Console and PC Gaming

I’ve been gaming far too much over the Christmas break and wanted to share my thoughts on the various platforms. I played on the Wii, the PS3, a high-end PC and briefly with an Xbox 360.

The Wii (or more accurately the DS, then the Wii) can certainly be credited with revolutionising input methods for games; even if Sony were researching the same input methods before Nintendo. The Wii does exactly what it set out to do, entice casual gamers and be drop-dead easy to use.

However, I must say I much prefer the Playstation Move, it’s harder to set up properly but the payoff is much greater. The motion interpretation of the Wii can be very haphazard and doesn’t seem to be that fine-grained. Meanwhile the Move controller is much, much more accurate and feels the more mature for it. Unfortunately it takes a long time to get everything positioned correctly to get this accuracy. Some games have clearly been patched with new code from Sony since some games are remarkably resilient while others require you to stay in perfect position indefinitely. So in some ways you could say it’s a wash with Sony requiring lengthy setup and Nintendo having haphazard motion detection. Still, I would give a firm nod to Sony since once you’ve got it set up the tracking is borderline perfect all the time whereas Nintendo is never quite right.

And this is really the crux of the matter – now consoles have got these unique input devices they’ve acquired a unique feature the PC doesn’t. These controllers could in theory be hooked up to a PC since that’s what PCs are good at, accepting all sorts of peripherals. However a PC is set up on a desk with no room for you to swing a controller around. It’s clear developers are still getting to grips with these new input methods, but the writing is definitely on the wall.

Another great thing about consoles (for now…) is the second-hand market. It’s easy to buy and sell games without worrying about DRM. This is a major, major boon since it can save you a lot of money long-term. I’ve got games on my Steam account I don’t like, but I’m stuck with them. Meanwhile my Xbox 360 collection is tiny since most of the games end up sold once I’m done with them.

But we mustn’t forget the PC’s greatest asset – overwhelming power. All games, even straight ports look much better on the PC, always. You can go into your graphics card’s control panel and jack up the AA/AF and improve the graphics of any game, old or new. Which is another asset of the PC – immense backwards compatibility. I still play the original Half Life which came out in 1998, when the PSX was in it’s final third of life. I can take the game and run it at 1920x1200 with great gobs of AA and AF. Meanwhile if I want to play a PSX game I’m stuck with 320x240, no AA and seriously blurry images – that’s if I’ve even got a PS3 with backwards-compatibility at all. In theory you can keep your consoles around for perfect backwards-compat, but that only lasts until the console breaks. Also as mentioned, you can’t improve the graphics at all which is unfortunate to say the least.

However, we’re steaming ahead to the next generation of console, and for me this next generation could be the one that finally weans me off of my PC kool-aid. The thing I like most about the PC is the resolution, I live and breath resolution. I don’t mind Half Life 1 graphics at all since I can run them at a high resolution – it’s all about resolution and gameplay for me. If the next gen consoles stick to 1080p as a hard and fast rule then I think I may well be game as I’m sure a lot of other people will. No need to buy expensive graphics cards, no need to worry about DRM, no faffing about with driver bugs, etc. Consoles have a lot going for them, and I hope that the next generation to enforce 1080p. But I have my doubts, there are plenty of sub 720p games for the PS3/Xbox 360 and they look atrocious.

Hopefully Sony can also fix the Move issues. It’s an incredibly immersive and fun control method that just needs some extra refinement. Having seen the Kinnect and having used the Wii I firmly believe in the Move. It’s much more versatile than Kinnect which seems to be more versatile as a robot device than a gaming one, and it’s more usable than the Wii. It’s a fantastic little device that’s very underrated due to appearing to be a rip-off of the Wii. It doesn’t help that it looks like some sort of kids toy or possibly even a sex aid. Still, I have high hopes – there’s plenty of games that support it and it seems to be selling moderately well.