The Might of PC Gamers!

[Salnax]

Chibi.V.29 said:

Salnax said:

Permission to speak frankly? Alright...

PC Gaming is simultaneously the most casual and hardcore form of gaming. On one hand, you have Flash and Facebook games that require about 2 seconds of prior investment before playing. On the other hand, you have these technological behemoths of games. The problem the PC has is the uncanny valley between.

Most PC users (not gamers) don't know shit about their video cards, available memory, or any of that. Therefore, the prospect of actually buying a PC game becomes precarious for the noob. Either they edge away from buying a top notch game, or they buy a game too advanced for their system, and need to buy a part or two later on, delaying the fun. This is deadly for PC developers, forcing them to focus either on a huge range of theoretically powered PCs or focusing on an existing market.

Consoles have the advantage of being clones. The Wii I got in 2006 plays the games I buy in 2010. This eliminates a major hassle, and makes the Wii therefore more attractive to a casual or only slightly serious gamer.

The same goes for PC controls. In theory, the PC has better controls than any system, combining a hyper-accurate mouse with a huge array of keys and possible controller support. The problem is, this is nearly incomprehensible for newcomers. Even the DS, with arguably the simplest controls this generation, has a touchscreen, four regular buttons, four arrows, a couple of buttons used for menus sometimes, a microphone, and another pair of buttons in the frikin back. Unless the PC game in question requires just the mouse, it can be truly incomprehensible.

I do not dislike the PC as a platform. However, I think the PC, by its very nature, is an exclusive system that drives away its own potential audience.

As for Nintendo's ability to innovate, that is a topic for another day.

You dont need to know a thing about your comp to play games on it XD 99.9% of PC games can run on just about any PC with fairly simple settings. Most people can work out that changing graphics from Low to high means they get better. You dont have to go through list of settings. even crysis has a setting for just Low, Medium, High, very high. Even i could work that out when i was about 6 XDDDD 

You think the 12 million wow players all know what there graphics card is? heck i dare say some of them dont even know what a graphics card is.

Also if can genanly think of anything Nintendo have done in last 10 years that has truly totally revolutionised the gaming industry other than the 2 things i said i will make this face O_O The true revelation in gaming where the simple ones. Sony using disks for concol games. Microsoft bringing online to consols. yet both of them where done by PC waaaaaaaaaaaaay before. Hell if you wanna go realy deep you could argue that sega came up with the idea of wii more kind of game play. (even if they did it badly)

Oh and yet the wii from back in 2005 can play everything from 2010 in all its shovelware glory (im jking but it was was worth it lol)

Do not underestimate the crappiness of peoples' PCs. You'd be surprised how many people use five year old PCs and laptops that were shit back then.

As for Nintendo's innovations, they have more to do with game design than true tech.

First of all, note the control systems for both the DS and Wii. There are a LOT of them. Depending on the game in question, Wii games from Nintendo have used traditional control schemes, NES style control schemes, and buttonless control schemes using the same Wiimote/Nunchuck combo, or even just a Wiimote. Therefore, a single system of input can fulfill a variety of roles without any two styles clashing.

This is a big deal. Traditionally, game design since the Atari era has been about giving the player as many ways to manipulate the onscreen events. The Wii's control scheme gives players exactly as many buttons as they need to play a game. This drastically reduces the learning curve.

The DS does a similar thing using its wide variety of input options. Players can use SNES style controls, simply poke at the screen with with the stylus, or use the stylus in one hand and the D-Pad with the other. Once again, this gives a variety of ways to control games without ever overwhelming the player.

 

Another innovation from Nintendo is the reinvention of extinct or obscure genres. Long story short, Nintendo took a weird route this generation. They assumed that every major genre had been created, and revisited them, investing resources in dead genres.

Think about the results this has had. Would 2D platformers have been reintroduced to the market if Nintendo hadn't been so sucessful using modern tech to power a 2D Mario? Could party games ever have been given new life without the creation of motion-based minigames? How could educational games have survived without the sucess of Brain Age? Would games like Farmville be as sucessful without Animal Crossing's leading the way?

By creating highly sucessful games in dead genres, Nintendo recreated entire markets. Today, we can actually have a debate about which platformer was best this year, simply because Nintendo proved it was a viable genre in this day and age, thanks to modern tech. In this sense, Nintendo is more of a pioneer than an innovater.

 

I won't deny the shovelware comment though. Shovelware sucks.