Hating "The Consoles" is extremely silly. I grew up on a console. Not just A Console, but The Best Console in the History of Mankind: The SNES. I still play SNES games. On my PC. Because I can. Because a PC is awesome like that. It can be other consoles.
No PC Gamer should ever hate on the Nintendos. They have no impact on our gaming whatsoever. The only downside to Nintendo games is that they are never ported to PCs! Come on, we want to play NSMBW on more than 20 emulated frames per second.
The Playstations barely had more effect. We share a good number of titles, especially during the PSX and PS2 eras. One of them was Sands of Time, one of the best games ever. Would that even have gotten made without the Playstation? And as the counter to Nintendo's eternal kid-friendliness, our violent gorefests became more accepted - thank you, Resident Evil.
The Consoles were either irrelevant (in a good way) or even helpful.
Then came the XBox. Specifically Halo. They wanted a big important shooter on their new brick of mediocre hardware, but had to make it work on that clumsy clumsy controller. All they had to do was radically change the way you play a shooter until all you had to worry about was pulling the trigger when an enemy happened to be in your crosshairs (because actual aiming is impossible) and taking cover every .7 seconds. The rest happened on its own, because they ran out of buttons for that, after assiging a whole 2 and a half weapons to them!
Once they made enough ignorant fools buy this shrine to simplicity for this magical thing called online multiplayer, they mistook it for great success. Worse, this convinced them that they did something on their console that was thought to be the domain of the PC before. Naturally, this meant the XBox was pretty much a replacement for the PC. Everything that works on the Box will work on the PC, too. So clearly, we only need to work on the Box-version now, the PC version will practically make itself.
That wasn't an issue for Halo, cuz it never came out on PC (oh it did? No PC Gamer noticed!). But everyone and their dog promptly made Box-games, because for some inexplaicable reason it meant easy money. Nobody cared that since then PC Gamers had to put up with all the stupidity that survived the "port" from the Boxes, because money. One of the earliest and still one of the worst offenders is Oblivion with the worst, needlessly clunky, huge-lettered inventory system in history. You'd think someone would have taken notice, but nothing changed in the slightest. If anything it became worse.
Health regenerates because looking at the floor is hard; menus are a pain in the ass because more than 4 on-screen directions are complicated; 17 actions are mapped to the same key/button because you only have 10, 6 of which are reserved for pointless melee attacks; quicksaving is dying out because... um... yeah, WHY is quicksaving dying out - you have fucking hard drives! ... oh I know, quicksaving is dying out because repeating the same shit 17 times from the same goddamn checkpoint hides the fact that our greybrown game is only 3 hours long; we need to scour the internet for custom cfg/ini-files if we dare to have a controller other than the 360's - which we then cannot reconfigure; graphics have looked the same for 7 years because copying motion controls is cheaper than starting a whole new generation. I literally cannot think of one good thing the XBoxes brought to Gaming as a whole, let alone to PC Gaming. Microsoft, Activision and EA are richer, but our glorious hobby is definitely poorer for it.
So yeah.
It's definitely silly to hate on The Consoles. It is, however, perfectly natural when PC Gamers criticize trends in gaming brought on by the XBoxes, and the XBoxes alone.
No PC Gamer should ever hate on the Nintendos. They have no impact on our gaming whatsoever. The only downside to Nintendo games is that they are never ported to PCs! Come on, we want to play NSMBW on more than 20 emulated frames per second.
The Playstations barely had more effect. We share a good number of titles, especially during the PSX and PS2 eras. One of them was Sands of Time, one of the best games ever. Would that even have gotten made without the Playstation? And as the counter to Nintendo's eternal kid-friendliness, our violent gorefests became more accepted - thank you, Resident Evil.
The Consoles were either irrelevant (in a good way) or even helpful.
Then came the XBox. Specifically Halo. They wanted a big important shooter on their new brick of mediocre hardware, but had to make it work on that clumsy clumsy controller. All they had to do was radically change the way you play a shooter until all you had to worry about was pulling the trigger when an enemy happened to be in your crosshairs (because actual aiming is impossible) and taking cover every .7 seconds. The rest happened on its own, because they ran out of buttons for that, after assiging a whole 2 and a half weapons to them!
Once they made enough ignorant fools buy this shrine to simplicity for this magical thing called online multiplayer, they mistook it for great success. Worse, this convinced them that they did something on their console that was thought to be the domain of the PC before. Naturally, this meant the XBox was pretty much a replacement for the PC. Everything that works on the Box will work on the PC, too. So clearly, we only need to work on the Box-version now, the PC version will practically make itself.
That wasn't an issue for Halo, cuz it never came out on PC (oh it did? No PC Gamer noticed!). But everyone and their dog promptly made Box-games, because for some inexplaicable reason it meant easy money. Nobody cared that since then PC Gamers had to put up with all the stupidity that survived the "port" from the Boxes, because money. One of the earliest and still one of the worst offenders is Oblivion with the worst, needlessly clunky, huge-lettered inventory system in history. You'd think someone would have taken notice, but nothing changed in the slightest. If anything it became worse.
Health regenerates because looking at the floor is hard; menus are a pain in the ass because more than 4 on-screen directions are complicated; 17 actions are mapped to the same key/button because you only have 10, 6 of which are reserved for pointless melee attacks; quicksaving is dying out because... um... yeah, WHY is quicksaving dying out - you have fucking hard drives! ... oh I know, quicksaving is dying out because repeating the same shit 17 times from the same goddamn checkpoint hides the fact that our greybrown game is only 3 hours long; we need to scour the internet for custom cfg/ini-files if we dare to have a controller other than the 360's - which we then cannot reconfigure; graphics have looked the same for 7 years because copying motion controls is cheaper than starting a whole new generation. I literally cannot think of one good thing the XBoxes brought to Gaming as a whole, let alone to PC Gaming. Microsoft, Activision and EA are richer, but our glorious hobby is definitely poorer for it.
So yeah.
It's definitely silly to hate on The Consoles. It is, however, perfectly natural when PC Gamers criticize trends in gaming brought on by the XBoxes, and the XBoxes alone.
