Why I hate consoles...
...It dawned on me this afternoon that I'm really starting to hate consoles. That's not strictly fair, in the sense that I don't really hate Nintendo, or Sega, but I certainly do hate Sony & Microsoft.
Why? One word - Ports. I am thoroughly fed up with companies putting out piss-poor console ports of games where the sole "extra feature" is the ability to play it in a resolution above PAL/NTSC. Some of you might remeber my rant about GTA Vice City and the frankly appalling way in which the PC version suffers from the same CD-streaming car pop-up that the PS2 version is afflicted with.
Because the Playstation & Xbox have a single company behind them, they can buy the exclusive rights to games, such as Vice City, for 6 months+ before allowing them to appear on other platforms. In those 6 months, developers could easily make modifications to the game in order to take advantage of the PCs superior just-about-everything (except maybe peripherals for some genres), but they don't, they add a few options menus for control redefinition and graphics options and they chuck it out with a big fanfare about how much better it is that the console version. The biggest culprit here is, of course, the Xbox, which thanks to its PC-like architecture seems to make developers think they can port to the PC without making any changes to the game.
What is even worse is when games are released on both the PC & Console at the same time, almost inevitably leading to identical products which, while perfectly acceptable for a console, utterly suck on a PC. Sometimes, it even causes them to commit the ultimate sin - not allowing you to re-define your controls.
Games such as Halo - initially intended to be a stunningly promising PC game - are snatched by console manufacturers in order to give their platform a 'killer app' to help overcome the competition. Despite promises that Halo (PC) would stem from the original code from before MS bought Bungie, it ended up being nothing more that another lame console port.
The other problem with porting games is that inevitably run badly. Being optimised for console architecture leads to all kinds of performance problems on a PC - look at Halo, even with a top of the range nVidia card (It's an nVdia optimised game after all) it's barely playable in 1280x960 and frequently lags up in 1024x768 with normal detail settings. In comparison, I can run UT2K3 - arguably a much more graphically impressive game) in 1600x1200, maximum detail, with no slowdown, on a 9800 (Again, it's nVidia optimised).
Perhaps what we need is some kind of PC Gaming body which can act on behalf of PC's in order to obtain exclusive rights to forthcoming games before the console giants can get in there and ruin them for us. Regardless, I can only see the problem getting worse as Sony & Microsoft vie for the increasingly lucrative console market.
Apologies for going on a bit, but when I feel strongly about something I tend to waffle quite a lot.
Why? One word - Ports. I am thoroughly fed up with companies putting out piss-poor console ports of games where the sole "extra feature" is the ability to play it in a resolution above PAL/NTSC. Some of you might remeber my rant about GTA Vice City and the frankly appalling way in which the PC version suffers from the same CD-streaming car pop-up that the PS2 version is afflicted with.
Because the Playstation & Xbox have a single company behind them, they can buy the exclusive rights to games, such as Vice City, for 6 months+ before allowing them to appear on other platforms. In those 6 months, developers could easily make modifications to the game in order to take advantage of the PCs superior just-about-everything (except maybe peripherals for some genres), but they don't, they add a few options menus for control redefinition and graphics options and they chuck it out with a big fanfare about how much better it is that the console version. The biggest culprit here is, of course, the Xbox, which thanks to its PC-like architecture seems to make developers think they can port to the PC without making any changes to the game.
What is even worse is when games are released on both the PC & Console at the same time, almost inevitably leading to identical products which, while perfectly acceptable for a console, utterly suck on a PC. Sometimes, it even causes them to commit the ultimate sin - not allowing you to re-define your controls.
Games such as Halo - initially intended to be a stunningly promising PC game - are snatched by console manufacturers in order to give their platform a 'killer app' to help overcome the competition. Despite promises that Halo (PC) would stem from the original code from before MS bought Bungie, it ended up being nothing more that another lame console port.
The other problem with porting games is that inevitably run badly. Being optimised for console architecture leads to all kinds of performance problems on a PC - look at Halo, even with a top of the range nVidia card (It's an nVdia optimised game after all) it's barely playable in 1280x960 and frequently lags up in 1024x768 with normal detail settings. In comparison, I can run UT2K3 - arguably a much more graphically impressive game) in 1600x1200, maximum detail, with no slowdown, on a 9800 (Again, it's nVidia optimised).
Perhaps what we need is some kind of PC Gaming body which can act on behalf of PC's in order to obtain exclusive rights to forthcoming games before the console giants can get in there and ruin them for us. Regardless, I can only see the problem getting worse as Sony & Microsoft vie for the increasingly lucrative console market.
Apologies for going on a bit, but when I feel strongly about something I tend to waffle quite a lot.
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