even a debate in my opinion.  The answer is ...ahem...

PC GAMING >CONSOLE GAMING

'Nuff said.

 

Haha. Everyone has their own opinion. And it's good
As do I, and yes, it's long. I'm bored at work and had many comments that I decided to categorize. It doesn't follow the podcast, but has the subject :P

Consoles vs. PC
A friend of mine who has been into PC's and PC gaming even b4 I started back in the day, and he has more PC games and console games than me and some other friends combined!
I'm mentioning him because he made a shocking statement, but it started to make sense after I played some console games too, to prove a point I was trying to make.
He said that, we PC gamers are good with a mouse and keyboard because that's how we learned to play the games we've been playing all this time. The same goes for Console lovers. They learned to play the FPS and RTS/RPG etc games on the console, and therefore they will vote that FPS games are best on the console, where we PC lovers would vote otherwise.

Now with the birth of the guitar hero games, that's where my attention was grabbed towards the consoles. I'm not loving the consoles, but after playing FPS games like BF Bad Company and Gears of War 2, I can honestly agree with my friend. My gaming started on the PC, and that works for me. For others it began on the consoles and therefore we disslike the other platform. Snail you are a console girl, you probably know what I'm talking about? :P

I must say this though, and it was mentioned in the podcast by Extremist: "there are games that are well suited to controllers but there are games that just should be played with a keyboard and a mouse" - and that is the fact.
Shooting games, especially competatively, depends highly on your response time and aim. Kill or be killed. And the analogue aiming stick you have to master with one limb is tricky, maybe not for the skilled console junkey, but aiming is meant for the mouse.

Sol: "with a mouse it's just point and click, it's not that dificult, it's very elementry"
I will agree it's easier with a mouse in FPS than on the console, solely on the fact that it doesn't frustrate me to hell trying to hit someone when I'm shooting at them!
But believe me, playing FPS online on PC is "serious business" :P
I've seen some guys shoot like I can only dream of. That takes skill and lots of practice. It's not only on console where you have to earn your aim.

I do own an XBOX 360, but solely use it for games that are not just made for the console, because we get games released on XBOX 360 only like BF Bad Company (which furiated me btw), but rather games that work best on the console like the Guitar Hero games, fighting games, racing games, adventure games, etc.

The portability of consoles is a plus point, and the PC is big, you need to pack up everything to go to a lan, but you need to do the same for a console when you're taking it somewhere too. But I'll drag my PC along anytime, before I pack up my XBOX gear.
Getting a new XBOX game, yes you know it will work because it's made to work on the console. But that makes the consoles very standard, and that means it doesn't get better as technology gets better. You need to buy a new console when the next range comes out, whereas with a PC you just get a better GPU, or more RAM or something. Custom is the future in my eyes personally :P
PC's is much more functional, and it has much more usability than the consoles.

Red Ring Of Death (RROD) is more an irritation here in SA, not because we are screwed, but because when that happens we can't play. So we just return it to the store with the slip, and get a new XBOX 360. And that is because we don't have Mircosoft support here, so they can't fix it and rather replace it.

Console and PC setup
Snail said: "with the keyboard and mouse setup there's sort of a dictated space that you have between yourself and the screen..." - "I moved recently as well from one apartment to another, and so in my new setup I've been readjusting to actually going through the game and it's different because my TV and my console setup it's in a different spot, and so I sit a different distance away from it, there's different light glare on the TV and that sort of thing" - "It's a really different gaming experience, the difficulty changes depending on how far away you are, and that just never happens with a computer, it's always steady. You set it up where you set it up"
Long quote
I think it depends from person to person, because in my experience of LAN parties and playing on someone elses PC, playing on another PC or playing on your own PC but at another location has an impact on your game. I can play good for a whole week at home, but then go to a LAN where I sit on a different chair, table, now with headphones and moving ppl that walk around in the hall in the background, has a big effect on many people. Myself included.
So when the norm is changes, it sorta throws things off balance even if it's just a little bit.

Bad Ports
GTA4 is a bad port yes, but with patches and sertain fixes that came later made it better. And I still say that GTA4 is my most favourite in the series, and enjoy it to no end because I can shoot with my mouse (but that is not the only reason)
And just to add, the graphics on the PC kicks the consoles 455 :P
I really hope that the next GTA title will be on the PC aswell. I know many friends and fellow gamers that gets agressively mad and dissapointed when they find out about the game that they've been waiting for, doesn't come out on the platform they've been expecting it to be on.

Starcraft 2 and piracy
Extremist: "They are just weak arguments, I mean if you look at StarCraft's history, despite piracy, despite all that stuff it sold really well and it continues to this day to do really well. So I don't know if the piracy reason is the real reason"
That's how I feel on the matter aswell. Taking out LAN is lame, and just feels like a cover for the real reason. Unless Blizzard is just deciding to be 455h0l35 and turn SC2 into an MMO-RTS hybrid.
Piracy is inevitable. It's there, and no one can do anything about it. So making the new Blizzard games LAN-less is just plainly pissing off the fans.

PC and Console prices
Yeah Extremist, you pritty much coverred it
My 1337 PC rig is my precious :P I think it's worth more than my car

Should we care what platform a game comes out on?
Deffinately!
(Sorry if spelling is wrong) Epetty Tweet: "...as long as great games are being made, who cares what platform it is?"
What!? You're kidding me right?
Extremist: "Why should we either be PC gamers, or console gamers? Why can't we all just still be gamers?"
True... But, would a pro Nascar or street racer drive a truck on the track?
Think about that.

PS: Sol, LEGO is the awesomeness man!
...and grade 2 is grade 2, standard 2 is grade 4

+1 for the cute barking killer doggie in the background Snail

 

There's no real grand unified theory as to why one side is better than the other.  I think it's often more a genre thing, personally, limited by how good the controllers are for muscle memory and, as Snail said, the tactile experience (RUMBLE PACKS!).

FPS > PC.
RTS > PC.
Fighting > Console.
RPG > Either.
Platform Action > Either.
Casual > Mobile Devices!
MMO > PC or Mobile Devices.

Snail's point about consoles being a social gathering is very true, but mainly because PC developers have given up.  Worms, to name the most notable, as well as a whole host of older 90s games (the original Capture the Flag MS-DOS game in particular), had a sort of turn based system where you would take turns being in control of your team.  This was popular at the time, although in games like CTF where knowing where your opponents team members were was critical, you had to have the other person leave the room for your turn (and at the beginning of their turn they would have a short segment showing where their team had seen your team move: it was quite a funny way of doing things).

One of the problems with having several players play on a PC at the same time, as Snail says, is that consoles have multiple controllers.  PCs, meanwhile, not only have only a few interfaces, but with keyboards you still have a hard cap on how many keypresses can be registered simultaneously (generally 5 or 6 from experience).  By comparison, you can press every button on a console controller at once and it could potentially register all of them.  This is particularly of note for fighting games, because besides requiring area specific muscle memory (which a keyboard does not provide as well), they require simultaneous button presses.  Two people playing a fighting game on a keyboard (I played emulated Super Smash Bros at a friend's place a few times) will often find that this conflicts with the maximum input issue.

On the topic of muscle memory, learning to aim with your wrist is much better than learning to aim with a digit, which is why FPSes will always have a greater internal difficulty on PC than on console.  For an example of what I mean by that, the Halo legendary setting on console lets you survive quite a few hits; on the PC, you can take 2.  That's the internal difficulty difference; however, playing the game on both machines might be equally difficult for players, i.e. external difficulty.  However, the sense of achievement you get from a game that can kill you in 2 hits as opposed to one that can kill you in 8 is very different!  So, you know, I don't agree whatsoever with Sol saying Halo was dumbed down in its PC port! ; )

Don't touch Alienware.  They're made to awful standards now.  They use top components, sure, but with no attention to details like, "will this laptop burn a hole in my hardware and burn my hand?"

I don't agree with you on, "played one RTS, played them all," Sol.  Compare and contrast: *Craft, Company of Heroes, Universe at War, Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire.  SupCom and SoaSE incidentally have UI designs that do totally not suck, unlike the rest of the RTS genre.  However, yes, for a lot of RTSes, they're *Craft/C&C clones, which is why the genre is slowly dying.

I suggest 'putting to Twitter' the question, "whose technical problems annoy you more: PC or consoles?"

All in all, my main issue is the way games are distributed.  If you want to have played every well rated and well received game of the last couple of years, you need to have purchased two of the main consoles, one portable, and a PC.  ARRARGH, I don't want to spend that much but I want to play the games!

Oh and BAM!, right after Cleric's also longwinded reply!

 

Gameriot really needs to learn to handle winking smilies.  ; ) is getting annoying. 8(

Also, I left out: Racing games > Console.

 

Yeah, I don't know why it reverts to the sideways face thingy. If you just put a space between the two it comes out alright though. ; )

 

I suspect it's worried that I'm going to do some script injection using ; to end lines, since that's what it's used for in coding.  But yeah, it was too late to edit when I realised I'd done it again.  It's silly though, we've got some smilies, though apparently I've forgotten which.

 

Just one more thing Sol has yet to fix. Like the middle alignment for pictures. I'm going to go bug him about it on Steam now.

 

Nooo! I forgot to mention Company of Heroes when I responded to "played one RTS, played them all." Thanks, Bethryn.

I remember playing co-op and split-screen games on the PC way back when (ahh, old Wacky Wheels, how I miss thee). What really counted and still counts in the console's favour socially is that it's typically located by the TV in the lounge where all the socialising is happening whereas PCs are generally located in bedrooms or studies.

 

+1 for Company of Heroes!

 

Sports > console

 

Echoing some same sentiments from Cleric and Bethyrn here as well. Got a good laugh with Extremist there "Like Agamemnon says, there's nothing that would make me buy a console" (LOL, I remember that), but it's effectively true. I have seen maybe one or two console titles that I really, really want to try (Shadow of the Colossus), but it's still not enough for me to go out and buy a console. I actually grew up with both the console and PC as gaming platforms, but as my brothers are older than me, they always hogged the Nintendo and Super Nintendo. So I was usually left to either watch them play or amuse myself on the computer. Doom was my first FPS, which I started playing when I was four years old (Jack Thompson just had a heart attack some where), and the FPS genre has held true still as my favorite genre.

So that end it shouldn't be so surprising as to why I like the PC much, much more than the consoles. There is perhaps only one console FPS I like and that was Goldeneye64, and that's about it. Anything after that for the console was just a dumbed down version of what you found on the PC. Same thing here again, Sol. The PC port of Halo actually required more skill than the Xbox version, and not just in degrees of difficulty--console FPS games are full of autoaim, given how sensative analog sticks are. No, the real skill to Halo PC was having to factor in the terribad netcode when playing online against others.

I also disagree on Sol's point of "Computers are cheap." Maybe in Malaysia, but here in the US, if you want to play anything other than Solitare on your computer, you're going to have to fork out more money than you would for a console, four controllers, memory, and a couple of games. Given, however, that the argument that the PC is much more than a gaming platform does hold true, but the problem is that the vast majority of the PC gaming market is not going to be using their PCs much for anything else other than word processing, so even younger gamers still living with their parents can't even use the family computer to game with because mom and dad are, most likely, uneducated when it comes to PC buying as well.

The console market is much easier, as Snail pointed out. You can just pick up a console, plug the video jacks into the tv, turn the power on, and you are pretty much set for life there. And because of this the PC market now only encompasses a mere fraction of the gaming market in total. And with piracy the way it is now, a lot of developers are starting to steer away from ports to the PC because they feel as if the sales will come short of the production cost. Honestly, it's a wonder why no would-be entrepeneur for a console idea hasn't picked up on trying to develop an actual "PC console," and I don't mean the over-priced **** like Alienware either. I mean a poor man's PC console that the market can utilize and use.

But back to my point on the genres. The selling point, to me, for being a PC gamer is the complexity involved with the genres that I like, such as FPS and RTS. I just played the demo for ArmA II and it's rediculously complex. You've got key bindings for running, walking, catching your breath, kneel, prone, inventory, iron sights, zoom, turn car engine on, eject out of car, free look, salute, squad commands, parachute, etc. The game CANNOT come out on the console for the simple reason that the controllers would not be able to support the complex key movements in the game.

And this rings more so true for RTS games. Early games like the first C&C featured extremely simple UIs with little to do, so they were easily ported to the console, but with a behomoth like SupCom, it's no secret why the PC reviews praise the game while the 360 reviews blast it. Frankly it was silly of Gas Powered Games to think that a game that complex would work on a console. But what really wrangles my ass on the whole situation is the mere fact that developers are doing console-ONLY FPS and RTS games. I mean, that's the biggest insult right there. Any game that does a console-only release for the FPS or RTS genre is a game that I know is, most likely, dumbed down beyond recognitition.

Which brings us back, yet again, to the console market. It's the craze simply because it's a pick-me-up market. I hear even Ninja Gaiden games are starting to become easy, and Contra too. And it's obvious that the transitions to moderate difficulty to "my four-year-old neice can beat this" has to do with bringing in a lot of new "gamers." I use the term "gamer" loosely; I'm not talking about the scene kids whose first game was Halo 3 and they only play it a couple of hours a week. I'm talking about my fellow citizens of the gaming world, who were gamers before gaming was the popular thing to do; back when we used to hide our PC Gamer mags in our bookbags for fear of being called geeks. The gamers who enjoyed Battletoads (or who even remember!). We're a dying breed here. We're being overrun by a shallow gene pool of "gamers" who find mediocrity acceptable. So it's no surprise, once again, to see why the console market is booming.

Personally I always respect a PC gamer. It tells me a couple of things about the person. First, they have the integrity to stick with the market with the quality games. Second, they have the patience to install, patch, and mod games, which usually denotes intelligence (I say this lightly--Counter-Strike is the exception to this cause). And third, they're usually part of the Internet craze, so you know that they're usually funny and witty too. Which, again, brings to me no surprise that some people who meet in MMOs go on to even marry one another.

Okay, longrant is over now. TL;DR: PC games rule, console games drool.

 

For now I just wanted to reply to (more like comment on) your comment about the unfortunate younger PC gamers stuck with inferior machines and/or people having PCs that can do word processing and little else.

I think this is why CS (1.6, not Source) and DotA remain popular. People can play those games on laptops with those absolutely atrocious "integrated Intel graphics accelerators" as well as the family PC that's barely Vista Basic ready.

 

From what I understand, CS 1.6 is popular because it's the last version of Counter-Strike that you can play online with an illegitimate copy, and also because it's a solid multiplayer game, but lower spec restrictions does help. Would make sense why WoW hasn't seen a graphic update as well.

 

is local multiplayer not dying out from consoles? i recently bought a ps3, and was surprised about how few games come with spilt screen now, compared to when i had a ps1
overall i agree with bethryn with the different game types, for example im not going anywhere near the next cod on my ps3, after seeing how meh the killzone 2 controls were compared to nailing rails on quake live.

 

Lol, Vir commented that Snail was the opposite of my voice...and I have to agree.

I was overwhelmed by that bubblegum lollipop voice of hers, lol.

P.S. wtb more snail

P.P.S. I especially agree with the discussion on piracy.

 

woot, nice muzik! Bag Raiders - Shooting Stars

my switching from a console gamer to PC gamer: now that I think about it, largely influenced by ability to drive (needed to transport heavy PC equipment to LAN)