Be Excellent To Each Other

It's a fair point actually, badly put as usual, but if the price of a PS4 is less than the equivalent PC, why would you buy the PS4? there may be exclusive games, but if this generation has shown anything the good ones are few and far between (and will probably be hacked to run on a PC anyway).

To get girls.

Sorry yes I did put that badly but the point stands, what is the USP of the consoles going to be next generation?

Looking back....

<< You can go back further than this of course, Megadrive and SNES and NES and Master System and so on, but they're more of the same, arcadey consoley easy-to-use experiences were the domain of the game console, and computers were a fucking nightmare. >>

PS1/Saturn era - The PC had absolutely nothing to compare with the likes of Ridge Racer on the PS1, or Sega Rally on the Saturn. Does anyone remember what arcadey/consoley games were like on the PC back then? They were FUCKING AWFUL, if you could even get the bastard things running at all.

If you were a serious gamer at this time, you had one of these consoles, or most likely, both of them. (Mine are still in a box downstairs.)

ALSO NOTE - Some very clever custom hardware that delivered incredible performance out of a tiny box at a time when PCs were hideous, huge, unreliable, temperamental nightmares for playing games on.

PS2/Dreamcast/XBox era - More of the same really. The Dreamcast delivered 'arcade in a little box' and the PS2 delivered the likes of GTA3, the XBox was a bit of a dark horse but there was still awesome stuff like the best versions of the Burnout games, and of course you could chip them.

Again, if you were a gamer, you had one or two or all three of these, the PC was slowly starting to catch up in a lot of ways, but nothing could match the console experience overall. (My PS2 and Dreamcast are still in a box downstairs, my chipped XBox still sees reasonably regular use as a MAMEOX machine and is still connected to the big telly.)

ALSO NOTE - Some very clever custom hardware that delivered incredible performance out of a tiny box at a time when PCs were slightly less hideous, huge, unreliable, temperamental nightmares for playing games on. Better than they were, but still a bit of a pain in the fucking arse overall.

(And I'm not forgetting the Nintendo consoles, but IMO they've always been about the Nintendo exclusives and nothing else, but maybe that's just me.)

360/PS3 era - Out of the gates these consoles got the drop on the PC, personally speaking I ended up with two 360s, an early 20GB JET TURBINE Xenos model and then a later Jasper chipset model. Games like Ridge Racer 6 weren't available on the PC, even though PCs were mostly capable of running them. Plus of course there was the whole XBLA thing going on, and friends lists, and achievements, and a really cohesive connected online experience - and at the time the 360's blade interface was a nice, simple, intuitive design for a games machine.

The PC had Steam and it was mostly OK but nothing like the experience it is today. As before, if you wanted your games to be of the highest standard and conveniently available, you had a 360 or a PS3.

ALSO NOTE - I'd say the PC not only hit parity with the consoles this generation, but then beat them at their own game, certainly in terms of game experience, and mostly in terms of ease of use as well. YMMV on that one, though.

Next-gen - Seriously, what's the point? We know for a fact that the PS4 and 720 will be mid-range PCs stuffed into little boxes, you'll get your Sony or Microsoft 'operating system', and you'll get more of what a lot of folks hated this generation, forced updates to the consoles, forced updates to games, advertising, DLC, increasingly internet-connected requirement, cracking down on pre-owned and so on.

You could very much argue that a Windows based PC is already a lot more open and less fucked with than the 360's dashboard, which bombards you with advertisements and forced updates that move everything around whether you like it or not.

On top of that, the hardware of the next-gen consoles is going to become obsolete sooner rather than later, but unlike a PC that you can easily and cheaply upgrade as time goes by, the consoles are going to be stuck with a fixed architecture, something that really made itself felt with the 360 and PS3 as it became increasingly apparent that they weren't up to the job of running what was being asked of them. (And I'd say it's a safe bet there'll be laptops inside a couple of years that roughly match the spec of the PS4 and 720.)

The other wildcard here of course is the Steambox, which really could change everything and make both the next-gen consoles look a bit daft, but it remains to be seen on that one.

The fact here, and it is a fact, is that hardware for the next-gen is going to be completely homogenised - it's all mainstream PC stuff, CPU, GPU, RAM - the works.

All you're really going to be choosing is what you want the box to look like and what 'operating system' you want to run, with games development (certainly for the 'big stuff') having never been more expensive, very few developers are going to want to go down the exclusive route - so it's a safe bet that 95% of the big titles will come out across all the platforms.

That's all I'm saying, there are no 'games consoles' any more in the traditional sense, just PCs in little boxes.

Fucking hell!

Have you SEEN Windows 8?

I have it installed on this Mac as a VM. The fucking thing thinks its a tablet! Had to install a hack just to make it boot straight to a desktop, and another hack to give me a start button.

During the next gen of consoles there is likely to be 2 more Windows releases. If Windows 8 is this fucked, just imagine how loony tunes Windows 10 will be. It'll probably require you to shit on a glass coffee table just to login!

There's no "games consoles" anymore because there'll be "Multimedia Hubs". That play games occassionally.

Not really. Games are still the main selling point I think. People aren't going to buy an Xbox primarily for watching films etc on when things half the size and a quarter of the price can do that instead, that's if their telly doesn't do most of it already even without anything else plugged in to it.

Yes, which is why I won't be letting it within a million miles of any PC or laptop in the house.

Windows 7 has mainstream support until 2015 and extended support until 2020, therefore it is not something I'm concerned about.

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/ ... 5&c2=14019

So what about the people who buy new PC's to play games on? You may have noticed but Windows 7 is already getting hard to find on new kit.

In fact even if you buy a naked OS as I did last week, 8 is significantly cheaper than 7 and I expect Microsoft will also be giving these discounts to the likes of Dell.

But this is absolutely my point Ian!

Microsoft and Sony can force you to update your console whether you want to or not, to completely change the look and feel of it and even what it's basically for. The last time my 360 updated itself I had trouble fucking finding my XBLA collection, and the dashboard had rearranged itself to bombard me with a pile of advertising and social media shite and movie streaming services and all manner of other shit that I absolutely did not want to be there - and I was like, 'What the fuck? This is my games console!'

You know how often my PC pulls that kind of shit on me? Never.

You know how often Steam has decided to completely decided to rewrite what it's for in ten years? Never.

When games consoles stop being about the games, I start to wonder why I would want to own a games console. As markg very correctly points out, there are far better, and cheaper, and simpler solutions to the media side of things. A mate of mine recently got one of those new Samsung smart tellies that has a computer built into the back of it and what is effectively a Kinect built into the front of it, along with full wireless internet access (or wired if you prefer).

It does all this shit already, and it's just a telly, why add a console into the mix when your telly can do Facebook and the internet and Netflix and so on?

Sure that's a problem, but Windows 8 will bed down in time, the same as Vista did. What I suspect will happen is Windows 9 will be along relatively quickly to correct the mistakes of Windows 8, same as 7 did for Vista. I have a strong suspicion that MS will either patch into Windows 8, or re-introduce with Windows 9, a 'classic desktop' mode and quietly drop the 'pseudo-touch' requirement.

But a key difference here is that Windows can't be 'broken' against your will the same as the consoles can (I'm sure I remember you having a right old rant about a 360 dashboard update Chinny), yes Windows will update and patch itself, but it'll never, ever, look completely fucking different one day after applying some updates and start bombarding you with adverts.

The Windows situation isn't perfect, sure, but are you really telling me it's better than where the 360 has ended up?

It's got lizards in it.

So yeah... About that PS4.

But seriously old chap, what's there to say about it?

We know the specs, we have no idea what it's going to look like yet, we know what the controller looks like, and we know that it'll host pretty much all the games of the next generation. Same as the 720, same as the PC, same as the Steambox, and the Wii-U might have most of it as well.

That's it, basically.

The next-gen is about choosing your faceplate, because the games are all going to be the same.

roffle it even uses Havok. You couldn't make this shit up !

Except, of course, that the PS3 had shiteloads of exclusives because the Japanese care for neither the Xbox nor PC (See, for instance, Demons souls). I see no reason for this to be any different going forward.

When I'm not using my MAC for WORK I like a CONSOLE to PLAY GAMES on with NO FUCKING ABOUT.

Anything else just causes havoc.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Dust. Wind.
dude.

Woah.

The PS4 isn't really a PC, you can't play PC games on it.

Although it's architecture being much like a PC is a good thing for everyone involved, I think. I wonder if they'll at least get full PS2 backwards compatibility via emulation?

To be fair, AE does have a point. New consoles used to be about magic and hitherto unforeseen power. That era does appear to be dead.

See also: Trains

Sony (probably) still have their heads up their arses, then. Technically, they're still riding on how good the PS1 was.

By coincidence, I actually bought a Wii U yesterday. My kids like it. That's literally all I have to say about it. Meh.

Does this mean this gen will be the same as last gen only a bit worse? All we need now is for Microsoft to make an awesome machine with fantastic games on the cheap so the hardware breaks all the time. Thanks multinationals!

Consoles that use PC architecture are just like PCs, which is why no-one bought the first Xbox and we all just used PCs. Also, there's no advantage to be gained from bare-to-the-metal coding techniques targeting fixed spec platforms running real time operating systems, which is why every seven year old $400 PC can turn out graphics the equal of a 360 or a PS3. Fuck me, I was certainly playing stuff that looked better than Uncharted 2 or Forza Horizon back in 2005 on my GeForce 6600. I'm almost certainly not making this shit up because I'm a fucking dribbling idiot. And I certainly can see how an octocore games console with eight mother fucking gigabytes of DDR5 RAM -- shit that's way faster than PC's lame-assed DDR3 bullshit -- is exactly the same as a PC. And I've definitely seen the ability to real time encode games down to a H.264 stream to be uploaded to the Internet for my friends to spectate on or even take control of my game in real time on Steam. Probably.

Man alive, there's some odorous bullshit being spouted in here, by all the usual suspects, I see. What a pissing omnishambles. Plus ça cunting change.

You're still wrong about the scrambled eggs, mind.

Not always strictly true.

Isn't the Dreamcast essentially a PC? It runs Windows CE after all.

Still can't believe we're finally getting Havok in the living room. Worth the entry price just for that, surely?

Can I POTW Gaywood please? I don't read BETEO WEKEO so have no idea how that sort of things work.

I dunno - I'm holding out for Bink Video support as well.

Again on Bloomberg there was an 'in depth' look at the next gen console battle. Mentions of games in piece (and that games in general, not a specific game or series)? er...none.

You should, you are in it lots.

What is Havoc?

The future of console gaming apparently

Havok? Most typically a physics engine, but can also help with things such as animation and other functions.

It's been on consoles for a very long time. What with being based on standard c/c++ code.

A film in which Anne Hathaway scores on the Craster Scale.

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

Indeed. It's only in recent years (the "HD consoles"/the advent of Havok in the living room) that I've moved away from PC myself. I've always had most of the consoles, but I barely used them.

And yet, we're still lectured daily on the merits of PC gaming! It's as if I wasn't sat at one 10 hours a day for the best part of 10 years.

I had one of these!
Edit, I still do somewhere.

I've had pretty much all of the consoles over the years, it was always PC first for me until the Dreamcast, then it was mainly consoles until a couple of years ago (apart from WoW), now i'm back to PC.

I just play games. Whether they come via consoles, PC, handheld, phones, boards or in the pictures that slither across my peripheral vision.

I'm definitely moving back to PC myself now. My chums have all got decent systems so that tends to be where we play. Not gonna discount consoles, though.

I like playing games and I don't mind what I play them on. I also understand that other people like playing games and I don't mind what they play them on.

I just wish everyone else thought the same.

I bought one from a car boot sale for 50p and sold it to a crazy Italian on eBay for about £40

Various reports saying Microscrofula will have a similar revealy thing in april.

I did see lots of speculation last week saying they have to have it before GDC (Games Developers Conference) so that the devs can actually talk about the games they are working on for the new Xbox and not just the stuff for the PS4 - GDC is down as the end of March so it may not be that long to wait

Oh God, this.

I play games on PC much more than I do on console, for pretty much the exact reasons AE evangelises about, but his constant fucking harping on about it leaves me slightly embarrassed to admit to being a fellow PC gamer.

They're shit and they don't have Havok.

Also its a C64 without a keyboard and 99.9% fewer games avaliable for it. Not even like the GX4000 which at least has enhanced hardware and exclusive titles.