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PC Gaming Isn't Going Anywhere
Grimrod writes "Dave Long, one of the editors of GamerDad, has a unique look at the PC as a game platform and how it gets forgotten among the constant barrage of console gunfire in his latest Long Shot column. From the article, 'It might never be like 1998 again on the computer, the year that PC gaming was probably at its very peak, but it's far better than analysts and even armchair soothsayers would have you believe. I got caught up in the hype myself to a certain extent. I started to believe I didn't need the computer for games. Now that I'm back on the inside with current hardware, I realize again how dumb that idea was.'"
He's right. The computer isn't dead for gaming, and in my opinion, will never be overshadowed by consoles. I've pretty much stopped enjoying console games, excluding the GTA's, n64's goldeneye and smash brothers, and my old SNES and nintendo games. Nothing else new on console is worth playing.
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But on the computer I've had tons of games that were tons of fun. starting back with civilization and progressing up through warcraft II, duke nukem, doom, quake, AOE, and then halflife & cs(!)
what makes most PC games so much better than the console games is the amount of personal interactivity with people. I can talk to the people i'm playing with in counter-strike. I can't do that with a console (excluding some horrid voicecom). And it's so much easier to use the mouse / keyboard combination for gaming than a controller (no matter how i try, i can't aim in halo worth a shit with an xbox controller)
but, as of late, i've gone totally retro and dusted off the NES and the atari for some old school fun times
FTA :
>> Halo 2 especially takes online multiplayer to a
>> new level of fun because of the integrated voice
>> chat of Xbox Live.
Perhaps he actually means: by ripping off ideas that were possible 10 years previously in pc games (i mean i was using roger wilco to play delta force 2 with 50 player servers back before hardware accelerated video cards existed...)
half-life 1 had integrated voice chat 5 years (or more) before halo2 - AND had multiplayer (gameplay & weapons & community) that kicked ass over halo's (the continued popularity of cs proves this)...
I still don't get why people would pay money for xbox live, when you can get all of this and much more on a pc...
then there's the new 'HD' craze that the console manufacturers are trying to promote with the new round of consoles...
yippee-freakin do - my console can now do resolutions that computers do 10 years ago - without hardware acceleration...weee
current-gen consoles can only go as high (resolution-wise) as standard ntsc video resolution, which is the equivalent of what quake1 in software mode could do (320×482 approx)
now, suddenly consoles can do 'hd' resolutions, which are basically what we've had on PC's for the past 7-8 years:
HDTV 1080i 1920×1080 (16:9)
HDTV 720p 1280×720 (16:9)
EDTV 480p 704×480
(source: wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_resolution )
is this really 'that' interesting? i mean 1920x1080 isn't something to scoff at, but by the time the consoles are out and people actually have tv's that can display this kind of resolution, computers will be running dual & triple display games at 2 to 3 times this resolutions, not to mention SLI video cards, dual core 64 bit processors and other PC-only enhancements that are coming down the pipeline...
(sure some of the consoles will have dual-core processors, but they are still nowhere near the processor speed of what we will be targetting as our lowest-end gaming machine in few years...)
consoles are pure marketing bs...mind you, as a developer they provide a single, stable hardware platform to develop games for, so IN THEORY, we can optimize game performance more for the consoles...
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