It would have been a love letter and a great act of goodwill towards the PlayStation enthusiast community if Sony allowed running Linux on it again.
Well yes, that would be nice, but I doubt they're going to do it.
I do miss having Linux on mine, it was a better music player under Linux than it is GameOS (for video it's vice versa), and it was nice having a better web browser on it than the pre-webkit versions of Netfront the PS3 had. And of course it runs a fairly standard Linux distro rather than that wacky Kondara-ized Red Hat the PS2 has. Then again, Linux has pretty much full access to the hardware on a PS2, and doesn't on a PS3. X11 has hardware acceleration on the PS2, it doesn't on the PS3, pure framebuffer. E17 is actually MORE responsive on a PS2 than it is on a PS3.
The PS3 and 360 will rumble on for a while yet. There's still a market on them for casual games - the Skylanders, Zumbas, FIFAs and whatnot.
Yup.
The PS2 continued getting new releases like that until over 2 years after the PS3 launched.
A lot more than 2 years, the last PS2 game in North America was released in 2013. That thing just wouldn't die as a platform. Something similar happend with the PSone too, the last NA release for it was in 2005. The PSP's last release was this year.
which means a 6 year old Phenom X4 or C2Q paired with a sub $180 GPU like the R9 280 3GB should just slaughter the thing both on detail and FPS.
Um no. I have a Phenom X4 and a PS4. I have War Thunder and Diablo 3 on both machines and both games perform better on the PS4.
Hell last I checked neither console can even do native 1080P above 30 FPS consistently
Stop reading Digital Foundry/Eurogamer. It's ran by a bunch of European Master race guys with the typical European anti-console bias, who aren't going to discuss the games that DO run at 1080p/60. All they're going to do is compare dudebro games and a few blockbusters like Witcher or Shadow of Mordor.
But let me point out that a $450 PC built today will crush both consoles in terms of graphics alone
I know you're a master-race sort of guy and are thusly severly biased but not for $450 it won't, and it it will run Windows, which comes with it's own issues.
and let you mod,
Yeah yeah, we all know PC gamers are cheap bastards and euro-pirates. Wasting money on hardware and not wanting pay for software. So they play some F2P FPS or MOBA and play a single map like de_dust or the Warehouse over and over and over or they mod some single player game and play that for 10 years and buy nothing else.
play MP games, and not charge you for it.
Well since they give you other things besides the multiplayer, you're technically paying for those. I'd have a PS+ subscription even if I didn't play multiplayer the instant game collection is worth the $49.95 a year.
Tony, your "Free Software Magazine". is no Linux Format,..It's a BLOG, that you founded and are pretty much the only participant of. So when you constantly puff yourself up like that, it comes across as desperate.
It would be like some guy movie blog with less than a dozen posts, demanding a front row seat at the oscars.
Most American bars would never let anyone plug in/start laptops, let alone occupy that much space or do a presentation. I saw one get hostile with a couple of guys who pulled out a miniature chess set.
I don't actually run Windows, was just reminding that not everyone is a "nerd".
I also don't use IPv6....yet. ISP doesn't support it yet and I'll have to upgrade the router and bridge when they do since neither of them support IPv6 either. And I've got some other non IPv6 devices. on the network so I'd have to have the router handle IPv4 as well anyway Basically only the two PC's (and probably the two android devices) can do IPv6.
People don't know they can do that? Even Linux users might not know they can use Pulseaudio to route practically ANY sound source into audacity or something.
Their download service didn't work on Linux. Why? It's only an MP3 file!
Actually it does work.
I had to download an application from Amazon that would only work on Windows that would "help" me download my recently purchased mp3 file. Huh?
Here's what your problem is/was:
In the early days you could download singles on Linux easily but NOT albums Then Amazon released a package of the Downloader which worked on linux, so we could download albums too, but eventually they stopped updating it, except for the Amazon UK version which only works on the Amazon UK store. Then they changed how their service and storage works.
To make the Amazon MP3 store work on Linux now, you just need the ".AMZ" files you get when you buy a song or album To do that you have to set a cookie by telling it that you're NOT using their software and using the old downloader (can't remember the exact wording on the page). Also Amazon "sometimes" does a user agent check and if they detect Linux, they won't give you the AMZ but send you to the cloud page which is annoying if you just bought an album. (I've contacted Amazon customer support a few times to tell them to not do the User agent check because Linux users have pymazon and clamz available) So when you buy music, you might need to change the user agent to Windows.
Once you do have that AMZ, feed it into pymazon, or clamz and there's your music
And what is it with all these UK/AU FSF zealots. Does "free software" remind them of all the amiga games they pirated or something? Is that why it seems every town in the UK has a LUG that meets at a pub? And what's with UK LUG's and pubs? Is pub culture that engrained in the UK that a fucking LUG has to meet there.
Without NAT and the IPv4 shortage, chances are quite a few more services would've caught on.
What, grandma using archie to update her gopher client so she could telnet into her facebook account, whereupon she accesses the WAIS at her grandsons college to see when the football game is?
The syntax for IPv6 stateful firewall IS EXACTLY THE SAME in Linux for IPv4 and IPv6.
What is this Linux thing you speak of?
What you're doing is thinking like a nerd and thinking what's technically and academically correct...and not thinking of the masses out there who are NOT nerds. As in my above statement, not everyone runs Linux.
Don't worry, I do the same thing at times, but we shouldn't do it to excess.
Egroups - for a half a billion - another social network component.
Didn't they incorporate that into Yahoogroups or something? It's been so long that I can't remember.
MusicMatch - that coulda been Pandora.
Oh yeah, I had that on XP, liked it well enough that I actually paid money to upgrade the thing to pro. Had an internet radio feature that worked fairly well. I think you could even buy songs in it, besides that Spotify/pandora-ish subscription thing. The Interface wasn't too bad either. Personally I think Internet radio didn't take off because back then it was tied to the computer, which often didn't have good speakers, and it required a good internet connection, which quite a few people didn't have, even in 2003. After all shoutcast/icecast has been around for a loooong time, but if you mention it to non-geeks they'd say "what"? Sure some people may be using TuneIn, but they don't know it's Icecast/Shoutcast.
Nowadays practically everything can use Pandora or Spotify, and people can use them on their phones/tablets/whatever. It's more convenient for most.
And note that the US was one of the initial signatories of Metre Convention and that our "customary" units have been actually defined from Metric units since 1893. The problem being that the people have been rather slow to stop using the customary units and the government hasn't really done much to encourage a total switch.
Well except in the 70's, Carter got blamed for that even though it was Ford who signed the legislation. The Reagan administration that came after was full of nostalgia addled traditionalists including the president himself, so the encouragement ended.
So it's only useful for those guys who have a sysadmin job, who have a server rack of their own in their basement and a business grade internet connection who want to host their cat pictures and videos on their own machine?
some quick googling shows launch day patches for both consoles and titles.
Yes, you're right, console devs HAVE become lazier as well, thanks to internet connected consoles. In some ways they're becoming more like PC devs in the lackadaisacal attitudes towards "getting it right the first time". This is not a good thing.
Witcher 3 day one patch
CD Projekt is a former PC only developer in Europe....any console gamer can tell you that when a European Dev goes console, they tend to suck at first because their dev practices/methods are PC Centric and they have little experience on console. The Witcher 3 is only their second title and their first on a Sony platform. I expected to hear of problems.
I'm not saying they can't do a good game, it's just that they're not quite there yet.
Just for the record what are some developers that you consider good?
For cross platform I'd add Bioware and Blizzard to that. Not Bethesda, they do good games, but they seriously need more solid QA. It's sad to think that their least buggy console game on the PS3 was Oblivion, that was the one they handed off to 4J to do the port. Irrational was fairly good as is Firaxis.
Or perhaps they can just allow players to play their files through the game?
As much as that feature is appealing to some do you think that they should dedicate dev time to duplicate functionality already in other applications or the OS?
The "dumbing down" is because the consoles of the era typically couldn't support some basic stuff. Like saving games on demand.
There are NES and SNES games that can save on demand. Really. It's not a limitation of the hardware but more a design decision that some people mistook for a limitation.
Or assuming really tiny television screen resolution. So you'd scale up rez on your PC to 1280x1024 and you'd end up with a really tiny unreadable user interface. Even in a game as new as Skyrim the default UI wouldn't scale up even though consoles are so much better now.
It was bad on consoles too! Some games had too small text, some had too big. I'm remembering Darkstone on the PSone which has legibility problems if you play with anything less than an S-Video connection. One of the Hot Shots golf games has the SAME problem, exacerbated if you play it on a PS3 with upscaling.
You remember Oblivion's typeface? On the PS3 at 720p it's a bit too big which reduces the amount of information the game can show in inventory and whatnot. Skyrim is better with it's F3 sized font, but why can't they just give EVERYONE a UI scaling option. It would benefit PC gamers AND console gamers AND people with eyesight issues.
Or any game with one of those ridiculous radial selection interfaces (makes sense if you only have a button and a joystick, it's utterly ridiculous if you've got a mouse and keyboard).
Radial menus are FAST, that's why they use them. Once you get used to them you can do stuff amazingly fast. But...it does take time to adapt. You should have heard me cursing the radial menu in BG&E, the first game I played with one.
You're right in that they shouldn't implement them on the PC though, unless the gamer chooses to enable one while using a joypad. They're not designed for mouse use, they're slower that way.
I'm glad Diablo 3 has a variant of a radial system on consoles. It's a heck of a lot faster and less annoying dealing with inventory on the PS3/PS4 than it is on the PC. No more silly time consuming inventory tetris.
Or the levels would be really small with frequent loading screens because the consoles couldn't pull in a whole level (think Thief 3).
Thief 3's developer didn't know the trick of streaming levels on the fly? You don't need to load the whole level at once, just the parts around the player. Standard technique on the PS2. PC games don't do it. For one, they've usually had more RAM available and got used to being able to load entire levels. and secondly they didn't have the necessary fast RAM and internal busses to pull it off. Game development is more cross platform and with more former PC only devs doing console games they need to learn about tricks like that.
Strangely console Minecraft loads the entire "world" in ways the PC version doesn't. For example you can travel far enough from your wheat farm in the PC version that the "chunk" it's in won't update so your wheat will be at the same growth stage you left it in. That doesn't happen on the console version. That may be why the console version has limited world size. And perhaps also because Sony/Microsoft have limits on how much save space a game is allowed to use. They probably don't want to tell gamers "You've run out of space for your new CoD DLC because Minecraft has allocated 200GB for it's world save just in case you decide to go off exploring endlessly"
Or the complete inability to use your mouse to select things, or type in something to name your character, etc.
That's lazyness, because consoles have had USB ports since the PS2 days. I've got PS2 games that have mouse and keyboard support.
Or worse of all in newer games are the "quick time events"; sure it makes sense when your control is limited with only 4 buttons to push, but on the PC it feels like the game is making fun of
Can you name the last time a game was dumbed down on a PC because the PC, and it was dumbed down because of shitty input design due to a controller,
Every game that uses sub-optimal digital WASD for movement? 2D platformers that used keyboard controls like Commander Keen? ARPG's where movement and attacking use the SAME mouse button.
lack of draw distance because the PC can't draw it at that distance, cut 1k-3k textures down to 256 in size because the PC can't draw textures that large?
3K textures? What kind of idiot uses textures that large, it's overkill. Only PC devs designing the next "you can't buy hardware that will actually run the game well yet" games like the original Crysis rather than for the hardware people actually own.
How about cutting down AI pathing and fighting abilities because there isn't enough processing power in the PC.
FreeRealms. The PC version had sucky pathfinding, compared to the PS3 version. And it was also blurrier and has inferior sound. The PC version also controlled like crap for movement, racing, demolition derby and the pirate minigame.
Load zones between areas including internal to external cells because of PC's? Well I can give you that one, it's been nearly 15 years.
I know of console games that don't have loading screens between areas, because they stream levels/areas on the fly. One noted version being EQOA. It has no loading screens between zones, something EQ on the PC did not have. You could walk from Fayspires to Qeynos and never see a load screen. The technique is less commonly used now because of all the cross platform development. PC's can't do it as well, they don't have the fast internal busses and specialized fast RAM.
That was the problem with Witcher 3, the current gen in no way could keep up with PC's from 2-3 years ago, and it suffered because of it.
The problem with the Witcher isn't that the consoles can't keep up, the problem is CD Projekt. Until relatively recently they were among the most "PC Master Race" of developers and publishers, being in Poland......well until witcher 2 of course.
As a formerly PC-centric European developer/publisher., they suck at working on consoles. Witcher 3 is only their second console game, and the first on a Sony platform. They simply don't have the necessary experience, yet.
They did say this:
âoeIf the consoles are not involved there is no Witcher 3 as it is,â said the studioâ(TM)s co-founder Marcin Iwinski, definitively. âoeWe can lay it out that simply. We just cannot afford it, because consoles allow us to go higher in terms of the possible or achievable sales; have a higher budget for the game, and invest it all into developing this huge, gigantic world.
that a console built based on hardware from 2011-2013 and can be beaten by a PC built this year for under what both consoles cost is the problem.
You can't build a machine for less than $399 that can match a PS4 or Xbox one. Not even a steam machine like that new console-ish alienware rig. And it still wouldn't have the specialized RAM or fast internal busses, and it would still run windows. with all the negatives that brings.
Players who like a certain KIND of RPG's. For the Black Isle fanboys it was more about atmosphere and catering to their "tastes" that made NV a bit less fun to those who really liked F3. For example in F3 I spent most of the game relying on 3 weapons: Lincoln's Repeater, Xuan Long, Terrible Shotgun. And one armor set: Reilly's Ranger And even if you don't have those Unique versions, the standard Hunting rifle, assault rifle, combat shotgun and combat armor will serve you well throughout the whole game. And they're relatively inexpensive and common.
But in NV they nerfed all of that to appeal to the hardcore Black Isle fanboys. It was nerfed so much I actually felf the game was "forcing" me to use a companion. In F3, I never used them. Now eventually the game was patched and became better balanced but that took quite a while.
And the BUGS. F3 had some issues but NV was worse. I personally got hit with that "reset faction" bug pre patch, which basically undid all my work and frustrated me enough to stop playing.
NV is a good game, yes, but as was said, it's a brown tinged, slightly annoying variant of F3.
However, there is a special charm to listening to them armed with a mini-gun in a poisonous, radioactive wasteland with a dog as my companion while fighting giant spiders.
You mean giant scorpions, F3 and New Vegas don't have Giant spiders They Also have giant flies, roaches, and ants with giant wasps and mantises added in NV.
This includes any time a dev said "But that won't work on console" - make it an option. None of this dumbing things down just because it has to run on a console.
And vice versa, no dumbing things down because PC gamers are a bunch of filthy casual dudebro shooter and MOBA players.
See what I did there?
Though to be more accurate just because a dev might "think" something won't work on a console, doesn't mean that it actually won't work. PC devs are notoriously lazy and incompetent by console-dev standards and prone to underestimate console audiences.
Oh, and an easy way to add songs to a playlist rotation, not requiring a mod with a new radio station, necessarily.
There are these things called external music players like WMP, itunes, Winamp, etc etc. And also things like Spotify. Sure you'd miss out on whatever intros to songs, public service announcements, and news whatever Three Dog/Mr. Vegas analog in F4 will do, but you could have all the music you want.
Slashdot Mirror
It would have been a love letter and a great act of goodwill towards the PlayStation enthusiast community if Sony allowed running Linux on it again.
Well yes, that would be nice, but I doubt they're going to do it.
I do miss having Linux on mine, it was a better music player under Linux than it is GameOS (for video it's vice versa), and it was nice having a better web browser on it than the pre-webkit versions of Netfront the PS3 had. And of course it runs a fairly standard Linux distro rather than that wacky Kondara-ized Red Hat the PS2 has. Then again, Linux has pretty much full access to the hardware on a PS2, and doesn't on a PS3. X11 has hardware acceleration on the PS2, it doesn't on the PS3, pure framebuffer. E17 is actually MORE responsive on a PS2 than it is on a PS3.
The PS3 and 360 will rumble on for a while yet. There's still a market on them for casual games - the Skylanders, Zumbas, FIFAs and whatnot.
Yup.
The PS2 continued getting new releases like that until over 2 years after the PS3 launched.
A lot more than 2 years, the last PS2 game in North America was released in 2013. That thing just wouldn't die as a platform. Something similar happend with the PSone too, the last NA release for it was in 2005. The PSP's last release was this year.
which means a 6 year old Phenom X4 or C2Q paired with a sub $180 GPU like the R9 280 3GB should just slaughter the thing both on detail and FPS.
Um no. I have a Phenom X4 and a PS4. I have War Thunder and Diablo 3 on both machines and both games perform better on the PS4.
Hell last I checked neither console can even do native 1080P above 30 FPS consistently
Stop reading Digital Foundry/Eurogamer. It's ran by a bunch of European Master race guys with the typical European anti-console bias, who aren't going to discuss the games that DO run at 1080p/60. All they're going to do is compare dudebro games and a few blockbusters like Witcher or Shadow of Mordor.
But let me point out that a $450 PC built today will crush both consoles in terms of graphics alone
I know you're a master-race sort of guy and are thusly severly biased but not for $450 it won't, and it it will run Windows, which comes with it's own issues.
and let you mod,
Yeah yeah, we all know PC gamers are cheap bastards and euro-pirates. Wasting money on hardware and not wanting pay for software. So they play some F2P FPS or MOBA and play a single map like de_dust or the Warehouse over and over and over or they mod some single player game and play that for 10 years and buy nothing else.
play MP games, and not charge you for it.
Well since they give you other things besides the multiplayer, you're technically paying for those. I'd have a PS+ subscription even if I didn't play multiplayer the instant game collection is worth the $49.95 a year.
Tony, your "Free Software Magazine". is no Linux Format, ..It's a BLOG, that you founded and are pretty much the only participant of. So when you constantly puff yourself up like that, it comes across as desperate.
It would be like some guy movie blog with less than a dozen posts, demanding a front row seat at the oscars.
Most American bars would never let anyone plug in/start laptops, let alone occupy that much space or do a presentation. I saw one get hostile with a couple of guys who pulled out a miniature chess set.
HAH. Your router likely runs linux. If you use an android phone, you're using linux.
You're an idiot.
My comment was obviously a "for instance" reminding Slashdot nerds that not everyone is a Linux running nerd.
[CronoCloud@ ~]$ uname -a
Linux 4.0.4-202.fc21.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed May 27 22:28:42 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
But however as you can see, I DO run Linux.
I don't actually run Windows, was just reminding that not everyone is a "nerd".
I also don't use IPv6....yet. ISP doesn't support it yet and I'll have to upgrade the router and bridge when they do since neither of them support IPv6 either. And I've got some other non IPv6 devices. on the network so I'd have to have the router handle IPv4 as well anyway Basically only the two PC's (and probably the two android devices) can do IPv6.
What's the problem?
People don't know they can do that? Even Linux users might not know they can use Pulseaudio to route practically ANY sound source into audacity or something.
Their download service didn't work on Linux. Why? It's only an MP3 file!
Actually it does work.
I had to download an application from Amazon that would only work on Windows that would "help" me download my recently purchased mp3 file. Huh?
Here's what your problem is/was:
In the early days you could download singles on Linux easily but NOT albums Then Amazon released a package of the Downloader which worked on linux, so we could download albums too, but eventually they stopped updating it, except for the Amazon UK version which only works on the Amazon UK store. Then they changed how their service and storage works.
To make the Amazon MP3 store work on Linux now, you just need the ".AMZ" files you get when you buy a song or album To do that you have to set a cookie by telling it that you're NOT using their software and using the old downloader (can't remember the exact wording on the page). Also Amazon "sometimes" does a user agent check and if they detect Linux, they won't give you the AMZ but send you to the cloud page which is annoying if you just bought an album. (I've contacted Amazon customer support a few times to tell them to not do the User agent check because Linux users have pymazon and clamz available) So when you buy music, you might need to change the user agent to Windows.
Once you do have that AMZ, feed it into pymazon, or clamz and there's your music
https://code.google.com/p/pyma...
(which also works on Windows too!)
just some Aussie who apparently was the editor and founder of some Free Software Magazine
https://au.linkedin.com/in/ton...
And what is it with all these UK/AU FSF zealots. Does "free software" remind them of all the amiga games they pirated or something? Is that why it seems every town in the UK has a LUG that meets at a pub? And what's with UK LUG's and pubs? Is pub culture that engrained in the UK that a fucking LUG has to meet there.
remembering an IPv4 is a lot easier than a v6, there's only 4 sets of digits which are from 1 to 255, separated by periods.
Without NAT and the IPv4 shortage, chances are quite a few more services would've caught on.
What, grandma using archie to update her gopher client so she could telnet into her facebook account, whereupon she accesses the WAIS at her grandsons college to see when the football game is?
The syntax for IPv6 stateful firewall IS EXACTLY THE SAME in Linux for IPv4 and IPv6.
What is this Linux thing you speak of?
What you're doing is thinking like a nerd and thinking what's technically and academically correct...and not thinking of the masses out there who are NOT nerds. As in my above statement, not everyone runs Linux.
Don't worry, I do the same thing at times, but we shouldn't do it to excess.
Egroups - for a half a billion - another social network component.
Didn't they incorporate that into Yahoogroups or something? It's been so long that I can't remember.
MusicMatch - that coulda been Pandora.
Oh yeah, I had that on XP, liked it well enough that I actually paid money to upgrade the thing to pro. Had an internet radio feature that worked fairly well. I think you could even buy songs in it, besides that Spotify/pandora-ish subscription thing. The Interface wasn't too bad either. Personally I think Internet radio didn't take off because back then it was tied to the computer, which often didn't have good speakers, and it required a good internet connection, which quite a few people didn't have, even in 2003. After all shoutcast/icecast has been around for a loooong time, but if you mention it to non-geeks they'd say "what"? Sure some people may be using TuneIn, but they don't know it's Icecast/Shoutcast.
Nowadays practically everything can use Pandora or Spotify, and people can use them on their phones/tablets/whatever. It's more convenient for most.
There's always Fedora, which DOES have a 32 bit wine available.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
And note that the US was one of the initial signatories of Metre Convention and that our "customary" units have been actually defined from Metric units since 1893. The problem being that the people have been rather slow to stop using the customary units and the government hasn't really done much to encourage a total switch.
Well except in the 70's, Carter got blamed for that even though it was Ford who signed the legislation. The Reagan administration that came after was full of nostalgia addled traditionalists including the president himself, so the encouragement ended.
Mumbles something about my red stapler and big grains of salt on the margarita
So it's only useful for those guys who have a sysadmin job, who have a server rack of their own in their basement and a business grade internet connection who want to host their cat pictures and videos on their own machine?
some quick googling shows launch day patches for both consoles and titles.
Yes, you're right, console devs HAVE become lazier as well, thanks to internet connected consoles. In some ways they're becoming more like PC devs in the lackadaisacal attitudes towards "getting it right the first time". This is not a good thing.
Witcher 3 day one patch
CD Projekt is a former PC only developer in Europe....any console gamer can tell you that when a European Dev goes console, they tend to suck at first because their dev practices/methods are PC Centric and they have little experience on console. The Witcher 3 is only their second title and their first on a Sony platform. I expected to hear of problems.
I'm not saying they can't do a good game, it's just that they're not quite there yet.
Just for the record what are some developers that you consider good?
Squaresoft (pre Enix), Snowblind, Zipper, Naughty Dog, Media Molecule, Atlus, Nintendo, 4J
For cross platform I'd add Bioware and Blizzard to that. Not Bethesda, they do good games, but they seriously need more solid QA. It's sad to think that their least buggy console game on the PS3 was Oblivion, that was the one they handed off to 4J to do the port. Irrational was fairly good as is Firaxis.
Or perhaps they can just allow players to play their files through the game?
As much as that feature is appealing to some do you think that they should dedicate dev time to duplicate functionality already in other applications or the OS?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
The "dumbing down" is because the consoles of the era typically couldn't support some basic stuff. Like saving games on demand.
There are NES and SNES games that can save on demand. Really. It's not a limitation of the hardware but more a design decision that some people mistook for a limitation.
Or assuming really tiny television screen resolution. So you'd scale up rez on your PC to 1280x1024 and you'd end up with a really tiny unreadable user interface. Even in a game as new as Skyrim the default UI wouldn't scale up even though consoles are so much better now.
It was bad on consoles too! Some games had too small text, some had too big. I'm remembering Darkstone on the PSone which has legibility problems if you play with anything less than an S-Video connection. One of the Hot Shots golf games has the SAME problem, exacerbated if you play it on a PS3 with upscaling.
You remember Oblivion's typeface? On the PS3 at 720p it's a bit too big which reduces the amount of information the game can show in inventory and whatnot. Skyrim is better with it's F3 sized font, but why can't they just give EVERYONE a UI scaling option. It would benefit PC gamers AND console gamers AND people with eyesight issues.
Or any game with one of those ridiculous radial selection interfaces (makes sense if you only have a button and a joystick, it's utterly ridiculous if you've got a mouse and keyboard).
Radial menus are FAST, that's why they use them. Once you get used to them you can do stuff amazingly fast. But...it does take time to adapt. You should have heard me cursing the radial menu in BG&E, the first game I played with one.
You're right in that they shouldn't implement them on the PC though, unless the gamer chooses to enable one while using a joypad. They're not designed for mouse use, they're slower that way.
I'm glad Diablo 3 has a variant of a radial system on consoles. It's a heck of a lot faster and less annoying dealing with inventory on the PS3/PS4 than it is on the PC. No more silly time consuming inventory tetris.
Or the levels would be really small with frequent loading screens because the consoles couldn't pull in a whole level (think Thief 3).
Thief 3's developer didn't know the trick of streaming levels on the fly? You don't need to load the whole level at once, just the parts around the player. Standard technique on the PS2. PC games don't do it. For one, they've usually had more RAM available and got used to being able to load entire levels. and secondly they didn't have the necessary fast RAM and internal busses to pull it off. Game development is more cross platform and with more former PC only devs doing console games they need to learn about tricks like that.
Strangely console Minecraft loads the entire "world" in ways the PC version doesn't. For example you can travel far enough from your wheat farm in the PC version that the "chunk" it's in won't update so your wheat will be at the same growth stage you left it in. That doesn't happen on the console version. That may be why the console version has limited world size. And perhaps also because Sony/Microsoft have limits on how much save space a game is allowed to use. They probably don't want to tell gamers "You've run out of space for your new CoD DLC because Minecraft has allocated 200GB for it's world save just in case you decide to go off exploring endlessly"
Or the complete inability to use your mouse to select things, or type in something to name your character, etc.
That's lazyness, because consoles have had USB ports since the PS2 days. I've got PS2 games that have mouse and keyboard support.
Or worse of all in newer games are the "quick time events"; sure it makes sense when your control is limited with only 4 buttons to push, but on the PC it feels like the game is making fun of
Can you name the last time a game was dumbed down on a PC because the PC, and it was dumbed down because of shitty input design due to a controller,
Every game that uses sub-optimal digital WASD for movement? 2D platformers that used keyboard controls like Commander Keen? ARPG's where movement and attacking use the SAME mouse button.
lack of draw distance because the PC can't draw it at that distance, cut 1k-3k textures down to 256 in size because the PC can't draw textures that large?
3K textures? What kind of idiot uses textures that large, it's overkill. Only PC devs designing the next "you can't buy hardware that will actually run the game well yet" games like the original Crysis rather than for the hardware people actually own.
How about cutting down AI pathing and fighting abilities because there isn't enough processing power in the PC.
FreeRealms. The PC version had sucky pathfinding, compared to the PS3 version. And it was also blurrier and has inferior sound. The PC version also controlled like crap for movement, racing, demolition derby and the pirate minigame.
Load zones between areas including internal to external cells because of PC's? Well I can give you that one, it's been nearly 15 years.
I know of console games that don't have loading screens between areas, because they stream levels/areas on the fly. One noted version being EQOA. It has no loading screens between zones, something EQ on the PC did not have. You could walk from Fayspires to Qeynos and never see a load screen. The technique is less commonly used now because of all the cross platform development. PC's can't do it as well, they don't have the fast internal busses and specialized fast RAM.
That was the problem with Witcher 3, the current gen in no way could keep up with PC's from 2-3 years ago, and it suffered because of it.
The problem with the Witcher isn't that the consoles can't keep up, the problem is CD Projekt. Until relatively recently they were among the most "PC Master Race" of developers and publishers, being in Poland......well until witcher 2 of course.
As a formerly PC-centric European developer/publisher., they suck at working on consoles. Witcher 3 is only their second console game, and the first on a Sony platform. They simply don't have the necessary experience, yet.
They did say this:
that a console built based on hardware from 2011-2013 and can be beaten by a PC built this year for under what both consoles cost is the problem.
You can't build a machine for less than $399 that can match a PS4 or Xbox one. Not even a steam machine like that new console-ish alienware rig. And it still wouldn't have the specialized RAM or fast internal busses, and it would still run windows. with all the negatives that brings.
Players who like a certain KIND of RPG's. For the Black Isle fanboys it was more about atmosphere and catering to their "tastes" that made NV a bit less fun to those who really liked F3.
For example in F3 I spent most of the game relying on 3 weapons: Lincoln's Repeater, Xuan Long, Terrible Shotgun. And one armor set: Reilly's Ranger And even if you don't have those Unique versions, the standard Hunting rifle, assault rifle, combat shotgun and combat armor will serve you well throughout the whole game. And they're relatively inexpensive and common.
But in NV they nerfed all of that to appeal to the hardcore Black Isle fanboys. It was nerfed so much I actually felf the game was "forcing" me to use a companion. In F3, I never used them. Now eventually the game was patched and became better balanced but that took quite a while.
And the BUGS. F3 had some issues but NV was worse. I personally got hit with that "reset faction" bug pre patch, which basically undid all my work and frustrated me enough to stop playing.
NV is a good game, yes, but as was said, it's a brown tinged, slightly annoying variant of F3.
However, there is a special charm to listening to them armed with a mini-gun in a poisonous, radioactive wasteland with a dog as my companion while fighting giant spiders.
You mean giant scorpions, F3 and New Vegas don't have Giant spiders They Also have giant flies, roaches, and ants with giant wasps and mantises added in NV.
This includes any time a dev said "But that won't work on console" - make it an option. None of this dumbing things down just because it has to run on a console.
And vice versa, no dumbing things down because PC gamers are a bunch of filthy casual dudebro shooter and MOBA players.
See what I did there?
Though to be more accurate just because a dev might "think" something won't work on a console, doesn't mean that it actually won't work. PC devs are notoriously lazy and incompetent by console-dev standards and prone to underestimate console audiences.
Oh, and an easy way to add songs to a playlist rotation, not requiring a mod with a new radio station, necessarily.
There are these things called external music players like WMP, itunes, Winamp, etc etc. And also things like Spotify. Sure you'd miss out on whatever intros to songs, public service announcements, and news whatever Three Dog/Mr. Vegas analog in F4 will do, but you could have all the music you want.