How To Ruin Your Game's PC Port

An anonymous reader writes "An article at Ars goes through some of the biggest sins game publishers commit when porting a console game to the PC. At the top of the list, predictably, are annoying DRM and inconvenient game settings. From the article: 'PC gamers like to play with their mouse settings, adjust the amount of detail in the characters or environment, and change the audio mix between the music and the sound effects. We want to adjust the resolution, the aspect ratio, and even the field of view settings. The more options given to PC gamers, the better. While some engines support more options than others, there is a minimum amount of tweaking that should be available when we jump into the game. For an example of how badly PC gamers can get screwed on this issue, we can take a look at Bulletstorm when it was launched. Not only was mouse smoothing turned on as a default, but there was no way to turn it off. You had to find the configuration files, which were encrypted for some insane reason, and then install a third-party program to be able to turn off mouse smoothing and get the game feeling like it should on the PC."

Comments

Extra work required

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Note how 3 of the 5 things actually mean extra work for the game developers and QA department. That work probably causes the 4th thing to happen: delayed release.

Re:Extra work required

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather a delayed game that works than a borked piece of crap released too early with a buglist larger than several (average) screen-heights worth. (worse when they are serious-level bugs)

Correct engine development shouldn't have to take ages to implement these sorts of things if needed.
Engine development is the most important part, without a solid engine to base everything else around, you end up having to go back and fix crap that shouldn't be there in the first place.

Re:Extra work required

[Anonymous Coward]

That work probably causes the 4th thing to happen: delayed release.

Better delayed than unplayable like I found Dead Space to be. No user definable keys meant I would have to become right handed to play the game or install third party software and piss about trying to get a user experience common on almost every keyboard controllable game created in the past 20 years. Some reason console porting nob-heads think they are above the universal laws of what makes a game remotely playable.

Re:Extra work required

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm sure they'd free up a heck of a load of time not implementing DRM.

Re:Extra work required

[Dexter Herbivore]

My personal favourite is when they leave the "Press X Button" hints in on the PC ports... it gives me real confidence that they've spent the extra time to ensure a seamless PC experience.

Re:Extra work required

[Novus]

2 out of 5, I'd say. Adding lots of configuration menus and control options is extra work, but I'd say DRM and useless network services are things that would be less work if they were never introduced in the first place. Also, wouldn't it be easier to develop the game on PC first, then port to console?

Also, many of the settings mentioned, such as aspect ratio and sound/music volume, should be in the console version already.

Re:Extra work required

[hairyfeet]

Exactly Mr AC. If you are only gonna release a broken hunk of shit, why release at all? We PC gamers would be happier not wasting the money on.....oh I get it! Good way to kill your sales though. An example for me would be Mercenaries II, where the controls for the various moves are not explained anywhere in game which is real fun when you have to pull a quick time event and they just give you a foot symbol without an easy way to check and see WTF button is foot again.

Or Turning point: Fall of Liberty or TP as I call it because boy the only thing that game would be good for is wiping your ass. With that damned thing the game actually shows you the X360 buttons for most of the screens and can't even be controlled with a mouse on the menu! WTF? I might have actually had a little fun with that game if the damned developers had actually TRIED using a keyboard and mouse instead of plugging in an X360 controller because I can tell you without a controller its completely unplayable.

So PLEASE developers, if you aren't gonna bother then just....don't, okay? It isn't like we PC gamers don't have an incredible library of games that actually work, or have more new games to choose from than we could ever play. All your putting out shite ports does is burn the customer who will then hate you and avoid your company in the future.

Re:Extra work required

[Dunbal]

Games have not been about what "you'd rather" since the mid 1990's, but rather about what the market is willing to pay for.

See entertainment software is in a rather special category - it doesn't really have to be good. It doesn't have to be bug free. It doesn't even have to be fun. All it has to do is "entertain". You can't get a refund from the cinema for a bad movie. You have to put up with 14 shitty songs on the CD that contains 1 or 2 songs you actually like. And no publisher will give you your money back because a book didn't end the way you wanted it to.

So we could argue that games should be essentially bug free because they are software, but the truth is that all they have to do is show a title screen and play some music, and you have been entertained. Anything else is extra. Now that's not the way it should be, but because there are a great deal of kids out there willing to buy games because of the pretty graphics on the box or the cool sounding title or because that company was the one that released MegaUltraBlasterSlaughterFest V so this game HAS to be good amirite? well, we're screwed.

All I can say is try before you buy...

Re:Extra work required

[Dunbal]

Eh funny you should mention deadspace. I never got past the first room the thing was so crappy. And I heard they made a deadspace 2....

Re:Extra work required

[goose-incarnated]

Its only a lot of extra work if they did it poorly in the first place. It is, in fact, a little bit of extra work if they did it properly.

Re:Extra work required

[kikito]

So? They are getting extra money. They should be doing extra work.

Re:Extra work required

[slyrat]

2 out of 5, I'd say. Adding lots of configuration menus and control options is extra work....

The thing is that they had to have tried different control schemes when they were playtesting the game themselves. So it shouldn't be that difficult to put some simple gui on top of what they already were doing. Not doing that is just plain lazy.

Re:Extra work required

[Anonymous Coward]

If only AC had points.

Re:Extra work required

[f()rK()_Bomb]

if you can manage to get over the horrific controls there's really a great game with an awesome story hiding under there. took me several tries to get into it but it was worth it

Re:Extra work required

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh funny you should mention deadspace. I never got past the first room the thing was so crappy. And I heard they made a deadspace 2....

such a good game, graphics and story and screwed because the controls... anyway, i remember there was a personalized settings.file somewhere to make it work with keyboard+mouse with arrows instead of asdf... sorry i can't point you, i found that months ago but i'm sure you can still find it in google.

by the way. Don't buy'em, torrents ftw

Re:Extra work required

[firex726]

I found Dead Space 2 to be much better on the PC then the first one.

It's been a while but I think I did have to fiddle around with the option menu a bit, but it was certainly playable while it's predecessor was not.

Re:Extra work required

[CastrTroy]

What really irks me, is when they make the controls completely re-mappable in the PC version, but neglect to have the feature in the console version. They just assume that everyone will want to use the exact same controller mappings, or at best, pick from a selection of 3 or 4 different configurations. Tony Hawk 2 had this problem. I played it on the PC and it was so much better than the Xbox, because all the selectable configurations in the Xbox made it so that you had to move your thumb off the jump button to do a grind. Whereas on the PC version let you remap them so you could press both buttons without moving your thumb.

Re:Extra work required

[MBGMorden]

If you are only gonna release a broken hunk of shit, why release at all?

Simple: people are often still willing to pay for broken hunks of shit. Hell Wal-mart has built a multi-billion dollar empire on that simple truth. They'd rather buy a coffee maker for $10 that breaks and needs to be repurchased every year, versus buying one for $25 that would have lasted 15 years. Quality just doesn't mean a lot these days. Why do you think their video game purchasing standards would be all that different?

Re:Extra work required

[KnownIssues]

Note how 3 of the 5 things actually mean extra work for the game developers and QA department. That work probably causes the 4th thing to happen: delayed release.

If 3 of the 5 things mean extra work and that's the explanation for the delayed release, then why doesn't that delayed game come with those 3 things? I think it would be reasonable to get a PC game if it meant a delay. I would understand that the developer needed to use some of the profits from its game to develop the PC-specific features of the game (although budgeting time and resources in advance would be preferred).

The complaint is that the game is delayed... for a version of the game where the developer pressed the "recompile for PC" button and little more.

Re:Extra work required

[Anonymous Coward]

Or.... They could plan ahead. Not everyone can afford or wants to own a specialized gaming console. PCs are still pretty ubiquitous, I don't see why gaming companies insist on delivering lesser products to PC gamers.

Honestly, I think quality has gone way downhill in general. God help you if you don't have an internet connection to download patches with (and yes, there are gamers out there who lack an internet connection for some reason or another). Heck, you can't play some of the games without one anymore.

Re:Extra work required

[s4ndm4n]

If you are only gonna release a broken hunk of shit, why release at all?

Quality just doesn't mean a lot these days. Why do you think their video game purchasing standards would be all that different?

I disagree with regards to gaming. While I agree that standards have changed these days in our tolerance for lesser quality products, when it comes to games, gamers are surprisingly picky about what is put out, that is, at least in the area of MMO-type gaming from my experience. I have played a great number of games and if it's made crappy, is buggy or the servers have problems, I have no problem dropping the game and moving onto another one. Maybe it's different for consoles but I doubt it.

Re:Extra work required

[Anonymous Coward]

>You can't get a refund from the cinema for a bad movie.

Yes you can but you can't sit there and watch till the end and then bitch. If it sucks so bad then get up and leave and demand your money on the way out*

*YMMV if you live in the USA.

Re:Extra work required

[Wrath0fb0b]

So? They are getting extra money. They should be doing extra work.

Are they? Conventional wisdom is that they are just cannibalizing the sales from their console versions. A small fraction of gamers (probably overrepresented on /.) will flat refuse to buy a game that's console only.

Re:Extra work required

[TangoMargarine]

You have to put up with 14 shitty songs on the CD that contains 1 or 2 songs you actually like.

Really? All the recent bands I've been listening to have standardized on 10 or maybe 11 tracks, not 15 or 16. Lucky bastard.

Re:Extra work required

[spire3661]

I ended up jsut using the Xbox controller on my PC for Dead Space. I can give EA a 'little' slack on this issue, but not Epic. Fuck them in the ass. THey have gone out of their way to piss off their original customers. CLiffy B is an asshole for no good reason. I own a physical retail copy of every Epic game made up to and including UT III. You couldnt pay me to play one of their games now.

Re:Extra work required

[LainTouko]

I would have thought the most obvious reason for "refusing" to buy a game that's console-only would be not owning the relevant console. And that slashdotters would be likely to own more consoles than random game-buyers.

Re:Extra work required

[PRMan]

I'm playing Portal 2 PC and I really wanted to use a Logitech gamepad I have. I found a replacement DLL (from the XBox 360 version, so clearly they already support it with 2 minutes work) and was able to get it working, but why isn't the configuration option just there anyway? Not everyone likes mouse+keyboard. Many of us are used to game controllers and work better with them.

Then, they did a software update and it crashed my game (my fault, I replaced the file). After 20 hours of reinstall (because Steam is so awesome!), now I had to switch to keyboard/mouse because there's no way to get the gamepad working anymore, even though they already did the work to support it.

Look, if MAME can figure out how to support keyboards, mice, gamepads, etc., in their "press a key" routine, it really can't be that hard. I don't need a pretty picture that doesn't look a thing like my gamepad/keyboard/mouse anyway, just make the dang things work and give me options!

Re:Extra work required

[Psmylie]

How is he "lucky" if all he's getting is another 3-4 crappy songs? :)

Re:Extra work required

[clodney]

The thing is that they had to have tried different control schemes when they were playtesting the game themselves. So it shouldn't be that difficult to put some simple gui on top of what they already were doing. Not doing that is just plain lazy.

You've never been in the last 2 months of a year long project, looking at the "nice to haves" that remain to get done, and having to decide what to cut? Or decide that nothing can be cut, and the release date has to be pushed out, meaning that Q3 revenue will take a hit, or you miss the Christmas season sales?

Fact is, every project I've been on has had way more things that we wanted to include than we were able to get done. QA departments tend to hate configuration options, since they greatly multiple the number of test cases that need to be run. And casual users (who are always in the majority) will never take the effort to find them in the first place.

Re:Extra work required

[TangoMargarine]

Good point. I guess I've been fortunate enough to find bands with good entire albums. But I also listen to the whole album straight down most of the time, so I'm just crazy :-)

Re:Extra work required

[Hal_Porter]

Yeah, they could just release on Xbox360 and PS3 where the security is all done by Microsoft and Sony.

Best thing about that is that if the security in the console is cracked it's up to console vendor to patch it. E.g.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDa-qpsrc4c

Console security is cracked. Console vendor patches with downgrade protection. Now admittedly if you're willing to spend an hour cracking the per console key you can override the downgrade protection. Even that might not be possible if they use a version of memcmp which doesn't exit early if the comparison fails.

Oh and to run cracked software you need a patched DVD drive. And Microsoft can stop you connecting to XBox live if you do that. And they might brick your console in a future update.

So on a PC the game developer spends time on security. It is inevitably cracked and then the game ends up on Pirate Bay. Hopefully they've managed to sell a few copies in the meantime. Or they can not spend time on security in which case they'll end up on Pirate Bay immediately.

On a console the console vendor fights the pirates and the games vendor can leave it to them. Or, if a platform is too badly cracked, only release on the other console.

Re:Extra work required

[Hatta]

You're the lucky one, if the bands you listen to expound on a musical idea for 7-8 good minutes. Most bands can't come up with an idea that's good for much more than 2 or 3 minutes of material.

Re:Extra work required

[Hatta]

Games have not been about what "you'd rather" since the mid 1990's, but rather about what the market is willing to pay for.

Which is why mid-90s games are still better than the crap they push out today.

Re:Extra work required

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, you didn't miss out on anything. Dead Space was thoroughly a shit game, from the poor controls, weak story, lame graphics, ridiculous character designs and stupid "over the shoulder" camera where your character's back takes up 1/3 of the screen for no reason.

Re:Extra work required

[WorLord]

and stupid "over the shoulder" camera where your character's back takes up 1/3 of the screen for no reason.

OMG so much THIS.

First game I'd ever seen where you get in your own way *by design*. Seriously, what idiot thought this was a good idea.

Re:Extra work required

[Darinbob]

It's not just that I refuse to buy a console game on principle, it's just that I have no console.

I just don't see myself ever buying one for a single game either, and there are none out there with a broad base of games that I would be interested in. If for some reason I ever did get one, I would use it exactly like a computer anyway - on my desk and not my TV, with keyboard and mouse if it's allowed. Therefore a computer is a better option. Consoles to me seem like something you use on a TV while sitting on the floor or couch, with controls not designed for my hands.

Then there's the whole upgrade thing to deal with. People complained about this on the PC, but that upgrade cycle on PC was really mostly for hardcore gamerz with kilowatt power supplies and SLI, etc. But consoles seem to be changing more often than I upgrade my PC. Plus the game selection on consoles is just abysmal, it's even more of a lowest-common-denominator market than with PC games. Some of the games I like are on consoles but are dumbed down in many ways (ie, no fan made mods).

And absolutely no way in hell am I signing up for "YouConsole-Live" or other absurd stuff. I should not have to pay a subscription fee to get game patches.

Re:Extra work required

[FlyveHest]

Many of us are used to game controllers and work better with them.

You and your invisible friend Hank does not constitute many ;)

If you're using a controller to play an FPS on PC, then, clearly, you're doing it wrong.

Re:Extra work required

[WarwickRyan]

> because all the selectable configurations in the Xbox made it so that
> you had to move your thumb off the jump button to do a grind

Welcome to the joys of Southpaw gaming.

Re:Extra work required

[hairyfeet]

Hell that is true for non MMOs as well. look up the sales numbers for Bioshock II and compare it to Bioshock I. While II made money they didn't sell squat compared to what was projected in no small part to word of mouth. Go to Amazon right now and half the posts are "Stuck with GFWL DRM, game is buggy, do NOT buy!" and you know what? People see that and move along. My kids were looking forward to Spore but after i pointed out what they were gonna have to do to have it (limited installs, buggy, major DRM BS) they said "Ewww, no thanks" and there was another lost sale. look at Driver 3 which I was all pumped to buy at release date simply for a single car the 1971 Pontiac Le Mans, because that was the car i spent most of my teen years behind the wheel of. Always online DRM bullshit? Bye bye, I can find another game.

If you treat your customers like shit they will simply avoid your product or pirate it. And noooo, the consoles do NOT stop piracy! Take a look on any Craigslist and you'll find hacked X360s preloaded with games, all for quite cheap. Most of the console guys I've talked to keep the hacked one for games they don't care about playing online, and a second one for XBL. Give us a good value for our money, treat us like customers and not scum, and you know what? We'll give you our money. Don't treat us worth a crap, put out buggy useless console rips? And watch us walk away and your profits with it. Sadly it doesn't matter how badly they treat the customer they'll simply whip off a PPT that blames it all on piracy anyway, never mind the fact that those that treat their customers well like GOG and Valve with steam are backing up the money trucks.

Re:Extra work required

[Kevin108]

Thanks for reminding me about this game! I'm digging out my CD and installing it when I get home tonight!

Re:Extra work required

[s4ndm4n]

Totally know what you mean with Spore and the piracy bit. There are all kinds of ways around paying for your game regardless of platform and it's been that way for decades! People did that since the early days. I don't condone piracy, but it's true that if they're gonna rip off the customer they're gonna end up seeing more people unwilling to pay for their games and support them.

Re:Extra work required

[darthdavid]

I know you're joking but this is the exact same attitude that has game devs expecting people to use the gamepad while playing on a PC just going in reverse. I happen to prefer playing most games with a mouse and keyboard but I've met plenty of people both online and in meatspace that prefer playing with a game pad. And what's wrong if they do? Choice is good.

Re:Extra work required

[Anonymous Coward]

Best tool for the job.

FPS/TPS/Strategy/RTS/RPG - keyboard/mouse
Platform/Shooter - gamepad
Fighting - joystick
Driving - wheel/pedals
Flying - flightstick/yoke/throttle

Even an utter n00b with a keyboard & mouse can beat an experienced player with a gamepad in an FPS.

Re:Extra work required

[benhattman]

Well, most of this is quite exaggerated. If a movie is terrible from the start, and you walk out in the first half hour or so, most theatres will offer you a refund (or more likely a free pass). If you like only one song a band performs (are you listening to rap?) you can buy just that song on iTunes or Amazon. And if you aren't sure about a book, there's this place called the library which will lend it to you for free.

Or, maybe kids should get off your lawn and go make some good entertainment like they did between 1978 and 1994??

Re:Extra work required

[mgiuca]

You assume that every PC gamer owns a console. That's a pretty weird assumption.

If you release a game on PC, I may buy it. If you release it only on console, there is a 0% chance I will buy it. Surely I'm not alone.

Re:Extra work required

[hairyfeet]

Want to hear the sad part? On several games I bought the game, have it still in the shrink wrap, and instead only play the pirated version. Why? Because sadly the pirated version is better because the pirates manage to strip out all the DRM horseshit so I can just play the damned game!

But I agree with you 100% if they think their fancy bitchslapping is gonna stop the pirates they need to wake the hell up! The pirates have been around since the days of BBS, when they would pass around floppy images over 300 baud modems. They went from that to rips, to full CDs, now to 10Gb+ full DVD rips. You can go to PTB and find working versions of their last "must be online to play SP" games, they think now will be different?

All it does is keep guys like me, who were sitting here all ready and happy to hand over my CC, from buying their games. I was all set to buy the Bioshock II SP DLC recently, but when I found I'd have to install the DRM crippled version because it wouldn't take my legit key without the DRM? fuck that, I gave the MSFT points to a nephew and closed the account. Being a PC repairman I have seen their DRM tear into an OS worse than ANY malware, even burning up DVD burners by throwing them into PIO mode. I have seen it throw all kinds of nasty errors, like did you know that if you install a Starforce game onto a 64bit OS not only will Starforce cause all kinds of nastiness but you CAN NOT remove it? The uninstaller is 32bit and doesn't work on X64! And on top of that the Starforce code is 32bit yet it tries to shoehorn itself into a 64bit kernel which as I'm sure you know is a BIG no no.

So all they are doing is hurting their own sales. The pirates still get their games, just guys like me take our CCs and go somewhere else. I have over 35 games on GOG right now, and I've gotten around to playing maybe 12, and finishing maybe 4. Why? Because even though I haven't played the ones I have when they have a sale I'm so happy they treat me like a customer and NOT scum I'm happy to throw them some more money! Give us a good value, don't treat us like scum, and watch the money roll in. Why is that soooo damned hard for them to understand?

Treating Paying Customers As Criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

The fundamental flaw is a business plan of treating your customers as criminals. If a large gaming company took the lead and provided inexpensive software that people could actually use, economics of scale would bring those profits back. Until then, everything is going to suck and I'm not even going to consider wasting my time with this. I don't spend money and time to be insulted.

Re:Treating Paying Customers As Criminals

[Anonymous Coward]

The fundamental flaw is putting the nag-ware/DRM/FBI warnings/etc on the product you sell, making the cracked/rippoff product without it a better product.

i wonder how many people will, after paying for some software, install the cracked version.

Re:Treating Paying Customers As Criminals

[Luckyo]

I know I do - nothing is as annoying as having optical disk randomly spin up during gaming (I have a very quiet system with optical drive being the strongest noise source by far). Even worse is crap like GFWL, which you end up having to crack just to get better overall gaming experience, or sometimes a working game in general.
Also, Witcher2 seems to have sold well in spite of being an AAA title with no DRM (at least as far as the genre is concerned).

220 Volt

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy: just disconnect your joystick, connect your game port to the electric grid and the electronics will blow.

Re:220 Volt

[Z00L00K]

I agree, I also did read the heading as "How To Ruin Your PC's Game Port".

Re:220 Volt

[jones_supa]

+1

That's exactly how I read the title too.

Re:220 Volt

[Dunbal]

Eh? A trip down nostalgia lane... I remember when PC's came with a game port. Or more specifically, I remember when they didn't. Xyzzy...

Re:220 Volt

[Haedrian]

I read that the same way. I was wondering why damaging your hardware deserved an article.

Re:220 Volt

[lazybeam]

My 386 got a game port when we installed a sound card a year or so after we bought it. I still have my gravis gamepad, but no port to plug it into.

Re:220 Volt

[heneon]

Heh, I too read the title the wrong way around. First thinking of DIY projets gone wrong, and right after that, "Wait a minute, there hasn't been game ports on pc's since late 90's or something... What is the article about again..?"

Re:220 Volt

[kevinmenzel]

My last LGA775 mobo shipped with a game port on a bracket, and you can probably still buy a PCI sound card with a game port for less than $20...

Re:220 Volt

[rossdee]

Do PC's still come with that analog port on the sound card? I haven't seen anything but USB joysticks for years.

Re:220 Volt

[Mister Pedant]

ahh, a wee trip down nostalgia lane....mind you, it's not as good as it used to be.

Re:220 Volt

[CastrTroy]

Ah yes.... The great midi/game port. Seriously. I think that people forget how bad we had it back them. USB is a dream as far as joysticks/gamepads go. To get an idea of how bad it was, anything with more than 2 buttons had to use the 2 buttons from the second controller (which you could use with a y-splitter), Same goes for anything more than 2 axes. So you had a total of 4 buttons and 4 axes, or the equivalent of 2 standard NES controllers without start and select. Anything beyond that required custom support to be written into the game. I really don't know how something that supported a whole keyboard worth of keys could only support a total of 4 buttons.

Re:220 Volt

[Z00L00K]

When a good game was on a 80x24 screen and only the keyboard was needed. The challenge of finding the right command. And you were able to play over a 300bps modem.

Re:220 Volt

[Dunbal]

I see what you did there. But back in my day we had real nostalgia....

Re:220 Volt

[Anonymous Coward]

cause there is a 100+ of them sitting right fucking there

Re:220 Volt

[Rich0]

Hey, my force-feedback Joystick for MS FS still plugs into the game port. :) Good thing the motherboard still had PCI the last time I replaced it.

Yup, one of these days I'll probably have to replace it with a USB. Mixed feelings - the newer joysticks work a whole lot better, but they won't cost $15 on clearance the way my current one did.

Re:220 Volt

[Anonymous Coward]

If you liked your gravis gamepad, you've just found yourself a great excuse to get into microcontroller electronics/programming. It should be quite doable to either turn it into a class-compliant USB device or to build a converter for it.

Re:220 Volt

[Plombo]

Nope. Sound cards haven't had game ports for years.

Re:220 Volt

[Hatta]

You can get great joysticks for $3 at goodwill.

Re:220 Volt

[Rich0]

With force-feedback?

Re:220 Volt

[Hatta]

Sure, if someone donates it. My Goodwill sells all joysticks/gamepads for $3, although I did get a HOTAS setup that was $10.

Re:220 Volt

[mgiuca]

+1

That's exactly how I read the title too.

What is wrong with all of us?

Re:Games are not easy to make

[Anonymous Coward]

Archimedes Plutonium, is that you?

Game port?

[Anonymous Coward]

A port is a connection, right? Have they brought back the game connector that used to be on some sound cards? How could you possibly ruin one of those? Why is it a problem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port

Then I read TFA. Faceplant.

Re:DON'T LIKE IT THEN DON'T PLAY IT !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, that's just stupid. I guess you'd be the type that would consider Ketchup as a serving of vegetables too. If you don't like it, don't eat it! Have fun with your DRM riddled crap, instead of actually looking for a real solution. You go branding people with legitimate complaints as criminals? SCREW YOU, STUPID USELESS TROLL. Your stupidity won't save you.

All too many times...

[isecore]

... have I (as a PC gamer) encountered crappy console conversions. Three examples off the top of my head:

Mirrors Edge: Yes, you could configure the controls, but in-game they were still referred to by their Xbox 360 identifiers. I.e. you could set jump to space, but in the tutorial it kept referring to non-existant buttons. Made the game virtually impossible to play since you'd get confused by the bad labeling.

Blur: Insane keyboard controls and completely unconfigurable. You had two keyboard layouts to choose from, both pre-defined and written in stone. Or you could use a 360-controller. Completely retarded. Various references all through the game telling you not to turn off your "console" while saving.

Assassins Creed: Completely un-intuitive console controls. Impossible to change.

Feel free to provide more examples.

Re:All too many times...

[daid303]

Worst offender remains the VR mode in Metal gear solid 2. You had a FPS mode, where you had to aim with the keyboard. (still loved the game, but that was just shitty console conversion)

Re:All too many times...

[Gaygirlie]

I bought Dead Space on Steam when it was on sale, only to be disappointed by similar issues: the controls are all written for consoles, you can't reassign e.g. mouse buttons and so on. It really wouldn't require much work to allow a user to remap the controls, but NO, screw users :S

I never got around to play through the game then, I couldn't get over my irritation over the controls :/

Re:All too many times...

[slyrat]

Feel free to provide more examples.

Games that use the unreal engine have had some major control problems. In Batman: Arkham Asylum it had the forward back controls reversed for a standard usb dual axis controller (logitech in this case). The only way to get a controller to work correctly, and this is true of quite a lot of console ports, is to get a xbox 360 controller or an emulator to fool the game that you are using one.
Also, one would think the developers changed controls during playtesting, so why is it so hard to change the controls in some pc ports of games. This is the first thing that should be in a game, the ability to change the controls. I don't care if you think I should play a game using controls X, I want to use controls Y.

Re:All too many times...

[slyrat]

Feel free to provide more examples.

Another example that got me to hate a probably good game was Bioshock. You could remap the controls, but the key I usually use for reload was permanently reserved for bringing the menu up. So half the time while I was going through the first stage I would get done with shooting things and bring the menu up to break up the game. Very irritating and really silly for them to have done something like that.

Re:All too many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

Feel free to provide more examples.

Games that use the unreal engine have had some major control problems. In Batman: Arkham Asylum it had the forward back controls reversed for a standard usb dual axis controller (logitech in this case). The only way to get a controller to work correctly, and this is true of quite a lot of console ports, is to get a xbox 360 controller or an emulator to fool the game that you are using one.

Also, one would think the developers changed controls during playtesting, so why is it so hard to change the controls in some pc ports of games. This is the first thing that should be in a game, the ability to change the controls. I don't care if you think I should play a game using controls X, I want to use controls Y.

For this you could try xPadder software. It maps keyboard keys to controller buttons, works very well with my Logitech controller (Rumblepad2).

Re:All too many times...

[jonwil]

Elder Scrolls Oblivion on PC is exactly like this.
Why the hell cant I click my mouse button to open the chest that I am pointing at instead of needing to reach over and press the "open chest" button. Or the "pick up item" button.

Another pet beef is games that dont let me assign controls to all the buttons on my mouse. My mouse has left & right buttons, clickable wheel (which acts as the middle button when pressed) plus left and right side buttons. Why cant games let me assign things like reload or "drink potion" to these left and right side buttons so I dont have to reach for as many keyboard keys all the time.

Re:All too many times...

[Syberz]

To add to Mirror's Edge's problems, you couldn't actually configure all of the keyboard as you wanted. I play with the numpad (old habits die hard) and Mirror's Edge won't let me configure half of those buttons, numlock on OR off.

Lego Indiana Jones. I own and love the Star Wards versions, but for some reason this game forces you to play with an Xbox 360 controller. I have a Gravis controller with the same amount of buttons as a 360 but the game doesn't recognize it as an Xbox 360 controller. The workaround is to download an application which you need to keep running in the background that will overload your controller inputs and fake the 360 controller. This was developed by a random user wanting to be able to play the game, not the company having made the game.

Re:All too many times...

[Shadow of Eternity]

MGS2 wins a special lifetime achievement award in the "bad port" category because you weren't actually using a keyboard, they had some kind of wierd controller-emulator that you mapped keys to buttons with outside of the game and that would grab your input and pretend you were using a controller. That's why you had to assign a key to "slow" and "gentle", so you could signal their controller-emulator-thing to pretend you were releasing a pressure sensitive button slowly or pressing it gently.

Re:All too many times...

[Shadow of Eternity]

FEAR 2 had a similar problem, at least in the demo. The game would let you rebind controls in the menu, and then completely ignore that and still follow the default controls ingame... but only for some things. The most obvious example was "E" for entering and exiting the giant mech. Come hell or high water no matter what you bound that key to you WERE going to get in or out of that thing when you hit that button.

Re:All too many times...

[chronosan]

They may have fixed that, I just played through the SP last week and I remapped the melee to the middle mouse button. Whenever I'm prompted for a melee attack it flashes a mouse with the middle button being fired.

Re:All too many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why the hell cant I click my mouse button to open the chest that I am pointing at instead of needing to reach over and press the "open chest" button. Or the "pick up item" button.

You can - I always bind the middle mouse button to open / activate. However the user interface makes it non-obvious - while you're likely looking at the small "controls" window in the middle of the screen, you need to click a button in the extreme bottom right (I believe it's termed "Device"). This allows you to redefine your mouse input, and possibly gamepad.

Hope this helps.

Re:All too many times...

[morari]

To add to Mirror's Edge's problems, you couldn't actually configure all of the keyboard as you wanted. I play with the numpad (old habits die hard) and Mirror's Edge won't let me configure half of those buttons, numlock on OR off.

Likewise, I seem to recall it not allowing me to use ALT. It made playing the game a lot less enjoyable for me, as I couldn't use the controls I was accustomed to. Otherwise, it was a very interesting title.

Re:All too many times...

[JohnnyBGod]

The most aggravating part of the controls in Dead Space isn't PC related, IMO. It's just that moving the guy feels like moving a forklift. For instance, you can either move forward, or strafe, but if you try to move diagonally he just runs forward while really slightly inching away to the side. It's pretty bad, though not game killing, for me.

Re:All too many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do think that the port was pretty fucking horrible. For one, it required something like 8 or 9 GB of disk space in 2003. In game they referred to the Xbox (eg: press the X button to...). The game didn't support ATi cards by default (you had to download a patch). Then there's that story, but that's not a porting issue. Also, the FPS mode in MGS2 sucked just as much on the PS2 as it did on the PC.

Re:All too many times...

[hort_wort]

Assassins Creed: Completely un-intuitive console controls. Impossible to change.

I finally broke down and got a 360 controller after trying this game for the first time last month.... It's a good controller, at least. I would've preferred it to cost about 2/3 the price, but what can you do?

Re:All too many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another:

Dead Space. It assumes your PC does not have a game controller with more than 8 buttons. If it does, it crashes. My PC has two, and pulling the (USB) plugs is not enough, I have to uninstall the drivers! Yeah right. I won't buy Dead Space 2 because of this.

- Bertus

Re:All too many times...

[grumbel]

I would've preferred it to cost about 2/3 the price, but what can you do?

It's half the price of a gamer mouse, so it's not exactly expensive.

And speaking about Assassins Creed, Assassins Creed 2 had a really curios bug when it comes to Xbox360 gamepads: It would work with the wired Xbox360 gamepad, but not with the wireless one. It really baffles me how such a bug could not only slip past quality control, but then also never unpatched afterwards. That is something that literately should take five minutes to fix.

Even more fun: The game had a second bug, it would always use the first controller in the chain, not the configured one, thus you could plug in both a wireless and a wired pad, it would detect the second, but then use the first. The game was thus perfectly playable with a wireless controller, but you needed a wired one to make it work.

The confusing controls however remained confusing even with a Xbox360 gamepad, as the game would still refer to hand and head symbols instead of the actual button names. Kind of no surprise that PC gaming has a hard time when developers seem to care so little about making their game work. If they won't spend the extra money on making good mouse controls, they at the very least should make the gamepad controls properly functional, but oftentimes they don't even do that.

Re:All too many times...

[SatanicPuppy]

FUCKING ASSASSINS CREED BLEEEEEAAAARG!

Worst. Controls. Ever.

That is all. Blah, blah, blah filter error. Looks like yelling? Well, duh, that was the fucking point.

Re:All too many times...

[blahplusplus]

"Feel free to provide more examples."

Darksiders. Darksiders had horrible PC support on release and many had to use an xbox 360 controller emulator to fix the camera being stuck in looking at the sky/turning in loops. I wanted to buy darksiders but without taking PC support seriously it's pointless to buy these games that are one offs and have no lasting value.

Re:All too many times...

[spire3661]

AC II does work with the wireless Xbox pad, but by default some of the buttons are swapped from what the in-game context menu says. I havent gone back to remap yet so no word on that.

Re:All too many times...

[Captain Spam]

Assassins Creed: Completely un-intuitive console controls. Impossible to change.

I finally broke down and got a 360 controller after trying this game for the first time last month.... It's a good controller, at least. I would've preferred it to cost about 2/3 the price, but what can you do?

I'll admit the XBox 360 controller IS actually a quite fine gamepad. Reminds me a lot of the Gamecube controller. I just wish that the reason I bought one wasn't because Team Meat seems to be openly disdainful of PC gaming in general in their port of Super Meat Boy.

Okay, to be honest, Super Meat Boy's gameplay itself DOES nearly require either a gamepad or a ridiculously good keyboard and borderline-inhuman finger reflexes in the harder levels, but the game could've done without the blatant insults to keyboard users in the loading screen. Or the on-screen icons that assume you're using an XBox 360 controller (admittedly not too confusing, given the simple controls, but still screams of "they just didn't care" when you're instructed to use trigger buttons to scroll a leaderboard list).

Re:All too many times...

[gad_zuki!]

>It's half the price of a gamer mouse, so it's not exactly expensive.

What? That's like saying a Porsche is a fraction of the price of a Lamborghini. Err, no one needs a gaming mouse. Your 5 dollar mouse is just fine for gaming. The controller and all 360 accessories are expensive because the console itself is so cheap.

Re:All too many times...

[grumbel]

That doesn't work properly, as you can't remap the trigger to anything, as they are handled as axis not as button by DirectInput. The only way to make the wireless controller work properly with rumble and all is to attach a wired controller.

Re:All too many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCKING ASSASSINS CREED BLEEEEEAAAARG!

Worst. Controls. Ever.

That is all. Blah, blah, blah filter error. Looks like yelling? Well, duh, that was the fucking point.

1. You didn't need to look like you were yelling.
2. It doesn't make the text come through any louder when we read it.
3. It doesn't matter how loud you pretend to yell, they won't hear you.
4. We don't care that you're pretending you're yelling in a text-based medium.
5. Okay, technically, I guess we do care that you're pretending you're yelling. Inasmuch as it sets off flags in our minds that tell us to stop caring about everything else you have to say, because you look like a 13-year-old moron.

Re:All too many times...

[demonbug]

Elder Scrolls Oblivion on PC is exactly like this.
Why the hell cant I click my mouse button to open the chest that I am pointing at instead of needing to reach over and press the "open chest" button. Or the "pick up item" button.

Reach over to the open chest button? Why not just map it to a button your finger is already right next to? If you are trying to open a chest you probably don't need to be moving at the same time. I thought Oblivion defaulted to 'E' being the open/use key, which is pretty damn easy to hit if you use the standard WASD for movement.

Also, as another poster said - you can remap it to whatever you want, mouse buttons included.

That said, Oblivion did have a pretty crappy console-riffic stock interface for things like inventory management. Fortunately there were ample mods available to make it much more PC-friendly; in fact, there mods to fix and/or completely change pretty much everything about the game. It stands as one of the great examples of why I much prefer to buy a game on PC than console.

Re:All too many times...

[spire3661]

Bah, ill jsut play it on console. Was hoping to play it in a nice high resolution.

Re:All too many times...

[grumbel]

That said, Oblivion did have a pretty crappy console-riffic stock interface for things like inventory management.

The best part with that is of course that Oblivion on PC doesn't properly support a gamepad. So the interface was not only bad with mouse, it doesn't even work at all with the device it was designed for. I personally don't mind when a game forces me to play with a gamepad, at least then there is one way to play the game as designed, but lazy ports that aren't properly adopted to a mouse and don't allow you to use a gamepad at the same time really drive me nuts. They give be the bad of both worlds and nobody can be happy with them.

Secondary monitors

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd really like to see games in the future support playing on secondary monitors, and support changing the audio output.

COD: Black Ops is so far the only game I've seen that would launch automatically on my tv, and let me change the sound to work over HDMI.

No settings.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just games ported to the PC. Even games supposedly native to the PC and built from the ground up for the PC are succumbing to this consolification of gaming. Crisis 2 did this by only having "Medium, High, Ultra" settings. That was all you could alter your graphics.

There is also an upcoming multiplayer shooter a few months from now that has a massive PC player fanbase that seems to be doing this, too. No setting alias levels, bloom, draw distance, shadows. Nothing. Just Low, Medium, High.

Noes, it's teh piracy!

[Seumas]

Stop blaming our shitty products that cater more toward trendy new social networking bullshit and hampering DRM and late releases and half-assed ports that seem to make PC versions of games red-headed step-children! It's all because of teh ebil pirates! They're to blame for any sales problems! Duke Nukem Forever was an AMAZING masterpiece! Don't blame us for it sucking; blame the pirates!

It's hard to feel proud of being a PC gamer anymore. It's just kind of depressing. There are still a few gems on PC, but we increasingly sit here with fantastic beasts of machines (compared to consoles) that are given short shrift on the software side. Sad.

How To Ruin Your Game's PC Port:

[Bensam123]

Make the game for the console then port it to PC.

Is 'cry me a river' too cliche for you?

[rts008]

Why should 'software development craftsman' be exempt from the rules/expectations required of real world craftsmen?
You demand equal protections from the law, regulations, and business practices for your IP...or is IP something ephemeral and aether-like?

You insist on calling yourself 'engineers'.
Hmm. So I guess it's 'Hurray for me, and Fsck you!'

Make up your mind/s already.
[generalized warning...outliers expected]
I guarantee you that I can 'hack and crack' the physical world far more than anyone can do so in any game. MacGyver be damned, for a n00b and amateur.

Why not approach it from a 180 degree, player POV, instead of 'what will make next quarter profits'. It is not a binary choice....there is a middle ground.

It has been arguably documented that a strong 'mod community' helped promotion/sales*KaChing!$* for said game.

YMMV, but it seems to correlate with the perceived value of the game to the user/buyer to your game.. (hint:GIGO from POV)

Re:Is 'cry me a river' too cliche for you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should 'software development craftsman' be exempt from the rules/expectations required of real world craftsmen?

...

You insist on calling yourself 'engineers'.

The mentioned design decisions are handed down by management and software developers have no say in it. Managers cut down anything that costs money (like porting controls, tutorials) and stop at nothing to maximize short term profit (more drm means less pirates).

The only reason other engineers can do their jobs without interference from management is due to laws ensuring certain quality and safety standards. Sadly there are no laws against selling low quality games.

Re:Is 'cry me a river' too cliche for you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we rating smack addicts up to +4 now? This isn't even in the coherency ballpark. Can someone rephrase this in English so I can understand where the +4 came from?

Re:Is 'cry me a river' too cliche for you?

[uninformedLuddite]

It is not a binary choice

ah Max Payne

How to ruin a port?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Require Games for Windows Live to be installed.
2. Require Securom to be installed.
3. Sell the game on steam with the above two.

Re:How to ruin a port?

[Anonymous Coward]

1.a Absolutely requiring a GFWL online account

Re:How to ruin a port?

[iampiti]

For instance: GTA IV.
Buy through steam.
Open steam.
Run the game, it requires GFWL.
Register and install GFWL.
Finally start to play.
Want to play online? Too bad you need to register on "Rockstar social" or something like that.
That's when you throw the pc out of the window and grab a basketball and go outside.

Re:How to ruin a port?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just used Games for Windows Live for the first time yesterday after getting Batman: AA on Steam through the daily sale last week or so. It was a seamless experience for the hour or so I played. It might take 10 more minutes to start up the game but idgaf.

#1 Way to ruin a game?

[goose-incarnated]

Design for console, then port to pc.

Re:#1 Way to ruin a game?

[Elbereth]

That's pretty much all that needs to be said.

However, consoles only have a subset of features that PCs have. This makes designing a game for the PC, then porting to the consoles a huge pain in the ass. When they design for the console, then port to the PC, they may get legions of angry PC gamers, cursing them for the horrible UI and lack of configurable options, but it's a whole lot less work for them. Designing for a neutral platform, then customizing for each platform is a rather large undertaking, and I can understand why (though I do not condone it, obviously) they would simply release half-assed ports, rather than put in all that effort.

It's a huge fucking pain having to fix all the console-inspired idiocy in each Bethesda game, but, once you install enough UI mods, there's actually a fun game. I'm simply amazed that Bethesda is so lazy that they push all that effort on us, however. I guess we need to be thankful that the interface is even moddable...

Re:#1 Way to ruin a game?

[morari]

It's a huge fucking pain having to fix all the console-inspired idiocy in each Bethesda game, but, once you install enough UI mods, there's actually a fun game.

That has only really been a problem in their last two or three games though, hasn't it? It seems like consolitis caught up with them on Oblivion. Sure, you could install mods and fix a lot of the problems, but the game was still pretty dull... especially in comparison to the masterpiece which was Morrowind.

Re:#1 Way to ruin a game?

[Elbereth]

Morrowind was under development for years. That gave them a lot of time to hand craft the world. I like all the Elder Scrolls games, but Daggerfall was, by far, my least favorite, and Oblivion followed Daggerfall more closely than it did Morrowind. I thought that made Oblivion less fun than Morrowind, but it was still a fun game. Unfortunately, there's been a strong trend in the Elder Scrolls series to streamline away all the features, until you're left with an FPS -- but this started with Morrowind, not Oblivion. Daggerfall had more skills and features than Morrowind did. It's just that many Elder Scrolls gamers weren't even alive when Daggerfall was released, much less Arena...

Fallout addressed most, if not all, of Oblivion's problems. You should check that out, if you thought Oblivion had unmet potential. Fallout 3 is probably even more streamlined than Oblivion, but it's got more content and gives you more opportunities to RP, even if it's the ridiculous Bioware-style RP that consists of choosing between angelic good and psychopathic evil dialogue options.

Re:#1 Way to ruin a game?

[twocows]

I disagree. Maybe it was because I didn't play Morrowind back in high school, but I thoroughly enjoyed Oblivion and found Morrowind to be much less enjoyable.

Re:#1 Way to ruin a game?

[Oligonicella]

I don't usually comment on game threads 'cause I don't play games, but that's what this comment is about actually.

I love reading the threads. I don't understand but every other damned word usually, but the adamant stances and knowledge are both amusing and impressive to read.

Re:#1 Way to ruin a game?

[spire3661]

SO glad someone else said Oblivion was dull. I never understood the appeal of that game. It was just honestly a terribly executed game, from massive bugs, to a terribly designed leveling system to being forever linked to 'horse armor'

Re:#1 Way to ruin a game?

[Bensam123]

Interesting, I wrote the same exact comment 5 minutes earlier and I was modded 1, redundant.

Re:#1 Way to ruin a game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Call it Dungeon Siege 3.
The second installment was as bad as Highlander 2.
Dungeon Siege 3 is a useless, unplayable, console game:

Reasons: Exactly stated: The controls suck, the port sucks, the game sucks,
and I wont buy or recommend it. Back to DS1, and Im happy.
The game was designed for console, and I would not call it a PC port, because that would be
generous. It was a barely startable app, that blows more chunks than an icemaker.

The company who ported it, wasted their time. Sure they will sell the console version,
but the PC version will go down as one of the worst ports ever, as well as poor sales,
which unplayable games deserve.

Who else mis-read the title?

[elFisico]

When I read "How To Ruin Your PC's Game Port", I thought "Easy! Just apply an overvoltage!" and immediately thought about all the wonderful hacks that we did, driving stepper motors via the parallel port and reading ultrasound proximity sensors via the game port...

*sigh*

Those were the days...

Re:Who else mis-read the title?

[jacksonyee]

That was about my sentiment as well, only my brain added:

But jeez... I don't have that old ISA SoundBlaster card with the game port on it anymore...

[dons long, white beard and fake glasses] These younger kids probably don't even know what a game port is anymore. Now get off my lawn!

Re:Who else mis-read the title?

[wbav]

Damn whippersnappers. I remember when a modem was something you did to blades of grass.

Yup, I modem real good.

Re:Who else mis-read the title?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I read that the same way and thought it would be nice to have one again.

On another note, I noticed many of the offending games were from Ubisoft, perhaps the best way to ruin a game is to make it for Ubisoft.

Re:Who else mis-read the title?

[gmhowell]

Damn whippersnappers. I remember when a modem was something you did to blades of grass.

Yup, I modem real good.

Then the damned kids come along and trample it.

Ruin your PC's Game Port

[qIroS]

Can't help but read it that way around. Does anyone still use a Game Port on a PC?

Re:Ruin your PC's Game Port

[Anonymous Coward]

XP was the last version of Windows that supported it, so...

Re:Ruin your PC's Game Port

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly how I read it! Was hoping it was going to be an article on interfacing with external hardware.

A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[Anonymus]

I've been buying more games lately and have been amazed at how many have to be run in windowed mode, run at an incredibly low resolution, or both. And most of those games are not even ports.

Minecraft, probably the current king of indie games, only runs at 800x600, Cogs only supports up to 1280x1024 and Hammerfight by default is windowed at something like 800x600 and requires editing a config file to increase it.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[PopeRatzo]

Minecraft, probably the current king of indie games, only runs at 800x600, Cogs only supports up to 1280x1024 and Hammerfight by default is windowed at something like 800x600 and requires editing a config file to increase it.

But at least you didn't pay $60 for them.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[Anonymus]

They don't have DRM either, which is an even bigger point for me than price. But I'm not really complaining, I just find it a bit odd and disappointing. Even knowing now their limitations I'd still buy most of them again.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[Robert Zenz]

Minecraft, probably the current king of indie games, only runs at 800x600...

Yeah, there's a fix for that, too...press the "Maximize" button.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[Ant P.]

F11 also works.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[tepples]

I've been buying more games lately and have been amazed at how many have to be run in windowed mode, run at an incredibly low resolution, or both.

I haven't used Solitaire for Windows 7. Can it go into full screen? Because Solitaire for Windows XP is still limited to windowed mode. Title bar and taskbar remain if I maximize it.

Minecraft, probably the current king of indie games, only runs at 800x600

And Super Mario Bros. only runs at 256x240.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[morari]

Minecraft requires you to login and authenticate with the remote server. I'd say that's DRM.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[Thalagyrt]

Works fine at 5970x1080 for me. \o/

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can get the .minecraft folder, you can just hit 'play offline' and it leaves you alone. I bought minecraft, though.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[kalirion]

As a gamer with a pretty weak laptop, I am annoyed that so many indie games do not let you specify the full screen resolution, and simply use whatever you set your desktop to. That forces me to reduce the desktop resolution prior to launching the game to ensure a smooth framerate.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[morari]

How are you supposed to play multiplayer then? I don't think I could go back to building on my own.

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[Anonymus]

So that it can run at 800x600 resolution fullscreen?

Re:A lot of indie games have this problem lately

[Robert Zenz]

No, it runs at the same resolution as the window. Except as mentioned by Ant P., if you press F11 it will run at your current desktop resolution.

Sorry, I'm unimpressed

[Moraelin]

Sorry, I'm unimpressed.

Having a lookup table for what keys are assigned to what function is technically a little extra work, but really very little. And in fact you have to do it anyway, if you want a game written for gamepad buttons to respond to keys and mouse buttons at all.

Hard-coding key codes makes no sense and is really frakking retarded and all around an anti-pattern.

Furthermore, most game engines and frameworks ALREADY have this kind of stuff. You just need to use it.

So you're telling me... what? That a game that blew the schedule by at least months, was totally saved by not spending a day or two implementing such a trivial thing that would make it actually playable?

Re:Sorry, I'm unimpressed

[Targon]

You assume the programmers in India and wherever actually have training, rather than just hacking code the way any high school student might. This is the real problem with outsourcing, where the developers may have no skill or talent, and that is why we see low quality software that gets released. The very concept of plan the design of the code before you start to write it is lost on many people.

Re:Sorry, I'm unimpressed

[yahwotqa]

Exactly. Where do you think all those "please be send solution to my email asap, thanks you" posts, signed by a long, Indian sounding name come from on any programming forums? Those are from developers who work day and night on the software you will later buy and lovingly use.

Re:Sorry, I'm unimpressed

[PRMan]

Assuming PC games support gamepads. In my experience, few do.

Re:Sorry, I'm unimpressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Then your experience is shit.

Huh?

[jsprenkle]

I've actually made only one of the many adjustments the author claims "pc gamers" want. That adjustment wasn't voluntary. I had to make it to get the game to play. The author is portraying everyone as being like he is without any research to back up his statements. It makes exciting commentary though. I grade this journalism C-

Re:Huh?

[Gaygirlie]

He isn't claiming that EVERY SINGLE PC GAMER is like that. He is saying the majority of PC gamers are like that. And so far it does seem that's in fact true.

I grade your comment C-.

Re:Huh?

[jo_ham]

He's not claiming everyone is like that, just that many are. Based on the comments already in this thread, he is pretty accurate.

I had the original Halo (on OS X) and enjoyed it a lot, so I picked up Halo 2 when it was on sale (but still a Vista exclusive "games for windows" nonsense thing) and installed it via dual booting.

Big mistake - it was one of the crappiest ports I think I've ever seen. Not only were all the menus and prompts still marked with Xbox buttons, the mouse controls in the menus did a pretty good job of imitating what it must feel like to be actively having a stroke. It seemed like the actual activation points for the buttons were in random places, so clicking the mouse on a button wouldn't work. Generally if you clicked quite a way below and to the side it would activate that button, which made it a pain to navigate in dense menus.

The game itself was not too bad in the control sense, but the level of cheesing was just outrageous - auto aim, regenerating health, bugs with weapons etc. It was a shadow of the first game (which was still only a 'quite good' shooter).

Still, the biggest single injustice was the nerfing of the pistol. Such a great weapon, sadly reduced to uselessness.

How to ruin your PC's game port

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I was, thinking this article would be about cool hacks you could try with a long-deprecated IO port.

Re:How To Ruin Your PC's Game Port

[Nyder]

I read this as "How To Ruin Your PC's Game Port"

My first thought was they still make PCs with game ports?
My second thought was I wonder what they are using the game port for that it gets ruined...
My third thought was I've been playing games on my PC for a long time...
My fourth thought was I wonder if I can get Tie Fighter working on windows 7

Xwing Alliance works for me fine.

I'm starting to consider that

[Moraelin]

With my ISP randomly disconnecting at random times, any offline game which proposes to boot me out several times a day just because the ISP crapped... yeah, it just told me I'll need a cracked version just to be able to enjoy the game.

In fact, it's starting to make me think about plain old piracy. I haven't pirated games since early college, but maybe I should look into it again. The idea of being counted in the success story of that DRM stupidity if I buy it and then have to have to crack it just to be able to play, is seriously unappealing.

FOV Adjustment

[PhrostyMcByte]

A while ago I started playing Section 8: Prejudice on PC, and experienced something odd. In all the other games I play (even Quake TF, which is very fast-paced), I have no problem tracking enemies when they're in my face and running around me. In Section 8, about 1/3rd of the time I'd completely lose track of them.

I soon came to realize this was due to optimization for consoles.

Consoles have very limited graphics power, so game levels are usually designed to keep you from seeing too much at once: they'll usually have a lot of buildings or a hill in the middle of a map to block your view. When this doesn't give enough of a boost, they lower your field of view -- basically zooming in slightly, to remove some things to draw from the edges.

We have about a 120 degree field of view. Most games until now stayed with the FOV Quake introduced: 90. Section 8 was using 70, with no way to change it. Even worse, it was treating widescreen as "4:3 with top and bottom chopped off", so the effect was even more zoomed. Eventually they did listen to a lot of complaints and added a (still clamped but better than nothing) setting that you could only change by modifying a config file. Most devs (especially the big ones) wouldn't have even given us that, so I guess I should be happy.

PC gaming today is crap. Even Portal 2 was designed for consoles first, with constant loading and nothing requiring the fast/precise aim of a mouse.

Re:FOV Adjustment

[Anonymous Coward]

Minecraft's FOV actually makes me nauseous. I have to play it windowed and stretched to fight it.

Re:FOV Adjustment

[Anonymous Coward]

We have about a 120 degree field of view. Most games until now stayed with the FOV Quake introduced: 90. Section 8 was using 70, with no way to change it. Even worse, it was treating widescreen as "4:3 with top and bottom chopped off", so the effect was even more zoomed.

You think that's bad... try Red Faction Armageddon. A 45 degree field of vision. Painful.

Fortunately, the users came to the rescue again with a third-party hack.

The game wasn't even that good looking, even with DirectX 11, so I'm not sure why such a tiny FOV was necessary.

Re:FOV Adjustment

[_0rm_]

Actually, Portal 2 is one of the good ones. Valve in general has been good to us. That "constant loading" you are talking about has been there since Half Life 2, unless your forgot (or never played any earlier Source Engine games, in which case I pity you.)

my list

[Anonymous Coward]

CONTROLS!
controls
controls
controls!!!!!!!!!!

press B to continue.

Graphic options i don't much care about. But damm. Controls make or break any game. Such as the piece of shit called dungeon siege 3 here lately. That was such a crap port it was sad.

Supplement

[djnforce9]

As a supplement to "Forget that most PC gamers aren't using a gamepad", some games assume that everyone has an Xbox 360 controller and offers little to no support for other gamepads. Now this doesn't affect me too much because I DO use a wired xbox 360 controller on my PC but many don't and it's frustrating getting it to work at times. Mind you there are xinput wrappers to get around this problem.

another crap game ported

[Anonymous Coward]

Crysis 2 (cough cough...)

Initial release had a "Press X button to start"

Just sad.

Grand Theft Port IV

[Anonymous Coward]

Grand theft auto IV. Yes, the port that came out 4 years ago in 2008 with recommended requirements of a quad core CPU and 8600GT graphics. Make the recommendation to have to have a $1000 worth of hardware to play your $49 game. That's a sure way to port!

Re:Grand Theft Port IV

[morari]

The system requirements were about the most tolerable aspect of GTA4. :\

Re:Grand Theft Port IV

[spire3661]

For the record, on proper hardware, GTA IV looks pretty damn good.

FOV that the monitor occupies

[tepples]

We have about a 120 degree field of view.

But how much of this field of view does your monitor occupy? CSS specifies the standard viewing distance for a desktop PC monitor as 28 inches, meaning a 21" 16:9 PC monitor has only 36.2 degrees. (Showing my work: 21" diagonal VIS * 16/sqrt(16^2+9^2) = 18.3" wide. Horizontal field of view is 2*arctan(width/2/distance), or 36.2 degrees.)

Re:FOV that the monitor occupies

[slyrat]

We have about a 120 degree field of view.

But how much of this field of view does your monitor occupy? CSS specifies the standard viewing distance for a desktop PC monitor as 28 inches, meaning a 21" 16:9 PC monitor has only 36.2 degrees. (Showing my work: 21" diagonal VIS * 16/sqrt(16^2+9^2) = 18.3" wide. Horizontal field of view is 2*arctan(width/2/distance), or 36.2 degrees.)

Doing that would be a bit surreal. It would be a game that looked as though you were looking through a window into another world the entire time. Which would be kinda neat, but it is a bit better if you get more of a view of the world at all times so that you feel like there isn't a monitor.

Re:FOV that the monitor occupies

[Anonymous Coward]

It means that in the game the FOV would be 72.4.
However, the screen should display me what the character is seeing, it is very unpleasant to control one that lacks peripheral vision. Specially in middle of gunfire and explosions.

Mode for multiple USB gamepads

[tepples]

USB is a dream as far as joysticks/gamepads go.

So why don't more PC games support a home theater PC mode, in which four USB gamepads are connected through a hub to a PC with a TV as its monitor?

Re:Mode for multiple USB gamepads

[slyrat]

USB is a dream as far as joysticks/gamepads go.

So why don't more PC games support a home theater PC mode, in which four USB gamepads are connected through a hub to a PC with a TV as its monitor?

Some indie games do this. Jamestown is the one that comes to mind for me. It has one of the BEST methods for controls. You can pretty much use WHATEVER you want and it just asks for you to map the controls before you start (only 3 buttons). One of the best experiences I've had in pc gaming in a while. I just wish it had online multiplayer.

Re:Mode for multiple USB gamepads

[CastrTroy]

Because most people don't hook computers up to their TVs. Not only that, as far as PCs go, it's a much better experience to just play over a network, with each person having their own screen. I never understood why so many people liked goldeneye. Playing a FPS with an analog stick with 1/4 of a screen was terrible compare to playing Quake with a mouse and keyboard on a full screen.

Prefer gamepad

[rxan]

Meh, I prefer a gamepad.

I feel that mouse/keyboard is a hack that only works for certain types of games. Games aren't meant to be played with mouse/keyboard, it just happens to be what everyone had laying around. It's also less comfortable.

I can understand certain types of games converging to a mouse-like control. However the keyboard is a joke for gaming. At least drop the keyboard and give me a real gaming tool for my left hand.

Re:Prefer gamepad

[elrous0]

Oh boy, you might want to duck.

Re:Prefer gamepad

[_0rm_]

I use the Nostromo by Razer/Belkin and am loving it so far. It takes the WASD cluster and a few others like tab, shift, ctrl, caps-lock, and gives them to you in a nice neat package. You also have a D-Pad by your thumb which you could do all kinds of crap with (batarangs and bat-claw in combat for Arkham Asylum, skill usage in Monday Night combat, switching weapons in TF2), not to mention macros (flamethrower + axtinguisher in TF2 come to mind). It's like a keyboard without the keyboard.

Re:Prefer gamepad

[slyrat]

Meh, I prefer a gamepad.

I feel that mouse/keyboard is a hack that only works for certain types of games. Games aren't meant to be played with mouse/keyboard, it just happens to be what everyone had laying around. It's also less comfortable.

I can understand certain types of games converging to a mouse-like control. However the keyboard is a joke for gaming. At least drop the keyboard and give me a real gaming tool for my left hand.

Some of this may be true, but the mouse/keyboard is the assumed controller that all pc owners will have. Requiring a specific gamepad or controller is the same as requiring a specific device not bundled with a console. You've seen how many good games on consoles do that. So if you, as a developer, want to be up tight about your control preferences than don't expect as many pc players to enjoy and/or play the game. If the developer gets some controls down that work with the keyboard/mouse too then you just have more people that will enjoy the game.

Re:Prefer gamepad

[Anonymous Coward]

Hand in your nerd card and don't let the rocket hit your butt on the way out. Shoo..

Re:Prefer gamepad

[DetriusXii]

Meh, I prefer a gamepad.

I feel that mouse/keyboard is a hack that only works for certain types of games. Games aren't meant to be played with mouse/keyboard, it just happens to be what everyone had laying around. It's also less comfortable.

I can understand certain types of games converging to a mouse-like control. However the keyboard is a joke for gaming. At least drop the keyboard and give me a real gaming tool for my left hand.

You're wrong about the keyboard. It's necessary to have a lot of key buttons available for RTS games so that abilities, stances, formations, and moves can be executed efficiently. I haven't played a console RTS, but console RPS use the shoulder buttons on a gamepad to cycle through weapons usually. If I want weapon 9 and I'm at weapon 5, I should be able to jump to weapon 9 without going through weapon 6-8. The lack of competitive RTS on the consoles should indicate that a keyboard and mouse achieves something that's necessary for some genres to thrive.

Re:Prefer gamepad

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel the opposite. I grew up playing Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Sega Genesis, but after a while switched to PC. I know this discussion has been beaten to death, but the mouse/keyboard are superior to every console controller I've used for FPS and other action games (we won't get into MMOs that rely heavily on entering text...). I own a Gamecube, original Xbox, and Wii, but they feel comparatively kludgy and slow. I've not tried Playstation (any generation), but I assume it to be much the same. I can't bring myself to buy other current-gen hardware since I feel it will be a waste.

Not to flame, but I honestly feel the reason they don't merge PC game networks with console game networks is that PC gamers would wipe the floor with them. But of course they can't come out and say that.

Back on topic: I liked the original Bloodrayne and played the heck out of it, and closely followed the development of Bloodrayne 2. To my dismay, the publisher announced it would only be released for the Xbox, and the PC version would later follow. It was delayed for a while and they eventually released the PC version, but it was not well done and as a result the sales lagged. I don't think the Xbox version did that well either. They should have stuck with their recipe of success: good game + PC = win.

Halo 1 for PC not supporting co-op... Halo 2 for PC requiring Windows Vista...

Re:Prefer gamepad

[guruweaver]

I'm too old school, I guess. I can't aim for shit with an analog stick on a controller. When I started playing XBox 360 with my son, I finally understood the previously mystifying option of "Aim Assist". It's hard as hell to hit things in an action FPS with that little stick. There's a very good reason why you almost never see PC and console versions of the same game allow multiplayer with each other. The PC versions would own the console versions due to the sucktastic aiming of the analog sticks.

Re:Prefer gamepad

[spire3661]

How you feel is dead wrong. A mouse is a completely superior input device versus a gamepad for FPS. Lets play TF2 on PC, you with Xbox controller, and me with my logitech G700 and see who wins. I will destroy you. try circle strafing a sentry with a gamepad without it hitting you and see how well you do. You sir are the hack.

Re:Prefer gamepad

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, I prefer a gamepad.

I feel that mouse/keyboard is a hack that only works for certain types of games. Games aren't meant to be played with mouse/keyboard, it just happens to be what everyone had laying around. It's also less comfortable.

I can understand certain types of games converging to a mouse-like control. However the keyboard is a joke for gaming. At least drop the keyboard and give me a real gaming tool for my left hand.

Obvious troll is obvious.

Re:Prefer gamepad

[Hatta]

Keyboard and mouse is objectively better, because every time K&M goes up against a joypad, K&M wins.

Re:Prefer gamepad

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823126050

Press X Key to start

[tepples]

Initial release had a "Press X button to start"

I haven't played any Far Cry or Crysis games, so I don't see how this is necessarily so bad. Most emulators for NES and Game Boy that I've seen map Z on the keyboard to the emulated B Button and X on the keyboard to the A Button until the user remaps the controls. If your game starts out mapped that way, then of course "Press A Button to start" will become "Press X Key to start".

Re:Press X Key to start

[Anonymous Coward]

the funny thing is crytek lying to users, telling it was not a console port LOL
Almost no graphics settings, motion blur by default, and a lot of console details inside.

Re:Press X Key to start

[jo_ham]

Halo 2 made it obvious - "press [image of red Xbox controller button] for back", on the PC version.

How to ruin your PC's game port

[Anonymous Coward]

I once ruined my PC's game port by pluging it into my monitor. Started the wires on fire - didn't hurt the motherboard though.

Amen brother

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoyed playing my friend's copy of Resident Evil 4 on GameCube in college. I didn't have a gamecube myself, but after graduating I found a copy of the PC version - I thought SCORE! Then I played it.

The game felt like someone had taken the Gamecube controls and directly ported them to the keyboard no alteration - button for button.

Zooming seemed to be based on a feedback control, allowing you to control the intensity, but you can't do that on a keyboard, so you had to zoom and unzoom, hoping to get the right level. Direction control was mapped to the arrow keys, of all things. Why on earth would you not map them to the mouse? The D pad can only go at one speed, which can easily get you killed in a game like that.

I found the game ultimately unplayable and forgot about it.

Follow the money

[elrous0]

The last time I checked the numbers, console and handheld games sales accounted for something like 7x the sales of PC games in the U.S. (about $1 billion a year for PC games, and $7 billion for console and handheld games) And that gap has been widening for years.

So which do you think they're going to prioritize?

In fact, considering those numbers, I'm shocked that any developer still releases any PC-only games at all. If they're not developing console ports, they're basically throwing away most of their money.

Re:Follow the money

[morari]

In fact, considering those numbers, I'm shocked that any developer still releases any PC-only games at all. If they're not developing console ports, they're basically throwing away most of their money.

A lot more people have computers than they have consoles. The only barrier you see is that some games won't run that great with onboard graphics. Sadly, most people are unwilling to spend the extra $50 on a decent video card.

Re:Follow the money

[FredFredrickson]

What's really sad is that these days, all it really takes is that $50 videocard. Not more than 5 years ago, to play the best games, it would've cost closer to $200. And a decade ago, forget about it under a $800.

Nvidia should do a marketing campaign: hey- pc gaming got cheap when you weren't looking... guyzzzz...

Re:Follow the money

[A Friendly Troll]

The last time I checked the numbers, console and handheld games sales accounted for something like 7x the sales of PC games in the U.S. (about $1 billion a year for PC games, and $7 billion for console and handheld games) And that gap has been widening for years. So which do you think they're going to prioritize?

Where do those numbers come from? Do they include just a couple of major retailers of boxed games? What about digital downloads (like Steam)? What about the entire world and the growing Chinese market?

I'm not trolling or trying to stir trouble; I'm just genuinely interested, because my google-fu had failed me.

Re:Follow the money

[cOldhandle]

The console business is a "razer and blades" style business - the game publishers have to give a huge percentage to the console makers. Although PC games are more niche, the publisher gets a bigger cut and there's pretty much no second-hand market stealing sales. Also, while console games require a huge amount of compliance testing (meeting the console makers' specific demands/requirements), you can pretty much release whatever broken, buggy shit you want for PC (hell you can release something like "Big Rigs" if you want), although obviously, similar requirements/licensing costs are required for content distribution systems like Steam/GFWL.

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

These numbers usually don't include digital sales (i.e. Steam), which have become the majority of sales on PC. You're also grouping together console and handheld, but those are completely separate markets.

Re:Follow the money

[HarrySquatter]

A lot more people have computers than they have consoles.

Which, if elrous0's statement is correct, makes it even LESS attractive to port to PC. If PC sales make up only 1/7th what consoles do with a larger market then you're ROI is far less.

Re:Follow the money

[elrous0]

Got them here (you can see his sources toward the bottom). Take it for what it's worth. But even if that's not including the money from MMO subscriptions and the like, it's still pretty stunning.

Re:Follow the money

[elrous0]

I should also add that I found a more recent article which seems to suggest the situation is getting even worse for PC games sales. Though mobile gaming seems to be gaining on both of them.

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because absolute shit games like E.T., Friday The 13th, Keith Courage, Sword Of Sodan, Revolution X, Rise Of The Robots, Street Fighter The Movie, The Crow, Superman 64 and Aquaman are never released for consoles due to the rigorous and thorough quality control procedures.

Re:Follow the money

[A Friendly Troll]

Okay, so it seems that the stats:

1) Only track the US, and there might be differences in console vs. PC game sales in the rest of the world

2) Don't include online purchases and digital downloads

I guess we'll never know.

However, it's not like you can make more money ignoring the PC and concentrating on consoles alone, so abandoning PC development is never going to be a smart move.

Re:Follow the money

[Pranadevil2k]

Consoles: PS3, Xbox 360, Wii
Handhelds: PSP/Vita, DS/3DS, Phones (sometimes)
PCs: .... PCs.

The obvious assumption is that maybe console and handheld games sell 7x more products because there's more consoles and handhelds to sell products on? A better comparison may be 'console-exclusive' game sales versus 'PC exclusive' sales. Willing to bet PC exclusives are largely in the lead in this category.

Re:Follow the money

[elrous0]

If you scroll down, you'll see there are similar figures for other countries as well. There is also a note indicating that the figures from 2005 and 2006 do include online downloads. Sorry, but PC game sales just don't compare to console game sales, no matter how you try to slice it. Consoles dominate. Just look at those Call of Duty numbers in the second article. Almost 5 million on the PS3 and 360, less than 400,000 on the PC. That ain't pretty.

Re:Follow the money

[A Friendly Troll]

Well, 2005 and 2006 were still "ancient" when it comes to downloads. Surely things had changed a bit over the last two or three years...?

I'm aware that consoles dominate, I'm just curious about how much; likewise, I'm curious about what the next-gen consoles will do to PC gaming, because I think we've more or less reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of PC graphics, and the next gen of consoles will catch up to "more than good enough for anyone".

400k of a $60 game is still $24M, and I wouldn't be so sure that they spent more on development of the PC version. Okay, the revenue wasn't $24M, it was lower, but it still made them a profit. If you already have the game (which today is the engine and the content), a port shouldn't be that expensive to make and is always going to make you some money. No point in not doing it.

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course thats only if you exclude: free to play games, mmo games, and facebook games. You know, all the growth gaming industries...

Re:Follow the money

[Anonymous Coward]

The last time I checked the numbers, console and handheld games sales accounted for something like 7x the sales of PC games in the U.S. (about $1 billion a year for PC games, and $7 billion for console and handheld games)
[...]
In fact, considering those numbers, I'm shocked that any developer still releases any PC-only games at all. If they're not developing console ports, they're basically throwing away most of their money.

The last time I checked the numbers, beef accounted for nearly twice the sales of chicken in the U.S. (about $74 billion a year for beef, and $43 billion for chicken).

In fact, considering those numbers, I'm shocked that any farmer still raises chickens at all. If they're not raising cattle, they're basically throwing away most of their money.

Because there is no such thing as a market niche and every single product on the market appeals to exactly the same set of consumers.

Re:Follow the money

[uninformedLuddite]

I found a couple of articles too. I suspect with the power of the $50 video card and the recurring obsolescence of the console that PC Gaming has a very bright future.

Tigersoft?

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA --"Ubisoft claims this is a win for the company"

Charlie Sheen rides again!

And if that's not bad enough...

[carou]

There are even more ways to ruin a Mac game than a PC version. All of the ones in that article, plus why bother to write a native port when you can run everything through a Windows API translation layer instead? It's a sure-fire route to making performance suck, and only the real pedants will care about things like .ini files randomly turning up in the Documents folder.

What annoys me most is their arrogance; it's like the publishers expect me to be grateful for scraps. Assassins Creed II actually manages to be incompatible with Keyboards (seriously - if you're on a laptop than you have to use the built-in keyboard, anything plugged into the USB won't be recognized). Ubisoft tech support said: "At this point in time there is no plant for a patch to change this. I wish there was enough space on the game box to write all this, but i will defiantly escalate your query to head office." Never mind that the game box was Steam's web page with essentially unlimited space, in what universe does it make more sense to advertise your bugs than to fix them? I just wish I could have been there to see that defiant escalation...

The interface

[eth1]

The number one gripe I have is that the interface usually ends up stunted. Fallout 3 was like this.
- they tried to reduce the number of buttons needed so it could easily be ported to a console, and left the PC users with a clunky interface when we could have easily just used more buttons.
- huuuge text that forced you to scroll all the time

Knights of the Old Republic wasn't as bad, but was still obviously optimized for a console.

Dungeon Siege 3

[splutty]

Dungeon Siege 3 is one of the absolutely terrible examples.

The camera view is utterly useless, you need to hit a button to pick up *everything*, in coop mode, your camera flies all over the place in an attempt to keep both characters on screen, the menus are so obviously Console based it's not funny, and I could go on and on.

Simply fucking terrible. I wish I could claim my money back.

Re:Dungeon Siege 3

[slyrat]

Dungeon Siege 3 is one of the absolutely terrible examples.

The camera view is utterly useless, you need to hit a button to pick up *everything*, in coop mode, your camera flies all over the place in an attempt to keep both characters on screen, the menus are so obviously Console based it's not funny, and I could go on and on.

Simply fucking terrible. I wish I could claim my money back.

I agree, and the game is pretty much unplayable without a gamepad. I had some friends really wanting me to get it but after seeing how bad the keyboard/mouse controls were I just scrapped the idea.

#6 Break up big levels into teeny tiny sections

[edremy]

Just because your console is memory starved doesn't mean my PC is.

Biggest offender: Thief 3. Thief 1 and 2 had *huge* levels. The one where you sneak around half the city on rooftops before entering the fortress is a great example- it really feels like you have the run of the city (although it is a bit linear)

Thief 3? You can barely move across a room without seeing fog and a loading screen. You can't move around the city at all without endless jumps between areas. It totally kills the immersion, and even if 1+2 have poorer graphics they are far, far better games.

consoles are too old

[Dan667]

Hopefully, companies will start pushing tech again on the PC and develop games just for the PC to take advantage of it.

Re:consoles are too old

[grumbel]

I rather like the current situation, as it allows me to play PC games even with a rather old PC. The only annoying part when playing with a low-end PC is that most games these days are CPU bound and unlike the graphic details, you almost never can do much to degrease the CPU use in a game.

Re:consoles are too old

[Hatta]

They made good games on old PCs, arguably better games than they make for new PCs. Any game developer who can't make a fun, worthwhile game on an 8 bit CPU with 64K of RAM won't be able to make a better game on an i7 with 8 gigs of RAM.

no, consolitis is worse than DRM

[PJ6]

I used to be a big buyer of games. $60 a pop, often, no problem. Back in the golden days. But now I hardly buy any games, and I'm very wary of purchasing any game that was also released for a console. Most recent example, Dungeon Siege III. Thank god for the demo, because I may have bought it sight unseen.

But I heard this strait from developers. If you're going to sell 10 million copies of the game for the console, and only 1 million for the PC, who do you think gets priority? You can explain all day to them what they're doing wrong for the PC ports, but they already get it and just don't care, because that's not where most of the money is coming from.

It's the same thing that happened with the new Netflix web interface. You think they don't know it sucks for PC users? Damn right they know. They know and they just don't care, because their biggest customer base has shifted to "devices" that have different interface capabilities, and pleasing the PC user isn't worth the extra development cost.

Re:no, consolitis is worse than DRM

[serviscope_minor]

and only 1 million for the PC, who do you think gets priority?

So, in other words, they're ignoring 15% of their sales worth up to $60 million? Remind me where the sense is in not hiring several developers to make the PC port something other than a complete failure?

Re:no, consolitis is worse than DRM

[demonbug]

It's the same thing that happened with the new Netflix web interface. You think they don't know it sucks for PC users? Damn right they know. They know and they just don't care, because their biggest customer base has shifted to "devices" that have different interface capabilities, and pleasing the PC user isn't worth the extra development cost.

Yeah, but the Netflix interface on my PS3 is even worse, so I'm just going to go with "Netlfix is clueless about how to create a decent interface, be it for console, PC, or toaster oven".

It's a storytelling convention

[tepples]

It would be a game that looked as though you were looking through a window into another world the entire time.

Which is perfectly fine if your game isn't first-person, such as the side view or semi-overhead view. This was common in the 8- and 16-bit eras.

it is a bit better if you get more of a view of the world at all times so that you feel like there isn't a monitor.

A 1:1 mapping of game FOV and eye FOV would require either A. a much larger monitor than is common with PC games (think 60" flat screen at 28" away) or putting the monitor much closer to the face and using goggles to change the apparent focal and convergence distance. I just want people to recognize that the common practice of squeezing 90 degrees of game FOV into 36 degrees or less of human visual system FOV is a storytelling convention.

Only root can read the game disk...

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently purchased a PC game that came out in 2006. I wanted to run it in Linux, but I couldn't read the disk unless I was the root user even after mounting it! So, I have to run WINE as root in order for the CD checking malware to see that I did in fact purchase the game. The CD FS is iso9660.

But I really don't get it... What is the appeal of turning your honest paying customers into the enemy? When I buy a game, if the copy protection malware EVER inconveniences me (even for one second), it causes me to never buy from you again. I actually go out of my way to avoid supporting game companies these days. I try and buy everything second hand, even when it is more expensive than new... And for games that attack my right to resale, I buy them from third party sellers on Amazon... just to avoid giving you developers and publishers a dime.

This is the type of gamer you have created; by forcing increasing amounts of third-party software and registrations on me, along with malware that prevents me from running my games on a netbook or system with no CD drive. You game developers only have yourselves to blame.

Re:Only root can read the game disk...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're trying to run a Windows game on Linux, which I'll assume is an unsupported configuration.

Re:Only root can read the game disk...

[Hatta]

You can mount iso9660 filesystems with the mount option 'mode' to give permissions to whoever you want.

Saints Row 2.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Just take one look at this game to see how terribly, terribly wrong a PC port can go.
These guys outsourced to another company to do it, and when it was released, it had SO MANY PROBLEMS the company dropped it and ran.
If you even want to play it period on a windows 7 machine, you have to find a user created mod that fixes the issues, the most notable being the 200% or so speed up.

Multiple views in Street Fighter or Bomberman?

[tepples]

Because most people don't hook computers up to their TVs.

Then why are people willing to hook up things like Logitech's Google TV box or a PLAYSTATION 3 console but not a similarly priced small-form-factor PC with an AMD CPU and NVIDIA graphics?

as far as PCs go, it's a much better experience to just play over a network, with each person having their own screen.

I agree with you with respect to FPS and RTS. But in a game like Street Fighter series or Bomberman series, what advantage would there be to give a distinct view of the action to each player?

I never understood why so many people liked goldeneye.

Because buying three extra TVs, three extra N64 consoles, and four copies of the game would have been cost prohibitive. There was a serial port on the original PlayStation for precisely such games, but the PSOne redesign didn't have it because so few games used it because it did turn out cost prohibitive.

Fastest way to ruin a PC port

[Rizimar]

Don't test it for any game-crippling bugs

Console checkpoints are the worst

[brocktune]

#1 aggravation is not even in the article - usage of checkpoints or limited save capability. I have limited time and patience for a game, and the last thing I want to do is die and go back 10 minutes to the last checkpoint. I guess this makes sense in old school consoles with limited storage capability, but a PC game should be able to save its complete game state anywhere. Even if you have to make a complete dump of the game's image in memory, that is preferable to forced replaying. If I kill Foozle, he has to stay dead.

What?

[IrquiM]

Are people still using PCs to play games other than minecraft?

Re:DON'T LIKE IT THEN DON'T PLAY IT !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Statisically, it's true. By far, most of the user base of any PC game did not pay for the game. It doesn't matter the reason; enough that it is true. This is why game publishers go with protection. It's not to punish, but to at least make some money from it. And as the bloke utters, if you don't like it, don't play it.

Me!

[Anonymous Coward]

I did exactly the same thing. My first thought was "What, hardware destruction by software? This should be good.."

But alas...

How To Ruin Your PC's Game Port

[mindwhip]

I read this as "How To Ruin Your PC's Game Port"

My first thought was they still make PCs with game ports?
My second thought was I wonder what they are using the game port for that it gets ruined...
My third thought was I've been playing games on my PC for a long time...
My fourth thought was I wonder if I can get Tie Fighter working on windows 7

What would make me happy...

[Obfuscant]

I would be happy if the X following things were true:

1. The game doesn't immediately turn the screen black and require a reboot to get out of it.

2. The vendor makes the customer whole by accepting a return when 1 happens.

3. The manufacturer supports the customer in getting #1 not to happen.

And yes, Duke Nukem Forever, Fry's, and 2d, I'm talking about YOU.

best pc fail = BLACK OPS

[Anonymous Coward]

i've kept on reading "bulletstorm" and kept on thinking, mehh the author of the article has to go checkout some of the call of duty black ops "issues"
do you happen to know any other game which
1) corrupts video textures by a hit of "alt"+"tab", yeah switching to winapm while in game is a no no no :(
2) performs poorly, i.e. unplayable in multiplayer due to video fps drops from 125+ to ~6, on 6x core cpu, with 8gb of ram, with a pair of raid 0'd drives and a gig on a vid card as well
3) has gigantic compatibility issues with, i'm sure unknown and not widely used, realtec audio chipsets
4) has compatibility issues with multicore and hyperthreading

i've played bulletstorm with 0 isues on the same machine btw, and to date every other game runs fine...

Re:best pc fail = BLACK OPS

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else is fail? Players of Black Ops.

And people call me a hipster because of this.

[The Archon V2.0]

My games library has rapidly grown to contain far more indie titles than recent AAA titles. I get accused being some sort of "I liked it when it was obscure!" hipster because of it. And I reply, "No, I just prefer giving my money to people who seem to want it and don't punish me for it."

Yeah, stupid Blizzard, EA, Bioware and others

[SmallFurryCreature]

Point me to a single console game that earned as much for its producer as WoW. What platform is SWTOR for? Okay, so FF13 sucked on the PC but still is not available on the PS3. What platform is Civilization a hit on again? Oh and what about The Sims? Another money generator of which the console ports suck donkey balls.

And with games that come out on both platforms, the PC version is always a LOT cheaper.

But I note that your brilliant statistic handily includes ALL non-pc platforms while it excludes farmville and the like as PC games, wanna bet you also exclude MMO subscriptions.

Why this is the case

[SmallFurryCreature]

Details cost money. A while ago I worked for a large company that produces printed content. During a presentation the presenter was very proud they had managed to get rid of a guy who was unwilling to adjust to changing times by retraining. The guy's job? Proof reading. He was a proof reader and that is what he wanted to do and continue to do. So when his position was made redundant, he was fired for being unwilling to change. This was meant to tell us that we had to be flexible and go with the flow. What it told me? I don't know, I was to busy noticing all the spelling errors in their publication.

How does this relate? Stuff like the driver setup used to be a part of the core development team and the reason big companies made better titles. It wasn't glamorous work but there are many developers who are no good with the latest 3D tech but who can write a reliable installer and test it over and over again on varying hardware and keep the program up to date. But it isn't glamorous.

So when companies can cut that job, they will. It used to part of every large publisher to have an installer routine that would handle all the setup. Now? That is an afterthought. When consoles became more capable then the xTh platformer, those companies that shifted towards the console instantly gave up configurability. There are a lot of console games where you can't even turn the music off. It just ain't an option. Why? Because it is easier, one less thing to test, one less setting that can be messed up.

But as the article rightfully notes, PC gamers expect more. So we ignore the bad ports and game companies think that the PC gaming market is dying (plugging their fingers in their ears to avoid hearing Blizzard laughing all the way to the bank for year after year).

Mind you, bad ports are nothing new. I remember some fairly old games that had it. Console producers can't do PC games. It is a different market. For instance, when I recently finally played on a console for the first time in over a decade I was quite surprised to see game go to a black screen to save progress at SAVEPOINTS... on a PC I just hit quicksave and it saves instantly never interrupting the game flow...

Poor console gamers. They don't just have to deal with poor design in ports, their native games suck too.

Uh, Bulletstorm? Try Borderlands!

[geekfarmer]

Why has nobody mentioned Borderlands on this subject? On the off chance you could actually join a multiplayer game, (even LAN over Hamichi didn't work) your mic had no PTT mode! If you had a mic plugged in, it was enabled and in voice-activated mode. The only way to turn it off was to unplug your mic. As of when the second DLC pack was released, (and I gave up and stopped paying attention) there was still no other option or workaround. I've never seen a PC port so fundamentally unusable as when I tried using multiplayer in Borderlands.

Technical term

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the correct technical term is 'consolitis', and a pile of games have been coming out with a near terminal case.

Why not just integrate with Steam?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wondered why game companies don't integrate with Steam more. For those who are wondering, this IS possible. Go download Spiral Knights, and any Steam friends you have who are playing the game are automatically added to your friends list, and you to theirs. Killing Floor uses the Steam servers to track what game server you're in. There are a few other examples, but I've always wondered: why do these game companies never integrate more with Steam? I mean, if you're going to do Ubisoft's dickish always connected DRM, might as well do it on a service that knows how to handle their services.

You can thank Microsoft for that...

[rsilvergun]

the idea is you're suppose to buy an Xbox pad to play your games with. Many Steam games only work with the 360 controller :(.