Anime How much do you hate consoles? (PC master race sentiment)

[Lyric Suite]

I hate console players more than i hate the machines.

 

[Nutmeg]

the term "PC master race" referred originally to complex gameplay

Can you name some PC games with actually "complex gameplay"? Most only look complex until you learn that you can ignore 95% of the options they give when it comes to overcoming the trivial challenges they throw your way, and thus they all boil down to incredibly simple brain dead games where the only difficulty is the initial learning curve of figuring out all the shit you can ignore.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

and then when you're given master of orion 3 you cry "spreadsheet".

 

[Nutmeg]

I should revisit some 4X classics with the more generous perspective that faction choice is difficulty setting, not a "house rule" handicap. It could be that there are more complex games buried in there unlocked by choosing weaker factions.

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Pc gaymers are the biggest faggots and mugs around. Ass raped by steam/gabe and his macro transactions, Nvidia and all that gacha/f2p shit.

Are you cunts for real?

 

[Humanophage]

the term "PC master race" referred originally to complex gameplay

Can you name some PC games with actually "complex gameplay"? Most only look complex until you learn that you can ignore 95% of the options they give when it comes to overcoming the trivial challenges they throw your way, and thus they all boil down to incredibly simple brain dead games where the only difficulty is the initial learning curve of figuring out all the shit you can ignore.

Firstly, you seem to be confusing "complex" with "difficult". Simply being complex is already an asset that is chronically lacking in consolised games which keep "streamlining" everything and reducing complexity. In that tradition, complexity is often seen as "feature bloat". For example, something like Victoria 2 is not very difficult, but still has enjoyable complexity that permits intellectual enjoyment. Consolised games tend to achieve difficulty via fast twitching, which is really quite worthless.

Secondly, there are quite a lot of both complex and difficult PC games even with just the AI. For example, Civilization 4 (Deity), Old World (The Great), Underrail, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (maps like Devil in the Details), Conquest of Elysium, Dominions all have plenty of difficulty in addition to complexity.

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

I hate modern consoles, anything from the 7th gen going forward has no reason to exist. I don't hate the earlier generations because I was a kid in the 90s who simply couldn't afford a PC and didn't have parents who could afford one until around the turn of the millennium. Even at that point, the computer I got was nowhere near capable of doing what my Nintendo could graphically or multiplayer-wise due to dial-up and low-performance hardware. My first PC was one of those Dell Y2K-ready packages that came with a printer, I was lucky to fit 15 games (minimum install) on its 10gig hard drive.

Really, I was only able to become a dedicated PC gamer around 2005 when I got a hand-me-down XP machine from my uncle that could actually play then-current (3D) games as well as the stuff I liked from my old PC smoothly. By 2007, most of my irl buddies moved off to college and that was the official end of my days of couch co-op on outdated consoles.

 

[cretin]

I only dislike consoles insofar as modern consoles are just shittier PCs with a bunch of spiteful limitations by the manufacturer.

 

[StrongBelwas]

Used to feel pretty strongly about not liking them, nowadays I don't really care. The 2000s were grim, but I've increasingly come to feel that the current state of decline was inevitable and consoles getting more aggressively into what was traditionally PC territory just sped it up.

 

[Nutmeg]

Firstly, you seem to be confusing "complex" with "difficult".

I'm doing no such thing.

By way of example, let's say there's a strategy game (turn based or real time, it doesn't matter) with 3 factions, each capable of putting 30 different kinds of units onto a complex game map consisting of all kinds of terrain all of which are defined by a set of 16 numerical fields and other attributes, on top of that the game has 5 primary and 7 secondary resources to manage and 10s of global upgrades of all sorts. Descriptively, it's a very complex system. But if the result of this complex system is that "spamming" only 1 kind of unit out of 30 is optimal for destroying the opponent, and only gathering only 1 kind of resource is necessary to "spam" that unit, then the game arising from the system turns out to be very simple.

Almost every "complex" PC game is like this.

 

[Nutmeg]

Civilization 4 (Deity), Old World (The Great), Underrail, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 (maps like Devil in the Details), Conquest of Elysium, Dominions all have plenty of difficulty in addition to complexity.

I've played 2 of the games you've listed above, HoMM3 and Civ4. I love these games dearly, but they're not really complex games.

Civ4 boils down to a turn by turn tile permutation puzzle game (no different, essentially, to any Japanese arcade tile matching game like Money Idol Exchanger) where the optimal permutation changes with the periodically evolving strategy the player is pursuing. Choosing a strategy at each periodic decision point is a matter of mechanically checking a small set of viable strategies against a simple list of criteria describing the game so far.

HoMM3 is simpler, as it's about visiting tiles with a cursor (hero), and the order in which you do so is determined by simple exploration heuristics and a fairly static ordering of tile values (e.g. Griffin Conservatories and other tiles granting high level creatures are valuable) (with some tiles only being accessible after meeting a certain power level). There's also a logistics chain set up puzzle aspect to the game.

I haven't played the others.

 

[Iucounu]

I wouldn't mind consoles if games were made exclusively for either console or PC. It's when devs try to make them run on both platforms we usually get compromise and decline.

And which component is it we don't like: the console itself, its handheld controller, TV screen, games or players? Keep in mind you can(?) connect a console to a PC screen, keyboard and mouse too. A handheld controller might be superior for certain types of games (racing?), and can also be connected to a PC. TV screens are practical if several persons participate in the same room. Retarded console gamers nowadays play PC games too, or maybe PC gamers themselves have become more retarded.

Soundtrack:

Problematic.

 

[gurugeorge]

Much has been said about the crucial role that the advent of console ports played in the catastrophic mid-2000s decline of the RPG. The normalisation of degenerate weeb style and genres among white youth. Switching to "cinematic" cutscenes because it's hard to see detailed interface on the television or interact with it without a mouse. Destruction of complex gameplay or the reduction of difficulty to reaction times. The absence of transition from childhood to adulthood as you graduated from NES to PC. The physical marginalisation of PC games in CD shops where they were relegated to single smaller stands. The influence of the consoles has been malign and extensive, especially starting from Playstation and XBox. The gaming traditions which were most insulated from consoles have been the most fruitful in terms of decent games (Germany, Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, Sweden, etc.) Even after the relative decline in console dominance thanks to Steam, we still now have to live with their influence left after their thrust.

Yet although many on the Codex express anti-console prejudice, some seem to tolerate them or even like them (see e.g. the JRPG subforum). Besides, people sometimes misconstrue PC supremacy as being based on graphics, whereas it is based on the content and type of gameplay. E.g. the term "PC master race" referred originally to complex gameplay, but then for some people it came to mean "fancy graphics due to updateable hardware".

How much do you subscribe to PC supremacism and hate the consolefag?

Soundtrack:

Yeah nice summary. All that, and yes it's mainly how the influence of consoles in terms of both their hardware requirements and their laughably-misnamed "controller" interfaces, has stunted the design and development of vidya from what it was on a trajectory to being and could have been.

Paradigmatic for me was the absolutely appalling drop in quality from Deus Ex to Deus Ex: Invisible War. Living through that was incredibly depressing at the time because one had expected the sequel to be bigger, grander, more complex, etc., and the opposite happened.

 

[Gerrard]

This much

 

[Humanophage]

And which component is it we don't like: the console itself, its handheld controller, TV screen, games or players? Keep in mind you can(?) connect a console to a PC screen, keyboard and mouse too. A handheld controller might be superior for certain types of games (racing?), and can also be connected to a PC. TV screens are practical if several persons participate in the same room. Retarded console gamers nowadays play PC games too, or maybe PC gamers themselves have become more retarded.

This is only theoretical. In practice, a console is intended to be played with a gamepad or joystick on a TV, and to have a set amount of games intended for that console. This is how the vast majority of people use them, and this is what defines the character of games on them, the sort of people who play them, the historical trajectory for that gaming culture, etc. (Among other things, there are others like no clear transition away from children-oriented consoles like NES). Probably there is 1 out of 1 000 000 console players who uses it to emulate Jagged Alliance 2 or something, but this is irrelevant.

If a game is developed with consoles or the console tradition in mind, then it is oriented towards that kind of basic setup.

 

[Sweeper]

I voted Dropped consoles: Never tried, but I did play on a Sega at my friend's house when I was like 6... Does that count?

 

[Azdul]

What I've hated about consoles was control over the market.

Some Japanese executives were deciding what could and could not be played. After necessary waiting period of 18 months Europeans were granted the privilege of experiencing 25 fps cinematic PAL N64 experience. Powers that be decided to release 2nd part of Xenosaga, but not the 1st or 3rd in PAL territories. All great Spectrum and Amiga developers went bankrupt trying to get their games 'approved' on consoles.

Last year consoles lost marketshare to PC and the same will happen this year. Once average teenager won't be able to tell PS6 graphics from PS5 graphics, Sony won't be able to sell 700$ machines. Valve will release blueprints of Steam Deck to other manufacturers - just to make sure that Switch won't control the market.

And it will be truly over.

 

[Squidhead]

I had a friend who asked me for a bunch of PC parts advice and ended up buying a PS5 anyway. Haven't spoken to him since last November.

 

[Nutmeg]

For turn based games, there is no difference between HIDs (Human Input Devices). It really doesn't matter if you use a keyboard, keyboard and mouse, arcade stick or controller. The game is turn based, you can enter your inputs at your leisure.

For real time games, there are differences -- the mouse allows for more dexterous aim in FPS games, and faster command issuance in RTS games. Axes based controls (triggers, analogue sticks, pedals, wheels) allow for more precise direct control of characters or vehicles in 3D worlds with simulated, continuous, movement physics. Digital controls are fine otherwise.

It is stupid to say one type of HID is superior to the other, they are for different kinds of games, none of which are inherently superior or inferior to the other.

 

[Reinhardt]

how the influence of consoles in terms of both their hardware requirements and their laughably-misnamed "controller" interfaces, has stunted the design and development of vidya from what it was on a trajectory to being and could have been.

lol, look at any modern aaa game. they have no idea what "requirements" are. "you bought best possible machine on the market? enjoy our laggy mess"
before you could be sure that if you buy console - you can actually play games for it.

 

[Nutmeg]

I do all of my gaming on PC and have done so for 95% of my life (starting from when I was a toddler, with only a brief respite in my early teens where I would game on the Sega Saturn and GameCube in addition to my PC) mainly due to the fact that piracy is an ethical imperative and much less of a hassle on PC, and I need a PC anyway so owning consoles would be far more clutter, because I'd need space for a dozen of them, not to mention all the cartridges and CDs.

But for me console gaming represents a good part (but only part) of Japanese gaming, and Japanese make the best games in some of my favorite genres like shoot 'em ups, mech sims, rail shooters, turn based tactics and so on. In these genres, very little (almost nothing) in the American PC gaming tradition can compete.

 

[ADL]

My disgust primarily comes from how restricted they are and how much shit the platform holders get away with as a result. Consolecucks still paying for peer2peer multiplayer and shoddy infrastructure that is regularly beaten in reliability and feature set by a publisher's own proprietary client on PC (Battle.net, GOG, Origin, uPlay etc.) is just pathetic. Nintoddlers don't even have access to their save files without homebrew firmware. They have to pay a membership for cloud storage and I hear that cloud storage isn't very reliable either.

At this point they're all just heavily restricted PCs using components that can be openly acquired for a couple hundred dollars more than the console's MSRP. Yeah PC gaming is more expensive, especially now... but look at what you're getting in return. Meanwhile in consoleland they're begging for a frame rate/resolution patch every couple years when a new SKU comes out. Fuck that.

 

[Reinhardt]

but look at what you're getting in return.

 

[Nutmeg]

In 1995, was there anything on PCs as complex as Carnage Heart for the PS1? What would have been the most complex PC game at that time? Sim City 2000 (which was a clone of a Japanese PC game also for the PC Engine)? Master of Orion?

 

[Lyric Suite]

Japanese devs being stuck on consoles is part of the problem. Imagine what kind of games we could have gotten if Japan had adopted the PC platform.

But like i said, the issue for me is console players themselves, the most offensive part about them being their total ignorance of anything else outside their console world. If you spend any time on the internet at large at all, it feels like PC gaming has never existed. 99% of the time games come up anywhere, on a youtube video, a Twitter post etc, it's always consoletard shit. Best RPG of all time? It's always Zelda, or Chrono Trigger. Like, every time.

I never owned a console in my life and yet i can recognize the most of the popular names i see, how come the reverse isn't true? I remember a thread on the steam BG3 forums of a guy who couldn't understand why Baldur's Gate was supposed to be such a big deal. Like, he had never heard of the game before then, and then, lo and behold, he talks about Chrono Trigger AGAIN. Like how the fuck is that possible? You've been gaming since the PS1 era and you never heard of that name?

And then there's this ridicolous brand tribalism. Like a whle back there was a big controvery around Sony making some of their exclusives available to other platforms. Somehow this pissed off Playstation fans because smehow it "devalued" the brand. Like, wtf do you give a shit you don't even work for Sony bro.