User blog comment:Airos/Rant: Why I dislike PC gaming/@comment-667748-20110608090457/@comment-164376-20110608114335

Ports can go both ways. Final Fantasy 7 and 8 were PSX first and PC second. Just about any FPS is PC first. There were many complaints about the quality of Half-Life 2, and the orange box in general, on the PS3.

Then there's the fact that a lot of things just plain don't come to the consoles even when they're available on the PC. Little Big Planet has proven that it is possible to share user-created content on the PS3. 3D Dot Game Heroes allows use- created content. To the extent that WIllowtree works, I can get user-created content in Borderlands. Why not Oblivion? Why not Fallout 3? Why not Portal? Many developers claim to "embrace" the mod community, yet they completely ignore the consoles. Hell, BethSoft released the mod tools for Fallout 3 for free. Even if you needed a PC to run the tools, it's no excuse for the mod not to be run on a console.

As far as standards in the PC world, it's not about "choice", it's about "my system off the shelf may not be able to run this game". Seriously. My old P4 desktop flat out would not run Neverwinter Nights until I bought a new video card and more ram. That was $150 on top of the $50 for the game because my computer was 2 years older than the game. That was a system that I bought "off the shelf", and within 2 years it was crap until I started upgrading the hardware. 4 years later and my PS3 continues to play any PS3 game I put into it.

And that's hardware. Software is just as bad. You had to jump through hoops to get a DOS game to run in Win95/98 because the games were looking for "Extended" and "Expanded" memory. Which was something that plain didn't exist anymore, at least until someone was nice enough to develop DosBox in 2002. And if you could get it to run, many were unplayable because the processor was just too fast and the game would fly across the screen. Vista was a pain to get any 98/2k/XP programs to run on, and those were only "last gen" programs at the time.

And that is just one OS. You have developers ignoring Mac. Those that actually care about Mac ignore Linux.

The problem isn't that a choice needs to be made, it's that there are too many choices for developers to keep up with. In the 1980's any major computer game was available on IBM and Apple, many were also available on C64/128 and/or Amiga. Because each platform was drastically different in what it could and could not do, each version of the game was developed for that system. Now you've got so many platforms that a developer has to try and make one engine that's going to function across several different systems, and it's just not going to work as well on some of them as it does on others. Putting a Windows game on my Linux PC is about as easy as putting a Ford parts into my Kia jeep. With enough understanding of how the system works it can be done, but it's not going to be easy and it'll be ugly if it breaks.

Even still, I made my choice. So why am I being punished for it? That's like saying, "Fords can only be driven at a top speed of 40 miles an hour because we haven't developed a suspension that can withstand speeds faster than that. You can try your luck with some after-market stuff, but because we won't release blueprints nobody is quite sure how to build them correctly. Here are you keys, try not to crash".

The backwards compatibility of the PS3 is the fault of trying to make the machine do more things than it needed to do. I have the 60gb model, so yes I can play PS2 games. Still, Sony got too many complaints that the price was too high, so they cut the BC chip to cut costs. There are a bunch of other things I would rather they cut to keep BC. Again, I feel that's the fault of consoles trying to be like PCs. I don't need all the crap like playing video files, or music, or pictures. My computer can do that. Hell, my phone can do that. I want my video game system to play video games, not MP3s and WMVs.