Trigger Finger

For anyone who has never visited GamersWithJobs , do so now. It’s quite possibly the best kept secret of the internet for gamers who are older than… well school age! Listening to their latest Conference Call (podcast) they opened this good old can of worms and it spurred me to write something (yeah I know the first time in a while! jobs… weddings… moving…. blah blah!).

I have touched on this before on this site here and here. Like someone in the CC said, my heritage is in PC gaming. If it wasnt for the likes of Quake, TFC, Tribes 2, AO, Eve Online, Planetside, Delta Force, and more…. I probably wouldn’t have my IT knowledge (gained mostly from building PC’s and screwing about with drivers and operating systems trying to get these games running at a good framerate!) and thus even my current job!

Skip back to the pre-xbox years and I laughed openly in the face of anyone who tried to argue a console was superior in any way. Then Xbox and Live came along, and brought a lot of the things the PC had a monopoly on to my living room and the big comfortable sofa. Internet multiplayer, voice comms, community, and so on.

Now I would say probably I spend 50% of my time playing on my Xbox 360, and the other 50% on the PC: The huge differentiating factor between the platforms now is complexity. Forza 2 for all of its depth and simulation finesse (I love it!), is still a very simple interface that suits a controller as opposed to a keyboard. But you will never get a game (and yes I did say NEVER) with the complexity and mechanical depth of Eve Online on a console and that is where the PC’s core market is now. MMORPG’s and complex RTS games like Supreme Commander or even MTW2 are just a nightmare for a developer to turn into a console interface without losing key chunks of the games core and thus soul. Some games simply demand that you have the flexible input mechanics of the old mouse and keyboard, whereas I would equally say that Forza would just not be the same hunched over a monitor at my desk.

The other thing (which really surprises me) about console gaming is that they remain so restricted in terms of how many players you can have in an online game. Battlefield is a game built on the chaotic carnage that only 64-128 players on a map can create. It gives the game it’s gameplay through sheer numbers, yet what is the most players ever in the consoles’ versions? 24? It’s just not the same game. I’ll go all out and say another NEVER. I will NEVER, on a console game, stand at the top of a valley on a map measured in 10′s of kilometres and look down on several hundred players duking it out over a single bridge like I did on Planetside. Whole platoons of tanks on either side, players and bullets flying around like hornets around a nest, a squad of choppers swooping through the valley on a strafing run only to be met with a load of AA fire, all within one grand landscape in an instant of time. Then checking behind me whilst summoning the courage to go down and join the melee, see an even bigger battle raging a couple of clicks away. This was what? 2001? The PC could manage that then, and no next-gen console looks close to creating such scene, and this was a persistent universe too where the battles meant something!

So now I accept it, my PC will always be the innovative proving ground for the truly adventurous games, but at the same time there a multitude of genres that are far superior on the console such as racing and hectic small scale FPS games such as GOW and Halo.

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