Console Gaming - WTF?

[SomeKid]

If I could afford a gaming PC, I'd love to have one, but the continuity of hardware is a huge advantage for console games from both a programing standpoint and a consumer standpoint. 

That's the thing. If you can afford a gaming PC, you'll need to afford another gaming PC in a couple of years, and then another gaming PC in a couple of years, and...

If you don't keep dumping thousands into it, it just won't play the latest games. And those thousands go down the drain, because the hardware becomes, well...Goodwill donation value.

Simply not true. I use my gaming PC for school, work, research, websurfing etc. I built this thing about 7 years ago, for roughly 1200. I have since replaced parts that wore out (bout $100, however I needed the PC for school anyway, and I bought upgraded parts, so you can't really call it a gaming expense) and added a gig of ram, which added another couple hundred.

Do the math on that. Lets call it 1500. For 1 PC. That has lasted 7 years, and been good for gaming. I am planning on making a new PC, sometime this summer. How many consoles can you do work, school, and fun on, for 7 years?

And you can play the latest FPS games with full framerate and high detail on this seven year old PC?

Go read my last post. I already said that I am finally retiring it. However, the last time I bought a FPS (been a while) it did run just fine on my PC.

[Iain]

I hated the PS controller at first, I'd played all my FPS games with a keyboard and a mouse, same for San Andreas.

Throwing myself into online COD4 trained me pretty well. I'd still prefer a keyboard mouse for FPS (and you can with the PS3 and UT I believe), but GTA4, Colin McRae DIRT and FIFA08 are easy with the PS controller.

In GTA4 there is a lot of guidance about which buttons to press to do certain actions, the thing I'm still finding awkward is the cover system.

[nico]

If I could afford a gaming PC, I'd love to have one, but the continuity of hardware is a huge advantage for console games from both a programing standpoint and a consumer standpoint. 

That's the thing. If you can afford a gaming PC, you'll need to afford another gaming PC in a couple of years, and then another gaming PC in a couple of years, and...

If you don't keep dumping thousands into it, it just won't play the latest games. And those thousands go down the drain, because the hardware becomes, well...Goodwill donation value.

Simply not true. I use my gaming PC for school, work, research, websurfing etc. I built this thing about 7 years ago, for roughly 1200. I have since replaced parts that wore out (bout $100, however I needed the PC for school anyway, and I bought upgraded parts, so you can't really call it a gaming expense) and added a gig of ram, which added another couple hundred.

Do the math on that. Lets call it 1500. For 1 PC. That has lasted 7 years, and been good for gaming. I am planning on making a new PC, sometime this summer. How many consoles can you do work, school, and fun on, for 7 years?

And you can play the latest FPS games with full framerate and high detail on this seven year old PC?

Go read my last post. I already said that I am finally retiring it. However, the last time I bought a FPS (been a while) it did run just fine on my PC.

What game was that?  It's a little disingenuous to talk about your 7 year old computer playing games at a framerate that's "just fine" if you haven't bought a game in 2 or 3 years. 

I'm going to go out on a limb (since I have a 7 year old PC that played the current games when it was built) and say there's no way your computer will come close to playing Assassin's Creed unless there are upgrades you're not mentioning.  No one is saying you shouldn't buy a computer to play games on (my next desktop will have specs that allow me to play games for a while), but it's a fact of PC gaming that in order to stay current it takes a constant investment in hardware that is much greater than the cost of an Xbox 360 or PS3.  That doesn't mean there aren't advantages to PC games or that it has to be an either/or decision.  But, from a cost standpoint, consoles do have a considerable advantage.

[Mabs2]

At least with an old computer you can run a new game with low detail.  That's what I do most of the time.
Try running a new game on your old console...

[SomeKid]

nico,

It certainly has not been 2 years. I just don't do FPS as much as strategy (Civ 4 for example). The last FPS I played was either FEAR, Area 51, or PREY. Prey ran totally fine with maxed graphics. Area 51 or FEAR I think I had to back off just a bit.

I never was fond of any of the Assassin/Thief games though. Too boring for my tastes.

[Mabs2]

Check out the Hitman games.  Very fun, imo.
You can either go 100% stealth or 100% nuts, or some mix of the two.  It's great.

[SteveS]

If there's civilized and reasonably mature console gamers out there where are they? Inquiring minds want to know.

I agree that gamerdad.com has a pretty good forum.  The link now takes you to a blog that he is a writer for, but you just need to click on the 'community' link on the right.  You could probably post your question here, too.  I have played GTA IV and Drake's Fortune.  I am sure others have played the other games.

I used to like PC gaming, but got tired of the hardware requirements.  I have a fairly basic PC that I bought last year that would barely run Midieval II, but the frame rate was horrendous.  I have never had a single problem with any console game going back to the Atari 2600.  Considering that I don't play all that often, I appreciate the simplicity.

[Vodka7]

It certainly has not been 2 years. I just don't do FPS as much as strategy (Civ 4 for example). The last FPS I played was either FEAR, Area 51, or PREY. Prey ran totally fine with maxed graphics. Area 51 or FEAR I think I had to back off just a bit.

FEAR - Released 10/17/05
Area 51 - Released 04/25/05
Prey - Released 07/11/06

No offense, but regardless of when you bought them, the last FPS's you played were all released 2-3 years ago.  The only one of those three with a fairly advanced engine for the time was FEAR, so it would make sense that thay might have been the one you had to tweak a tiny bit to preserve framerate.  And FPS's generally have the most taxing system requirements, compared to RTS's or RPG's.

The rest of your points are mostly correct though--PC's as a platform offer a lot you can't get on your console.  Like you said, you can't type a paper or go on YouTube on your Xbox 360, and the thought of playing something like StarCraft with a PS3 controller breaks my brain.

The only other thing I take issue with is your idea of economy, and the idea of bringing in utility to a gaming discussion.  For someone who just wants to play games, and already has a computer suitable for web browsing and office work (i.e., every single person on this forum), consoles turn out cheaper in the long run.  This is a gaming thread on an internet forum, so I'm going to assume we all have PC's and want to talk about games.  So, I'm going to ignore your question about how many consoles can you do work and school on, and focus on how much gaming fun you can get out of $1500 over seven years:

01/26/00 - PlayStation 2 released for $299
11/22/05 - Xbox 360 released for $399 (Premium edition)
11/19/06 - Wii released for $249
11/17/06 - Playstation 3 released for $599 (60GB premium edition)

So, for $1546 you could have had the most popular console from the last generation, and every single console from the current generation.  Console generations cycle every five years or so, and the effective life of a console (the time where new games are still being released for it) extends about another two years after that.  If we assume those figures hold true for this generation as well, your PlayStation 3 will still have new games coming out for it in 2013.  The first console on the list was purchased in 2000.  So, you're looking at thirteen years of gaming, almost double the seven you got out of your PC.  Even if you declare a system dead when it's successor comes out (which isn't true), you've got a good 11 years there from the launch of the PS1 till the "death" of the PS3.

And, all the figures I gave were launch prices, so really they could only be compared to buying the best and fastest video card right when it comes out.  And if your PC cost $1200 originally, there's no way it had the best video card at the time.  Most people never buy the newest, bleeding edge video card because they're all $300-$400 on release and have been since the Voodoo3d days.  People buy the value cards from the current line or the cards that were bleeding edge 6-12 months ago.  And if you wait twelve months, nearly every system comes down in price.  (The same thing goes if you buy the Core/20GB editions instead of the premium ones I picked out.)

A frugal gamer, who's willing to wait for the first major price drop, will save on average $100 per console.  More if he goes for a basic system.  And we've got four consoles on my list, so that's a savings of $400.  With an extra $400, you could have bought an Xbox after the first price drop (to $199) and a GameCube at it's launch price.

And in that case, for $1550, you'd own every single console from the last and the current generations.  Not a bad deal at all.

[nico]

At least with an old computer you can run a new game with low detail.  That's what I do most of the time.
Try running a new game on your old console...

The minimum system requirements for Assassin's Creed (just using it as an example of a current game) are:

Processor: Dual core processor 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
RAM: 2 GB
Video Card: 256 MB DirectX 10.0-compliant video card or DirectX 9.0-compliant card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0 or 10.0 compliant sound card
HDD Space: 12GB
DirectX Version: DirectX 10.0

My 6.5 year old, $1500 desktop has an Athlon 1900+, Geforce 3 Ti, 512Gb of ram, and a Sound Blaster Audigy sound card.  It will run Assassin's Creed about as well as my PS2 will run my Xbox 360 games. 

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with playing games on a PC, but if bang for your buck is a major concern, consoles have a clear advantage.  Sticking with the Assassin's Creed example, for a person who doesn't already have the necessary hardware, you're looking at a $1000+ for a PC that will give comparable game performance to what you'll get on a $350-450 console. 

[Mabs2]

I haven't tried Assassin's Creed, but my computer is always out of date.  I always get old gear because it's cheaper, yet I still manage to run all the games I want--even the latest and greatest.  Yea, the graphics aren't always maxed, but it looks good and is still playable.

[SomeKid]

Check out the Hitman games.  Very fun, imo.
You can either go 100% stealth or 100% nuts, or some mix of the two.  It's great.

Played them, and hated them. I cannot stand stealth games. I played Splinter Cell for a whopping 5 minutes before going on a stabbing spree.

[Manedwolf]

I much prefer stealth games. I'll take a sniper scope and watching the bad guy go down -> way over there any day to running into stuff yelling and immediately being cut down...which is usually what happens to you when you do that.

I want more of the Thief series. Those were amazing.

[SomeKid]

Vodka, Prey is at least under 2 years old, so what I said earlier was still correct. Granted, I admit I hadn't realized they were nearing that mark.

However, the concept of playing SC on a console is painful. I was killer at that, and BW after. I am hyped about SC2, what about you?

You leave out two very important factors in the money discussion. 1: Who wants to use a slow old computer for decades? You still need to upgrade to take advantage of technology and go faster. In my area, we are getting fiber optics to every home. I want to have a top of the line PC so I can surf fast. 2: Game prices. New PC games run 40-50. (Avg). How much are the games for a PS3? Last I heard people were paying 80 and up for them.

Maned, you would have loved Codename: Outbreak. It is OLD now, but it was the only game I actually had fun while being covert.  However, I hated the Thief series. Most FPS type games you can't be covert anyway. Try going ninja in a game like SOF where they tell you to be stealthy. You simply can't, granted, it is fun.

[Manedwolf]

A surprisingly good console game a lot of people never heard of was Geist.

It's like Half Life, but, well...you're dead, pretty much. And you can possess things and people. You can possess machinery and objects to toss them around or cause malfunctions, you can possess a rat or dog and direct it around (with a really good true-to-biology limit to its vision distance and color perception), and also possess the guards and turn them on each other, or possess the scientists and workers to accomplish tasks. The writing was so good that they had the guards getting paranoid and constantly thinking each other was possessed after a while. You can cause a truly satisfying amount of mayhem and panic.

[SomeKid]

...sounds like you are invincible in that game. Tell me there is more than random possessions.

[Manedwolf]

...sounds like you are invincible in that game. Tell me there is more than random possessions.

Hardly. You only have a limited time out of bodies before you expire. You can "consume" (wither) other living things like vegetables in an office fridge or a potted plant to get more energy, but it drops quickly. So if the body you're occupying gets shot, which tends to kill the person, you have to find another quickly.

And you can't just occupy another person. They have to be severely frightened first, which means using a lot of objects in the environment to scare the crap out of them when they're looking at it, well-timed. A jiggling trash can, then a lightbulb popping over their head, a cord whipping around their ankle...then you can possess them. That's what makes it fun.

There's good puzzles, like having passed through a laundry facility as a guard, then having to remember to go back there later as a scientist to get a coat, all that. You keep changing people as you need them to do different things, people cleared for different areas, and it gets more difficult as the entire facility comes under more scrutiny as they figure out what's going on. As an added thing, when you possess some people, you see fragments of recent strong memories, which are often important clues, in one case, a physician who was keeping a friend of yours under sedation. You have to find them, possess them, and be them to go into the medical wing and reverse the medication orders, get other meds from the lab fridge and administer them and all.

Also, when disembodied, you can't pass through walls, only certain cracks.

And there's a hilarious scene where you possess someone's laptop to confuse them. It shows a behind-the-screen view of their confused face as the screen starts displaying endless overlays of popup ads and porn banners and stuff....while at the same time, a large robot greenhouse arm rig thing is approaching them from behind...

[SomeKid]

OK Maned, now that sounds hella fun.

[taurusowner]

I don't play PC games because I don't have the $$ to get the game, as well as upgrade my computer every time a new game comes out.  And you can't rent PC games.  I don't want to go through a new video card every 6 months.