Opinion: An ode to the enduring greatness of the humble PC, by Nathan Lawrence, aged... you know, we don't really know. But he loves his PC!
As PC gamers, we’ve had our fair share of gloomy gaming days that threaten to take the wind out of our collective sails. The rise of the multiplatform design logic has often made us feel secondary to the ever-increasing popularity of consoles, mod support continues to dwindle and let’s not get started on the devolutionary approach to dedicated servers. But despite these many hits across the board, we can still hold our heads high as devotees of what is still, to this day, the greatest gaming platform ever forged: the PC.
When I say ‘gaming platform’, I’m referring to real gamers whose primary PC-owning purpose is for pwning n00bs or otherwise getting amongst it on some form of digital battlefield. We can tweak our gaming experiences in countless possible ways, switching out hardware and fiddling with settings to push our rigs and personalise our gaming moments in ways that consolers don’t even know how to dream of.
While the console world is stuck in the mindset of defining their platforms in terms of past (last-gen), present (current-gen) and future (next-gen), the PC as a gaming platform is in a constant awesome state of flux; a holy trinity platform that embraces past, present and future, all the while perpetually erring on the side of next-gen.
After all, we don’t have to count down the number of E3s until we get to hear the announcement of our next gaming platform.
While developers may have their work cut out for them when designing for a platform (that would be the PC, folks) that has near-unlimited hardware/software combinations that impact the playability of their product, they’re still forging titles for a platform that can show off their respective games at the peak of their potentiality. When I reviewed Crysis 2 earlier in the year on Xbox 360, I had to ask a seasoned consoler just how good it looked. I knew it was pretty on the Xbox by console standards, but I see the world through PC-tinted glasses and knew that the PC version of Crysis 2 looked better on the platform that spawned its preceding title. And Crysis 2 is hardly the prettiest game to ever grace PC screens.
And then, of course, there are the many gaming genres that have still yet to be faithfully translated from their PC roots to console screens. First-person shooters enjoy a popular niche on current-gen consoles, but cannot compete with the navigation prowess of a keyboard/mouse combo. On the same rationale, real-time strategy games and simulators (racing titles excluded) also spring to mind, and serve as strong reminders that 14 buttons on a console controller struggle to compete with the hundreds of potential control combinations on a PC. Let us also not forget that small issue of the crucial role a mouse plays in these popular gaming genres.
As frustrating as it is to see our beloved PC gaming platform take hits in the form of dwindling mod support, odd dedicated server hybrids and messy afterthought ports of multiplatform games, the PC still stands as my gaming platform of choice, and I don’t ever see that changing. Do you?
Issue: 137 | June, 2012