PC gaming: Pros and cons

[SpaceBooger]

Growing up I played platformers and action games on my NES and Sierra/LucasArts adventure games on my PC... so to me it feels weird playing any game suited for a controller(pad) on my PC. If its mouse orientated I prefer PC if not it has to be played on a console. Those are my pros and cons...

[elvis]

I see some of you guys have never heard of the amazing things one can do with a mouse scroll button. Here's just one idea: set it to your grenade command.

Plus, the massive amount of keyboard buttons will allow me to do things like move forward while crouch jumping, firing my weapon and cooking a concussion grenade so I can fly up and release frag grenades in midair while quick switching to my medpack to give the sniper AIDS.

But it's no good for a dragon punch.

Pros and cons, people. Pros and cons.

[Erik_Twice]

On the price part. This is simple.

A console life expectancy is 5 years . I have upgraded my computer every 6 years more or less without running into any specs problems. (486, Pentium III 600MHz, Pentium IV 2.66 Ghz, Current computer). This should make computer gaming somewhat cheaper one the long run (PC generations are slower than console generations).

A console costs around 350 euro (This seems a pretty reasonable price for a console as only the Wii was cheaper than that at launch). You will buy around 2 new controllers for it (Because some people will only use two and others will egt the full set of four). Each controller costs 40 euro so the total expenses for the console plus two controllers is 430 euro.

My computer had a cost of five hundred euro and will last one more year.

Also the games are 20 euro more expensive each and PC games drop way faster than console games (I don't know why this happens but it does). This makes an important difference even if you buy only 4 games.

If you buy 20 PC games instead of 20 console games you save four hundred euro. For that money you can buy even better components if you want to so you are able to run games at full specs.

Also online game is free on PC while you have to pay for consoles and the services will dissapear after the next console appears.

And since you are going to buy a computer for more mundane uses you can reduce a PC cost by two hundred euro unless you don't want a computer at all nor need to use Word nor MSN nor anything.

On other notes:

There are definitely rhythm games and party games for the PC. Haven't you ever played You Don't Know Jack or Stepmania?

I have never heard of that Jack.

And

- No rhytmn games at all. Lots of simulators avalible though.

Stepmania is a DDR simulator not a commercial game so I didn't count it. It wouldn't be fair to say that PC has the best music games because it has Frets on Fire, ilegal Beatmania arcades running on XP and Stepmania. IMHO. Also Stepmania runs in Xbox if I'm not mistaken.

-Outdated games not being able to run on your newer, more powerful PC.

Well, you cannot run SNES games on your Xbox do you?

Also this isn't true, the only games you can have trouble with are early Pentium games that are too demanding for DosVBox and too old for compatibility mode.

I wish I had kept my 486, it was so beautiful...

I don't understand, you mention PC has an overall more balanced and better library...

But, then go on to say it lacks heavily in five other genres of games.

Touché, that was a mistake of mine, I first wrote that but after thinking about it discovered it was not true at all so I wrote the second part while forgetting to erase the first.


On the mouse controversy this is the way I see it.

A mouse is better for shooting games because it allows instant movement of the crosshair to any point of the screen while keeping all the precision avalible. If you use analog joysticks either you lose precision in the middle of the screen or you loose speed. This makes shooting controls better and that is the most important part of shooter controls.

As for the "Analog is better than keyboard for movement", well I don't see any difference at all given that you don't need a lot of precision for movement. I don't see any situations where that is important.

And I agree the difference of genres in PC/Console gaming is the deciding factor here.

[executioner]

I see some of you guys have never heard of the amazing things one can do with a mouse scroll button. Here's just one idea: set it to your grenade command.

Plus, the massive amount of keyboard buttons will allow me to do things like move forward while crouch jumping, firing my weapon and cooking a concussion grenade so I can fly up and release frag grenades in midair while quick switching to my medpack to give the sniper AIDS.

But it's no good for a dragon punch.

Pros and cons, people. Pros and cons.

There's no con for controllers on pc, that limitation was broken years ago! There are so many usb adapter and pc specific controllers you can think of, just having a keyboard to play is impractical.

Con: is keeping up to date if you want the latest just released games at the highest detail settings because you will need regular upgrades on video cards, but if you are like most here care less for the newer game releases you can go by with a every 2-3 year video card upgrade and rest of the components on a 4-5 year upgrade cycle.

Pro: PCs are still more useful when not gaming.

[Ack]

Actually, if you practice a little, you can learn to pull off some basic commands, such as the hadouken, while using a keyboard. It's those diagonals that get a bit pesky.

[alienjesus]

i must say i feel that i'd rather have a good movement control in a FPS than ultra precise aiming. If only you could use an analogue stick AND a pointer.

hopefully someone will realise the wii has huge potential here instead of mostly ignoring it. we'll see.

[elvis]

-Outdated games not being able to run on your newer, more powerful PC.

Well, you cannot run SNES games on your Xbox do you?

You totally missed the point.

I bought a Playstation 1. The unit had a shelf life of 11 years. Games I bought year 1 ran just as well as games I bought year 11. (In fact, later games ran better as developers got used to the hardware).

Compare and contrast to PC. Can I keep the same hardware for 11 years and expect to play the latest games at full quality and full framerate? No. This is the argument being made.

The solution, of course, is to periodically upgrade. There's a few tricks to remember too: choose a platform that will support upgrades long-term (not AMD and their "new socket every 6 months" approach), and don't buy bleeding edge all the time (staying 6-12 months behind the "bleeding edge" tends to result in a better cost to performance ratio). But there's still cost and effort required compared to consoles.

Particularly with modern games, a PC's shelf life is dropping dramatically. While consoles stay "modern tech" for 3-5 years, a PC is dated quite easily in 1-2 years. That's not revolutionary information either. It's been that way for quite some time.

Pro: PCs are still more useful when not gaming.

Speaking as a systems administrator who specialises in information security, they're also a hell of a lot more dangerous when not gaming. Some people ought to switch to consoles for gaming, and pen and paper for everything else, just for their own good.

Actually, if you practice a little, you can learn to pull off some basic commands, such as the hadouken, while using a keyboard. It's those diagonals that get a bit pesky.

Yeah, I've played my fair share of emulators on keyboards. But command throws and super cancels still work better on a good joystick than a keyboard (or even a gamepad for that matter).

I can use a spanner to hammer in a nail. That doesn't make a spanner an adequate hammer.

And for the record, my two PC-based MAME cabinets both use arcade joysticks.

[MrPopo]

I bought a Playstation 1. The unit had a shelf life of 11 years. Games I bought year 1 ran just as well as games I bought year 11. (In fact, later games ran better as developers got used to the hardware).

Compare and contrast to PC. Can I keep the same hardware for 11 years and expect to play the latest games at full quality and full framerate? No. This is the argument being made.

I feel this argument is a bit flawed. The PC hardware is continuously changing, while a console's hardware is static (with the occational addon like the expansion pack). With the console if you want to make a game look nicer you have to learn all the tricks to exploit every nook and cranny of the hardware. With the PC you can get better graphics simply by using the same algorithms but with better hardware. And since PC hardware is always going through constant revision it is easier to rely on people buying the better hardware than it is to highly optimize to allow for better graphics on the same specs. Once you get beyond the obvious optimizations things start to become a real pain in the ass. You start getting into things like embedded assembly in higher languages and loop unrolling.

In general it is much more difficult to program a high-end game on the PC than it is on the console. In the year to two years it takes to program the game the state of the hardware industry will have changed. You have to decide on a target range of hardware (which is what makes those Steam hardware surveys valuable) to design for, which means that you are in a position where you will exclude some people from playing and other people won't get the features of their hardware utilized.

That said some companies are better at designing than others. Blizzard has a very good track record of making their games playable on all ranges of hardware, but at the same time they've never won an award for having the greatest graphics. It's a trade off.

[zarathstra]

-Outdated games not being able to run on your newer, more powerful PC.

Well, you cannot run SNES games on your Xbox do you?

You totally missed the point.

I bought a Playstation 1. The unit had a shelf life of 11 years. Games I bought year 1 ran just as well as games I bought year 11. (In fact, later games ran better as developers got used to the hardware).

Compare and contrast to PC. Can I keep the same hardware for 11 years and expect to play the latest games at full quality and full framerate? No. This is the argument being made.

The solution, of course, is to periodically upgrade. There's a few tricks to remember too: choose a platform that will support upgrades long-term (not AMD and their "new socket every 6 months" approach), and don't buy bleeding edge all the time (staying 6-12 months behind the "bleeding edge" tends to result in a better cost to performance ratio). But there's still cost and effort required compared to consoles.

Particularly with modern games, a PC's shelf life is dropping dramatically. While consoles stay "modern tech" for 3-5 years, a PC is dated quite easily in 1-2 years. That's not revolutionary information either. It's been that way for quite some time.

[

I don't see your point. You can't play the latest games on your ps1, because they don't make games for ps1 anymore. If you want the latest games you have to buy a ps3, 360, or Wii. Of course, if you want to play all the games, you have to own all 3 consoles, because some games only come out for one of them. And older games will run, with a little finagling, on modern PCs. SNES games will absolutely not run on the Wii (unless you buy them again).

Also, since you're going to have a computer in the house anyway, it doesn't cost THAT much more to buy a decent video card for it every now and then. Certainly not as much as buying 3 consoles every 5 years.

Like I said, I love my consoles, but I've never experienced this massive bill that apparently comes along with PC Gaming.

[elvis]

I don't see your point. You can't play the latest games on your ps1, because they don't make games for ps1 anymore.

The PS1 was used as an example within its era. The point was looking at a particular single hardware rollout, and the shelf-life it has for its generation. Why did I choose the PS1? Because its era is over, and we can objectively compare the hardware of its generation from start to finish, instead of speculating the future with the current consoles and PC hardware. But seeing as you've brought the argument up...

The same argument can be made today. Here's a thought experiment (because I don't have a time machine handy): Buy a PS3, and buy a PC for an identical dollar amount. Don't upgrade the hardware (or OS, other than free patches/drivers/sevice-packs) on either for 4 years. At the end of that 4 period, you can still go buy a brand new PS3 game and know it will run at full frame rate and quality. Go buy a new PC game, and you'll no doubt have to pay dollars to upgrade the hardware/OS just to get the thing to run at a decent frame rate. And if the hardware you buy isn't compatible with old motherboards (anyone feel the sting of the AGP->PCIe changeover? Or as before, the countless AMD socket changes?), then spend even more dollars (upgrade the mobo, and chances are you're up for new CPU/RAM/video as well, which is the lion's share of dollar cost towards a whole new rig).

Also, since you're going to have a computer in the house anyway, it doesn't cost THAT much more to buy a decent video card for it every now and then. Certainly not as much as buying 3 consoles every 5 years.

Again, assuming your new video card just plugs in. See the "AGP->PCIe" argument above.

And why buy three consoles? Are there really enough exclusive titles on any platform these days to warrant owning all consoles? I have a PS2 and a Wii at the moment. The XBox didn't offer anything amazing that I had to have. My next purchase is likely to be an XBox 360, as it's cheap and has all the games I want. The dollar amount I've spent on three consoles over two and a bit generations will be less than my last PC, which didn't even last 12 months before it was "out of date".

Like I said, I love my consoles, but I've never experienced this massive bill that apparently comes along with PC Gaming.

"Massive" is relative. See below as to what other things some of us have to deal with before upgrading our home PCs gets budgetary approval.

I feel this argument is a bit flawed. The PC hardware is continuously changing, while a console's hardware is static (with the occational addon like the expansion pack). With the console if you want to make a game look nicer you have to learn all the tricks to exploit every nook and cranny of the hardware. With the PC you can get better graphics simply by using the same algorithms but with better hardware.

At face value this is fine. What we see today is a lot of games developed quickly and shoddily, with plenty of reliance on after-market patches or hardware upgrades to make them work.

What happens is gamers are being forced to upgrade hardware all the bloody time. Look at anything made by EA in the last few years. Despite using graphic engines that aren't top of the line, you still needed expensive hardware to get the most out of them. Hell, don't even start me on Crysis.

I used to be an ardent PC gamer since around 1990, but I gave up around 2002. Spending $500-$1000 every year just to keep my PC at playable levels pissed me off. Yes, prices are lower these days (you could probably get away with $200-$400 annually), but that still shits me that I'm spending the money on hardware that could go towards a dozen or more games.

And I'd MUCH rather spend the money on games (and more to the point, fund game developers).

It's not that I don't like the PC as a games platform. It's not that I don't like PC games. It's that, from a pure "pay a set amount of dollars and see what you end up with" point of view, consoles represent more bang for my gamer buck. And speaking as a guy with three kids and a mortgage, I've got a lot of important things that take my bucks away long before I arrive at gaming on my list of things to spend money on monthly.