Malc wrote:
Just to respond to this, I was a heavy gamer between 1995 and 2005 and I didn't have a console at all. I had an expensive pc. A lot of people I knew were the same.
Malc
Ack! Come on chaps, you did see the bit where I specifically referenced 'arcadey console type games'?
Like a lot of folks here I suspect, I've owned both consoles and computers over the years, going right back to the 8-bit days.
My point about, for example, the PS1, was that it brought the arcade game Ridge Racer into your house, and it did with a little box of magic that just plugged into your telly. You didn't need to install anything, you didn't need to configure anything, and you didn't need to spend £1000 or more on a PC (£1000 basically being the
absolute starting point for a PC you could play games on back then). I mean, fucking hell, even getting a basic game controller working on a PC twenty years ago was an exercise in hellish frustration, and god help you if you wanted two of them working at the same time.
And yet with the PS1, all you had to do was buy it along with a copy of Ridge Racer, plug the PS1 in, put the disc in, turn it on, and by christ it was a fucking 3D arcade game that still cost a pound a go in the arcades, in your own house, on your own telly. It was stunning, it was magical.
Of course we were playing stuff on our PCs at the time as well, Quake, Warcraft 2, Civilization 2, Command & Conquer etc etc but the PC couldn't do anything like the PS1 was doing. Even if it was technically capable of it - (which it wasn't since 3D acceleration basically didn't exist, hence my earlier point about the consoles bringing something new and magical to the gaming table, Quake was software 3D at launch with hardware 3D acceleration only coming later) - the huge financial and technical barriers to entry made it pie in the sky for most people. We do all remember config.sys and autoexec.bat and freeing up enough base memory to load a CD-ROM driver and even a fucking mouse driver, don't we?
Now if you didn't like arcadey/consoley type games then fair enough, the PS1/PS2 era may well have passed you by, but in my circle of friends and acquaintances we were all over that shit like a cheap suit - despite being mega-keen PC gamers as well.
That's really all I'm getting at here, this is probably the first generation of consoles that offer nothing unique, nothing new, nothing that can't be got elsewhere for around the same cost and at around the same level of convenience. At the PS4 reveal show one of the games was later confirmed to be running on the PC, the argument being 'well that's basically what it'll look like on the PS4', that's the level of homogenisation we're talking about.
I don't understand why it's such a contentious point. I'm not arguing about the relative merits of the platforms as such, just saying that they're all basically the same now.
The same hardware, running the same games, with the same controllers (remember you can plug a 360 pad straight into a PC and I wouldn't be surprised if the 720 wasn't the same), at the same sorts of resolutions and detail settings. (Initially at least, the PC will pull ahead as time goes by, as happened with the current-gen.)
Choose the box you like the look of most, choose your 'operating system provider', maybe choose based on platform exclusives a couple of years down the line (if there are any) - but the point stands, next-gen is 'everything's about the same' gen.