I was quite interested when i read the replies on my halo thread, and it got me thinking... If you had to choose (for whatever reason) which setup would you have for gaming? A PC or a console? And what do you classify as a gamer... a person at a PC reguarly playing WoW or CSS, or someone who plays their Xbox360 only when their firends are their just to brag... (u get the idea) So do you see yourself as a gamer? or just as someone who occasionally will play a videogame...
A typical gamer IMO is someone who plays PC or console games regularly every day. Of course theres varying degrees of gaming. Gamers can be PC as well as console games and the games themselves don't matter, gaming is gaming. Myself I don't play games as often as a classified gamer, once every other day or so.
Yeah there are also varying levels of gamers as well, those who play because it's fun and they just want a bit of entertainment and those who take it so seriously if they can't game they start sweating and shaking whilst curled up in the corner of the room...hah: Anyway, I wouldn't call myself a gamer as I only play now and then, when i do play it's Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Some guys in the year below me at school are pretty keen gamers though.
I'm a serious gamer, as you can see from the 'What Game are you playing?' thread I play on the PC/Console whenever I have free time really. Heck, I'm playing Black on the PS2 while writing this very post
Black, man do I want that game...anyway I game alot but I'm far from hardcore. I'm way more interested in having a fun, memerable experience, rather than getting all competitive and beating the game on the hardest difficulty. I don't want to be frustrated and retry the same scene a few dozen times so I guess you'd call me a casual enthusiast, I realize that's a big contradiction but it's how I look at it. I know a lot of people who only use their console for gaming as their PC is pretty junky. It's pretty common as either, as I said they don't have a good PC, or the games their interested in are already on the console anyway. Both platforms have their merits and I guess the console is more synonymous with gaming as thats pretty much the whole draw save for DVD playback mainly. I don't know what everyone else thinks but I feel that PC gamers are usually a little more hardcore. Your hear about big time LAN parties and PC gaming competitions more than that of the PS2 platform for instance. It's just a different league as everyone can tot jazzy hardware and all I guess.
Very good point there Ex, PC gamers are usually the more hardcore as a lot of PC games have their lives extended with the multiplayer aspect, finding someone to play against is no real problem all you need to do is connect, find a server and play. Simple as. With consoles it's a little harder, you need multiple TVs and multiple controllers, plus more consoles, that's not to say that it doesn't happen though. Me and the guys at work regularly take our Xbox 360's to the managers house and have a massive Perfect Dark Zero game, so much fun, even if half the guys get pwned all the time by the ones who play it more As for the competition part, you're right about that, most gamers play games to see how quickly they can finish it on the hardest difficulty possible. Now that's more a competitive gamer than a hardcore gamer to me. As a hardcore gamer, I think, should be known as someone who spends a lot of time in their games, getting all the potential fun from the game, exploring everything the game has to offer. When you start trying to complete the game as fast as possible, you miss out on half the game, you go right past a lot of things the makers spent time putting into the game to make it that much better. I realised this myself when I was playing Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, and my friend was teasing me that he was way ahead of me. I started playing it much faster but then I suddenly stopped for a second. I realised this game was no longer the awesome title I had thought it to be, so I went back to how I normally play games and it was immediatly better, I wanted to play it more, I didn't care if I was the last person to finish it in the world, I was enjoying it. That, to me, is what hardcore gaming is about.
I don't clasify myself as a hardcore gamer, but i do enjoy the occasional game, usually atleast 5 hours at a time every few days. But if i had a choice, PC would defiantely take the win. Better upgradeability, more customisation, better graphics. Need i say more?
"Hardcore Gamer" Do you think you have to be a certain type of person to be this? i mean the common stereotype of a hardcore gamer is basically .... a loner. Someone who has v. poor social skills and tries to counteract this by latching on to something a lttle more than most people (e.g games, goth metal etc) But this stereotype seems to be unfounded, a lot of extreme cases of "hardcore" gaming seems to be carried out by fairly regular people. I remember some guy in America who let his baby starve to death because he was playing Everquest too much, but this was someone with a family and stable life so what was it about him that caused this extreme case to occur?...
Holy, what kind of loser leaves a baby unattended that long, I mean even the best game in the world can't be that captivating, though apparently for some it is. Anyway I totally second what you're saying WWR and Knev. Particularly about the hardcore vs. competitive bit. Competitive people, the way I see it, often spend most of their time online with other humans, games like Counterstike. Hardcore people may do that but they're also the ones who go and try and unlock every extra and easteregg the game has to offer. They play things until it's all been done and then some in many cases. The PC is a great gaming platform but keep in mind it has it's drawbacks. I mean you've got to have serious money to drop on a new components if you plan to max settings year after year and all. Chances are it's not going to work how it did the day before all the time, some days just yeild crappy performance and unresponsivness, at least in my experience. You've got random rebooting and software bugs to contend with on occasion. You've got to wait for all 5 disks to install of pay the extra few $ for the DVD version. It's kind of depressing to think that your $500 video card will be midrange by the next year. And there are some games that just don't play well and therefore aren't generally published for the PC. Devil May Cry 1 or 2 never made it, a lot of the castlevania games didn't make it, sports and racing titles are pretty cumbersome, fighting games are pretty much non existant. But if shooters and strategy, RPG's, and shooters are your thing you're all set. Consoles aren't ideal for shooters and are bad for strategy but excell in the afore mentioned things. You don't need to install anything or worry about viruses, or spyware, they just work. They're cheap and non-upgradability is kind of nice when you know that developers will incrimentally improve the graphics and feature sets over the consoles life so you don't have to spend any more cash. If the PS3 really does have mouse and keyboard support it would really own in my opinion.
In a lot of ways, computers are better for games, like the sheer power and graphical capability of top-end machines. But in the end, you hear of people complaining at high prices for next-gen consoles but when you think of it, that next gen console costs less than the highest range GFX card. PCs may offer better control over games thanks to the WSAD keyboard and mouse too, but there are some games that are just better with a controller, hence the reason they invented PC pads and made it so the 360 wired pad can be used on XP. But as Ex said, there are numerous problems with a PC, hard drive space for example, some of today's games are absoloutly HUGE in terms of how much space they need, I remember a while ago looking at a newly released game and asking how long it would be before games started to need a gigabyte of hard drive space. Turns out it was far shorter than I expected. Plus any number of things can go wrong or you may not meet the specs required for the game, plus if you upgrade too much, you lose your old favourites due to your PC now being too good to run them. Consoles, on the other hand, are ready to go at all times, all you need to do is plug in three things, the power cord, the video cable and the controller. Then insert your game and start playing, no installing, no hard drive, just instant gaming. Consoles never need to be upgraded, seeing as game makers find new ways to strech the capabilities of the consoles in future games. Rather than with PC games where the latest one will push your PC to the limits, console games start off as launch titles which only use about 20% of the potential of the machine and steadily get better as they learn what it's capable of. I do agree with Knev to some levels with being a Hardcore gamer, but I think it's more in stages, you have gamers who are hardcore to the point of being plain sad when they play 24/7 with no girlfriend, job or friends. Then you have lesser versions of this, people who still take a break at some point even if it is just to sleep. Then you have people like me, who play all the time at home, but I have priorities, oddly enough gaming is one of the lower catagories, below eating, drinking, working, sleeping and seeing my fiance. I do love to play games whenever I can, but I limit myself and stop playing when I need to do something else, if there is a good reason, I am surprisingly easy to tear away from a game. But there is another kind of gamer in the world, best known to many people (especially those of an RPG background) as munchkins. These are the people who get a game, find all the cheats for it, and then beat the game in the stupidest way possible, like putting on God Mode and Inf Ammo then beating it with only the weakest weapon in the game. To me, that isn't achievement, it's not the way the makers designed the game, you're not playing a game to enjoy it, nor even to beat it as fast as possible, you're playing the game to brag to others that you've finished it and cross off another game on your list of games. This is what I like about a feature of the Xbox 360, the Gamerscore system, basically each game has a set number of points avaliable (usually 1000 or so) and you get these points from doing certain things, some of the points are gotten for finishing the game, but the majority of the points come from getting all the extras and unlockables avaliable, encouraging you to get everything in the game to increase your overall score. In responce to your point about consoles and shooter games Ex, you are correct, consoles are not best designed for shooter games. I remember all the problems I had with Killzone and Halo, but I found that it was partly my lack of experience with the method of control and partly it wasn't done correctly. It hasn't been until I played Black for PS2, CoD2 and Condemned for the 360 that I realised that things had changed, shooters worked on consoles now, and they worked well. In fact, in some ways there are certain aspects of shooters that can't be reproduced in PCs. Condemned, for example, if an enemy does a berserk attack on you (leaps on you and goes furious) you have to move both control sticks around quickly and in all different directions, now this works because it builds on your own desperation to get free. But that would be impossible with a PC, that is the equivalent of randomly moving the mouse around and hammering the WSAD keys in random sequences, it just doesn't have the feel. I think consoles just feel more into the game, because you are holding something and controlling the game with small movements of your thumbs that you hear no sounds from, rather than the light click of when you use the keyboard/mouse combo. Personally I could compare CoD2 on PC and 360 and I would say I feel more involved in the 360 version, for some though, this may be a bad thing, the whole computer games aren't meant to be real arguement.
I played both too. Loved both but i guess since have weak sound (regular stereo) on my TV i prefer pc alllll the way. Surround sound pc speakers and call of duty 2 make an awesome combination. As for games in general, certain games are meant to be played on console. Metal Gear, any fighting game, and adventure type games just feel like they should be played on a couch, not slouching on a computer chair. I haven't seen many home setups of PCs where they invite multiple people to sit and look at the same screen together. Usually the person playing the pc game is hogging up all the viewing space, so it doesn't seem practical to have physical bodies surrounding one monitor even if you do have 5 gamepads. thats where consoles are way better. you can get all ur pals on a sofa/couch/bed/whatever furniture, and just play side by side, beatin on each other if your team mate looses, or jump up and down in his face to celebrate a hadouken/touchdown/final lap. PC however is GREAT for an online multiplay experience. Tell those friends to get off your couch and get on the server, or bring their laptops to your house and then you've re created the "console" feel on PC. If i were on an island with electricity by myself, PC would be my choice. If it were in a nuclear safehouse with my friends, i would rather have a console....
Great points guys! One more thing I might add is that, in more recent years it seems that consoles are gradually becoming more PC like, and vise versa. For example the Xbox and X360 have a lot of media center like function. There are rumors of people getting linux and web browsing with their consoles. It's likely the PS3 will have keyboard and mouse support. And then on the other side of things the PC industy is pushing the whole home entertainment center idea, not to mention gaming being more popular than ever on the PC platform, a task which as well as it works it wasn't the origional plan to have your computer serve as a gaming machine. But now that what most of use it for (in conjuction with the web browsing, audio creation, etc...), a task that was once reserved for your Atari. I wonder just how close the two platforms will really get as Microsoft in particular seems to be pushing the multifunction bar.
I like FPS games, and while there have been notable exceptions for the console, I think because of the keyboard mouse combination native to computers, FPS games are best served on the PC, whereas a fighting game like Street Fighter, Soul Calibur, are much better suited to something with a D-pad or joystick controller.
I do agree with you here, but don't you think that this will become a major problem for the PC. i'm just worried that a point will come when the consoles will totally rival the PC for functionality. And then wont the PC become obsolete? The originality and change that the PC brings will no longer be in the hands of the people nut in the hands of major publishers... And with consoles being reguarly cheaper than a high end PC, perhaps people will simplay say "what is the point in having a PC for gaming" The multiplayer advantage of the PC could be counter-acted by the increased connectivity to the internet and therefore to their consoles. Is the PC destined just to be used for word processing?...
While I think they'll become very similar I hightly doubut Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo would every take it so far that they begin to build computer gaming consoles that rival desktops. It's not financially feasible to spend all the money on developing and lisencing desktop technology when at heart it's a console meant for gaming, not photoshop and MS Word. There will always be enough innovation in the desktop field that I hope it won't come to loosing a platfrom. Interesting idea we have here though.
