I guess this post is somewhat more article-based than what usually goes in this forum, but it doesn't really qualify as a "User Review," so I put it here.
Leave it to the gaming community to make me feel like a fossil at the ripe old age of 28. I've posted on forums for a while, though this is the first forum that was specifically for gaming, and I tend to feel that I've always been a little out of place in this field. On the one hand, I've played games for most of my life, and I currently work at a video game retailer, but as far as gamers go, I'm not really. My job forces me to be a bit more knowledgeable than the standard casual gamer, but by no means does it place me among the hardcore. The problem arises from the fact that the era of gaming that I am most associated with comes dangerously close to pre-dating a lot of my customers, and I'm even talking about the ones that CAN buy the "M" rated titles. I was particularly disturbed when a topic popped up at another site's forum, asking which "old-school gaming console" was their favourite, and amongst the options was the Playstation 1.
Maybe I'm not quite keeping with the times, but I find it quite difficult to consider any game "old school" once a character starts to incorporate more than 10 polygons. Maybe the PSX isn't so terribly far from this, but I'm thinking of games like 4D Boxing over here (which, incidentally, is perhaps one of the greatest boxing games, ever). What confuses me the most about all this is that there are gamers my age, and a lot of them, and we grew up on the same games from the NES forward, but a lot of them still have no clue what I'm talking about when I mention certain titles. I'll talk about Prince of Persia 2, and they'll assume I mean The Warrior Within, rather than The Shadow and the Flame.
It was at this point that it truly struck me; the reason why most of my gaming knowledge borders on the obscure is because I was gaming on the PC back when some of the people I was growing up with didn't even know what games the "IBM" had to offer. People were huddled around the schoolyard talking about Super Mario Bros 2, at around the time that I was obsessing over Maniac Mansion. I was invited over to friends' homes to play Castlevania because nobody really wanted to come over and play Police Quest. Sure, people think back and remember fondly about The Secret of Monkey Island, and I'm left to wonder how so many people remember that game, but nobody remembers Loom? (Don't get me wrong; Monkey Island is a GREAT game, but so many other games from that time period were ignored, even though there was obviously SOME exposure to PC gaming.)
So, I know that it's been something like a decade since the first Resident Evil introduced the masses to survival horror in a big way, but at the time, I didn't really like it all that much. Not that it wasn't a good game, but I felt it was borrowing heavily from the much older Alone in the Dark, which was far more scary. Discrepancies also follow when everybody remembers Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom, but it's hard to find anybody to reminisce with me over games like Syndicate, Crusader: No Remorse and The Incredible Machine. Everybody's going crazy in years of anticipation over Spore. I'm sure it'll be a great game, but I can wait, because I got my fill from playing SimLife. The PC gamers champion Fallout as one of RPG's greatest chapters, and for good reason. But where are my fellow DarkSun fans?
And now, I think at where I am now, compared to where I was, and my focus has almost entirely shifted towards the consoles, with very few PC exclusives to feel particularly proud of. American McGee's Alice was a wonderful experience. I want to give UFO: Extraterrestrials a try, but mainly because it's an almost carbon copy of one of my favourites, X-Com. And that's about all I can really name off the top of my head.
So, what brought about the 180-degree switch? How can I, a once-proud PC gamer have almost nothing to do with the platform anymore? I don't even play World of Warcraft. Even my roommate plays that, and he's about as far away from a gamer as you can get. Well, I think I've figured it out.
Back in the day, PC games were always trying to find a balance between cutting edge technology and widespread appeal. They didn't want to exclude too many people from playing their games. So long as you had a 1MB SVGA card and 32MB RAM, you were set for about 5 years. Nowadays, programmers seem to be taking more pride in the fact that people CAN'T play their game. Look at Crysis; they actually recommend that you build a new computer in order to play their game to the fullest extent! When Doom 3 came out, they sent free RAM chips with their review copies. Trying to make sure that a game will actually work on your computer has become more of a chore than a hobby, and an expensive one at that. I simply cannot afford to keep up, and even if I could, there's nothing that's really compelling me to do so.
When I buy a console, I know that when I buy a game for it, it will work, unless it's defective or suffers from a major glitch. I don't have to worry if my video card is above a certain model of a certain brand and has more megabytes of video RAM than the hairs on my head.
In the current state of affairs, I wonder if PC gaming is dying as a culture, since the majority of its games are ports from console versions. Sure, you can pump up your PC to perform better than the consoles, but it's just not worth my time, energy and money to do so. And there are fewer and fewer unique gaming experiences on the PC unless I want to play Ravenhearst. But then I think back on the days when PC gaming was ripe with innovation, unique gameplay and accessible fun, and realize that those games are faded away into the foggy cabinets of the cult division, and I wonder if PC gaming was ever truly alive to begin with.
Leave it to the gaming community to make me feel like a fossil at the ripe old age of 28. I've posted on forums for a while, though this is the first forum that was specifically for gaming, and I tend to feel that I've always been a little out of place in this field. On the one hand, I've played games for most of my life, and I currently work at a video game retailer, but as far as gamers go, I'm not really. My job forces me to be a bit more knowledgeable than the standard casual gamer, but by no means does it place me among the hardcore. The problem arises from the fact that the era of gaming that I am most associated with comes dangerously close to pre-dating a lot of my customers, and I'm even talking about the ones that CAN buy the "M" rated titles. I was particularly disturbed when a topic popped up at another site's forum, asking which "old-school gaming console" was their favourite, and amongst the options was the Playstation 1.
Maybe I'm not quite keeping with the times, but I find it quite difficult to consider any game "old school" once a character starts to incorporate more than 10 polygons. Maybe the PSX isn't so terribly far from this, but I'm thinking of games like 4D Boxing over here (which, incidentally, is perhaps one of the greatest boxing games, ever). What confuses me the most about all this is that there are gamers my age, and a lot of them, and we grew up on the same games from the NES forward, but a lot of them still have no clue what I'm talking about when I mention certain titles. I'll talk about Prince of Persia 2, and they'll assume I mean The Warrior Within, rather than The Shadow and the Flame.
It was at this point that it truly struck me; the reason why most of my gaming knowledge borders on the obscure is because I was gaming on the PC back when some of the people I was growing up with didn't even know what games the "IBM" had to offer. People were huddled around the schoolyard talking about Super Mario Bros 2, at around the time that I was obsessing over Maniac Mansion. I was invited over to friends' homes to play Castlevania because nobody really wanted to come over and play Police Quest. Sure, people think back and remember fondly about The Secret of Monkey Island, and I'm left to wonder how so many people remember that game, but nobody remembers Loom? (Don't get me wrong; Monkey Island is a GREAT game, but so many other games from that time period were ignored, even though there was obviously SOME exposure to PC gaming.)
So, I know that it's been something like a decade since the first Resident Evil introduced the masses to survival horror in a big way, but at the time, I didn't really like it all that much. Not that it wasn't a good game, but I felt it was borrowing heavily from the much older Alone in the Dark, which was far more scary. Discrepancies also follow when everybody remembers Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D and Doom, but it's hard to find anybody to reminisce with me over games like Syndicate, Crusader: No Remorse and The Incredible Machine. Everybody's going crazy in years of anticipation over Spore. I'm sure it'll be a great game, but I can wait, because I got my fill from playing SimLife. The PC gamers champion Fallout as one of RPG's greatest chapters, and for good reason. But where are my fellow DarkSun fans?
And now, I think at where I am now, compared to where I was, and my focus has almost entirely shifted towards the consoles, with very few PC exclusives to feel particularly proud of. American McGee's Alice was a wonderful experience. I want to give UFO: Extraterrestrials a try, but mainly because it's an almost carbon copy of one of my favourites, X-Com. And that's about all I can really name off the top of my head.
So, what brought about the 180-degree switch? How can I, a once-proud PC gamer have almost nothing to do with the platform anymore? I don't even play World of Warcraft. Even my roommate plays that, and he's about as far away from a gamer as you can get. Well, I think I've figured it out.
Back in the day, PC games were always trying to find a balance between cutting edge technology and widespread appeal. They didn't want to exclude too many people from playing their games. So long as you had a 1MB SVGA card and 32MB RAM, you were set for about 5 years. Nowadays, programmers seem to be taking more pride in the fact that people CAN'T play their game. Look at Crysis; they actually recommend that you build a new computer in order to play their game to the fullest extent! When Doom 3 came out, they sent free RAM chips with their review copies. Trying to make sure that a game will actually work on your computer has become more of a chore than a hobby, and an expensive one at that. I simply cannot afford to keep up, and even if I could, there's nothing that's really compelling me to do so.
When I buy a console, I know that when I buy a game for it, it will work, unless it's defective or suffers from a major glitch. I don't have to worry if my video card is above a certain model of a certain brand and has more megabytes of video RAM than the hairs on my head.
In the current state of affairs, I wonder if PC gaming is dying as a culture, since the majority of its games are ports from console versions. Sure, you can pump up your PC to perform better than the consoles, but it's just not worth my time, energy and money to do so. And there are fewer and fewer unique gaming experiences on the PC unless I want to play Ravenhearst. But then I think back on the days when PC gaming was ripe with innovation, unique gameplay and accessible fun, and realize that those games are faded away into the foggy cabinets of the cult division, and I wonder if PC gaming was ever truly alive to begin with.
