After having “dragged” one of my friends into playing Castle Crashers with me, I felt that I owed it to him to pickup a game of his choice. Fable 2 would be the game of choice from him. Within our micro-community, a few of the people were super hyped about this game, having truly enjoyed the first iteration.  My experience with ARPG’s has still been touchy at best – I am not well played in this genre. I have also become increasingly critical about approaching video games as a story-telling mechanism rather than just a point of entertainment. Not ever game or genre need to achieve a perfect balance between story and mindless entertainment, but it is definitely something the ARPG’s hinge on.

So, I jumped into Fable II. I tried to keep myself as neutral about it as possible. I didn’t want to read into the hype online, and I tried to take everything that my peers were oogling about with a grain of salt. I read up on the story a bit on Wikipedia, and left it at that. My friend and I were incredibly interested in the multiplayer co-op that the game boasted, and we were looking forward to gunning through the game together, taking in the experience for what it was worth. I’m a sucker for cooperative play, so if anything had piqued my interest, it was going to be this.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The game takes place in the fictional world of Albion, five hundred years after Fable’s setting, in a colonial era resembling the time of highwaymen or the Enlightenment; guns are still primitive, and large castles and cities have developed in the place of towns. Unlike the original, the player may choose to be either male or female.

Impressions

The game itself promised to be incredibly open with never just one choice for anything you did. My friend and I wanted to take that for all it was worth. We had just finished playing another game where we had taken the good side, and we wanted to turn that around on this one. I wanted to be as evil as this game would allow. Every option the game gave, we took the most sinister approach. We rescued people, then murdered them. Our first order of business was to slaughter the entire town, and kill a few dozen guards before we moved onto our first quests. We killed parents right in front of the eyes of children. Then we tried killing the children – but I guess the game has some limits – children are invulnerable. The evil continued – we massacred villages, destroyed families, relationships, and left any possible wake of dismay, despair, and destruction in our paths. One thing that struck me instantly was the cut scenes this game had: they were absolutely gorgeous! After having beaten the game, I was entertained, but not floored by the experience that I had played through.

This game was a turning point for me in how I will approach my future game purchases as well – the overall feeling of mediocrity that I was left with this game is making me consider my purchases versus rentals/trades a bit more seriously.

Issues (Spoilers Ahead)

Lack of cut scenes. With the backlash from Metal Gear Solid 4′s hour and a half of cut scenes, this game actually had a selling point that it had “less than five minutes of cut scenes”. After seeing how great they did on the small cut scenes that were available within the game, I was simply left with wanting more. The lack of cut scenes should not necessarily be a selling point of a game, the correct balance of using them with gameplay to push the storyline forward should be.

Menu system. The menu system for this game seems to come up quite a bit when I talk about my complaints about this game to other people. It’s laggy, and takes a long time to get into and use. Secondly, there are some things within the menu system that see too much use (items, clothing, weapon changes) to require you to have to deal with such a slow moving piece of crap. There are a few reports that the menu system sped up when NXE was installed, but that doesn’t do any good because the game came out before the install feature was even an option. I personally wish the controller design had be re-engineered to control some more of the features that we had to go into the menu for rather than some of the features it gave us immediate access to.

Controller Bindings. Generally, games have you aim with your right joystick, and move with your left. I’ve had this unbreakable habit of having my right stick be inverted. I tend to blame 007 on the N64, but it is probably more likely a testament to how stuck in my ways about my controller setup I am. Either way, this game has the left stick be your aiming, so neither regular nor inverted felt right for aiming. This is compounded by the fact that when you shoot, you need to hit B, rather than a trigger to shoot, making it ineffective and even worse design if you were to make the right stick be aiming, because you need to move your thumb off the joystick in order to shoot. I think that this is a case of either trying to put too much into the game, or just failed controller design.

Fashion, the big deal, but not really. RPG games are starting to put quite a bit more effort into the customization of your character. Dying, various lines of clothing, and Fable II even has tattoos that you can apply to your body. Pretty interesting stuff, as the customization allows you to really create your unique image within the virtual world that you’re immersing yourself into. Only problem, is the game doesn’t really do too much in letting you be able to see that. The camera control allows no zoom, there are no cut scenes where you get any closeups of your character, and even the character “dress-up” menu doesn’t let you zoom in to your character to look at the details of the features you are adding. It’s a few steps back from pushing the customization features.

Eating disorders. I’ll admit, I was a bit sexist in the approach to building my character. I wanted her to be an evil, magic oriented character, but I wanted her to be good looking. After I mistakenly ate a piece of cheese and saw +Fat, I never let my character eat anything again – I sold any food I came up to. I eventually learned that veggies were good to reduce fatness, and she got to eat some old celery, but it was just potions after that. The game itself lets you “let go” in terms of food, equating a few pieces of pie into about a 25-50 lb gain. And with all the damn running I do from quest to quest? Come on!

Your under annoyance! No matter how many guards I killed, I would continually be approached for arrest. This brings up a delayed menu, which chooses what you want to do: pay a fine, community service, or resist arrest. Because of the delayed menu, I once had to start killing some guards right in front of my husband. He divorced me soon thereafter – probably couldn’t stand that I was wearing the pants in the relationship. Either way, one easy way to get around this nuisance is to promise to do community service, and never do it, with no fear of repercussions. It was the personality that I wanted to be portraying in the game, but too much of a cop out of the feature.

Play a game, not a job. Yahtzee did a great job at picking fun at this part of the game, and I can’t help but agree with him. The jobs in this game, which you use to build money, buy houses, and thus continue to increase your wealth are BORING. What’s that you say? Jobs are boring in real life and thus this is just more of a realistic approach? Oh okay. Well when I want a real life simulation, I’ll step outside. For now, please focus on entertainment while I play a game which I purchased to ENTERTAIN ME. Also, another complaint about the jobs that I have, is the game seemed to be truly pushing the limits of the 360, and I was experiencing a bit of frame lag now and then. When you’ve got a minigame that suffers from framelag at fast speeds, the experience is further deteriorated for the user.

Multiplayer? As I said, multiplayer was the one thing that I was excited about for this game. Technology has come along way since the 2600, we’ve got the hardware, we’ve got the bandwidth, now give us some jaw-dropping co-op experiences. Sadly, this game didn’t deliver a good multiplayer experience. First off, anyone who joins is your “henchmen”,  any of their actions have no affect on their character whatsoever, other than that they can gain experience and use to train their character. The game, overall, seemed to move incredibly slow with this feature, and take any entertainment value out of the game that was previously there. After a few hours of this, my friend and I ended up doing something that has been called “orb-questing” online. Where we progressed through the entire game nearby while online, and we could see each other’s position, would help each other finding objects, unlocking puzzles and whatnot. This actually brought some entertainment to playing it alongside someone else.

Premature Ending. This entire game builds up for you finding these three “heroes” to get together so you can fight and oppose the evil that is overtaking your area. After you’ve amassed your trio of assistants, you merely use them to suck up their powers, and punch the bad guy off his proverbial pedestal to his death. End Game. After this happened, I realized that the last fight at the beach against that huge shard was the last boss fight, and I felt even more cheated. For an ARPG, we could have used more A. To add to this anti-climactic ending, my friend who was playing waited too long before he did anything to the enemy, and the gun hero ended up shooting the bad guy and said “Oops, were you going to do something?”. Essentially taking the game chugging along at 30MPH right into a brick wall.

The “ending”. At the end of the game, after the dream sequence where you are taken through the color changing landscape with some sound bytes that show you coming from where you were as a kid to where you are now in your life, this was an absolutely great idea. It had very similar experience to Shadow of the Colossus, Call of Duty 4′s nuke-death sequence. However, just like the game itself, the thing was over before it started. In the beginning of the game, you were not allowed to run when following the butler in the castle, and this should have had the same sort of speed control. While this did have an impact, I feel the emotional impact to the gamer would have been much stronger had the entire transition period from the dream world to the “grim reality” that is your characters life had lasted another 30-60 seconds, to really let the whole weight of everything that’s happened sink in.

In short, if I could do it again, I would have simply rented this game.

In the spirit of Halloween, I decided to re-play through Half Life 2. When I first bought it, I had gotten through a good portion of the game but I must have stopped and gotten focused on something else, as I didn’t remember *any* of the Citadel. Hopefully I can get through Episode 1 and 2 in the next few days, along with the BK:N&B demo with a friend.

Also, LittleBigPlanet is going to change the way we think about games. The game is a damn platform – the best description I’ve read thus far is: “a YouTube for games.”

Needless to say, I rushed to download the game, and convince some of my friends to do likewise. When I was younger and arcades were still common, beat-em-ups (Fists of Rage, Final Fight) were incredibly common. One franchised beat-em-up, The Simpson’s arcade game had received the majority of my spending money. With The Behemoth behind this project, and the promise of four player online co-op, I was nothing less than giddy.

Overview

From Wikipedia

The game is a side-scrolling beat-em-up in which up to 4 players can play, online or locally. Playing as one of the available knights or an unlockable character, players must defeat enemies to progress using attacks and magic. As enemies are defeated, the characters level up, giving access to new combos and abilities, and players can improve attributes such as attack, magic, defense and agility.

Overall Reaction

Great art, great music, a creative story progression, a pretty good combo system, and a ton of replayability make this game well worth its purchase. I have personally beaten the game probably about six times or more, either by myself or with friends. Despite the large amount of playtime, I have failed to truly get bored of the game. After you’ve beaten the game, you can revisit levels to find 60+ hidden or acquirable weapons. To aid you in your quests, you can currently collect up to 26 “pets” whom either alter your character’s stats, or they preform actions of their own (attack the enemies, find/point out hidden items, or bring you food). After your character’s leveled up and can fly through the regular game without a sweat, you could try your hand at Insane Mode, where your enemies are much harder to put down. And either before or after you’ve collected all the weapons and pets, you can unlock up to 23 characters by beating the game with different characters, or unlocking characters by beating the single player arenas.

What makes this game truly shine however, is the multiplayer co-op. When you add the ability to throw friends in the mix (both online or locally), one play through to the next is a different, yet enjoyable experience. Surprisingly, even playing online co-op is just as responsive as playing locally. If anything, I can count the momentary slowdowns I’ve experienced on one hand.

Lastly, some of the community members at the GameFaq and NeoGAF forums have impressed me with the determination to find every unlockable item within the game. From pets, to weapons, to characters, it’s been a 24-hour manhunt for almost a week now, trying to figure out what sequence it takes to unlock some characters and weapons that have surfaced in some testing/press images that were released. The Behemoth is obviously having a good time with the community of hunters, as they gave no outright explanations to begging fans at the past PAX 2008, only to leave the mobs of unlockable-hungry (myself included) players searching in the dark for the few holy grails left in the game. It would seem that the game has quite a bit of room for some DLC to come into play to potentially unlock these characters, I would hope that The Behemoth plays to the stingy and reveals free means to obtaining the unlockables.

What I’d Change

Abracadab…
Magic in this game seems to be very one-dimensional. While it does seem to have some sort of effect against the type of enemy you’re fighting, there doesn’t seem to be some sort of teaming-up aspect between the skills when playing co-op. Other than the attacks themselves, it feels like magic could be easily  expanded on as an improvement to the game. I remember in The Simpson’s beat-em-up, players could combine to form one unit, with one player attacking and the other controlling movement. You could combine something like fire and ice, the ice magic would freeze the opponents feet while the fire burned his head, or make fire more potent when someone was poisoned. Either way, I wish there was more depth to the differences and cooperation of magic that would make choosing a varied amount of characters important to gameplay, rather than just feeling like the majority of magic was merely a sprite switch.

No Sea Legs
Sadly, the entire “water” bit of the game, where you fight ninjas aboard a ship lasts only for only two waves of enemies. With a few long desert levels following, why was so much cut (or not added) to the ship level? That level had my  favorite music throughout the entire game, and it ended sooner than it started. You could have characters jumping from ship to ship, fighting off  waves of ninjas, avoiding cannon balls, and the like. It’s not like we’re worried about repetition here, the entire game is comprised of beating up several enemies, moving on, and beating up several more enemies. Lastly, I agree that ninjas are awesome, but why didn’t we get pirates too? I’d love to play through the game hobbling on a peg-leg and slashing my enemies with a hook or sword.

One road diverged in a yellow wood..
To get all the known characters at this point, one would have to play the game through twelve times. While I may find myself doing that eventually, the game could offer some sense of multiple passages that offer different means to reach the boss at the end of the level, either a way requires more magic, or stamina, or just provides a different experience to the player, it could ease up on the monotony of wanting the play through the game several times, without the ability of being able to do a play through with your  eyes closed.

QA Issues
While my issues with QA as of late will be saved for a post on its own, it seems that some of the bigger known bugs in the game may have been able to be caught with either better managed QA, or simply a larger team, or more time in testing before release. There are multiple instances of glitches and bugs in the game that others have found. One that my friend and I found while playing (that hasn’t been posted on YouTube yet), is when you are in the desert, and go inside to where you can see one pet (I think it’s ScratchPaw) hiding behind a screened window. If you walk up the stairs on the left side, and jump quite a bit, you end up glitching into the ceiling and are walking outside of the building. We were able to fall down into where ScratchPaw was (before we found a bomb would have gotten us back there), and then we found ourselves stuck in the level, not being able to progress to the next room. On top of these in game glitches, it seems the game has had a myriad of online play and saving issues when 3-4 players get together to play online. Coupled with matchmaking problems over Xbox Live, we can only hope that any next iteration is throughly stress tested before it’s next release. Thankfully, for the current players of CC, we should be seeing an update/fix to our online/saving woes soon.

End Scene
I’ve almost memorized the names of all the people involved and thanked in this game. Can we please skip the ending scene after we’ve seen it five times already?

Episodic Content/DLC
While this isn’t something I would necessarily change in the game, I would go and say that a few things could be added that would continue to keep me coming back for more. I think this game could easily continue bringing in money if more levels were added, and new content/abilities were tossed in the mix to keep things fresh. I wouldn’t mind paying for things to add to gameplay, but I don’t know how excited I would be if The Behemoth simply just threw new weapons and characters up for purchase. I’m not too fond of the Bad Company approach, and I hope it doesn’t become a habit.

If you own an Xbox 360, you need to pickup this game.

I’ll be spending the next few posts going over some more XBLA/PSN downloadable games.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The story is centered around a fictional near-future conflict involving the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, who are fighting against Russian ultranationalists in civil war torn Russia, and rebels that have staged a coup d’état in a small Middle Eastern country. It is told from the perspectives of a United States Marine and a member of the British SAS, and is set in multiple locations, including the Middle East, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Prypiat, Ukraine. The multiplayer portion of the game features various game modes, and contains a leveling system that allows the player to unlock additional weapons, weapon attachments, and camouflage schemes as they advance. The game was in development for two years. It uses a proprietary game engine, and includes features that include true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare received considerable praise and has won numerous awards from gaming websites, including IGN’s “Best Xbox 360 Game”. It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, reaching over seven million copies as of January 2008.

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

I am continually impressed with the success of this game, both in my own eyes, and in the eyes of the entire gaming community. I’ve mentioned time and time again in a few of my more recent speaking engagements how successful COD4 has been – especially on XBOX Live, and how it could have the potential to be the next “Counter Strike” series, with the large amount of gamers already hooked to the series, especially the last iteration.

Furthermore, the campaign provides an incredibly immersive experience, which lays out the gritty details of war, and in no way glorifies the violence necessary in warfare. By the end of this game, if anything, the player is left with a sad realization of the major casualties that war creates. In the same way that I praise SOTC, I have caught myself time and time again comparing FPS titles to COD4.

Overall, the entire package of this game both campaign and online multiplayer has really raised the bar in the genre for developers to look to imitate and improve off of what Infinity Ward has delivered.

Campaign

The campaign in the game takes you through the experiences of a member of the USMC and the British SAS. The two characters give a collectively rounded story of the sad situation the world is in, and a broad range of experience from two of the different groups. As I mentioned earlier, this game does a great job in detailing the pains of war without once glorifying it. There were on multiple occasions where the game leaves you feeling helpless, lost, disparate, and generally frustrated about the positions you find yourself in, and what must be done to escape the situation.

COD4 takes some hints from the great experience I had with the ending of Shadow of the Colossus, where you’re left to control a player before his ultimate death. The frustration and realization that this emits from a player is always a strong one, and this game executes it well. Experiencing the death of your character after you aborted an escape maneuver to save a downed pilot, only to die alongside your entire team after a nuclear explosion is devastating. Everything in this scene is incredibly well done, from the controls, to the coloring, to the scenery (including wreckage, fallen buildings, and children’s toys) adds to the sinking feeling of exactly how much war truly destroys in its wake.

The Veteran difficulty frustratingly (and enjoyably) gives experienced players some levels which test the ability of the gamer, making you rethink your routing, the order in which you clear hallways and rooms, down to the timing and placement of grenades. There were two or three sections of the game where I had to play over fifty times in order to finally succeed. If you’ve played the game up to the last “Epilogue” scene, I swear that my beating that level was a fluke.

One thing that really impresses me about this game is how diverse it is in letting the player get a full experience of some of the things involved in wartime. From being airdropped on a ship, to infiltrating buildings, to operating mounted guns from a helicopter to a bombing run, to a covert ghillie-suit level, not once did I feel that some content of the game felt out of place, or thrown in. The flow from level to level was smooth, enjoyable, and coherent with the context of the story.

There were a few times where this game really had an impact on me. In the “All Ghillied Up” scene, where you jump back 15 years as Capt. Price was just a Leftenant doing some “wetwork” as a covert sniper, I was constantly enjoying the scene, where you could make the choice of either staying stealth, or taking some well aimed sniper shots (seriously, who turns down shooting someone in these games with a sniper rifle?) before continuing. At the point where you need to crawl in the grass to avoid the oncoming tanks and walking guard, I became incredibly paranoid, and even felt myself scrunching up in my seat, worrying that the computer AI will hear me breathe.

The second instance of this intense immersion into the game is an experience I had at the end of the game. I tell this to everyone who has played the game, and thus I think it merits its own paragraph. At the end of the game, where you see Griggs die, and Captain Price struggling for his own life, you yourself are injured are dishelved just like the Marine was before he had died. Watching Zakhaev assassinate a comrade in cold blood right in front of me, I figured, “I’m done for.” Just then Price slides the pistol over to you, and you pick it up. Figuring I was dead anyway, I took out Zakhaev with one shot and let his guards kill me, figuring it was a honorable way to go out. Then I got ripped from the story as the game made me play it over. “What?”, I thought, “What did I do wrong?” I then realized that I would live if I killed his guards. This was awesome though; the game had brought me to a point in the game where I felt my situation was so hopeless that I had no choice but to die, and that I had given up my characters will to live but to at least accomplish the task in taking out the last target that we had in our achievements before I died. A game put my mind in this position! Not a critically acclaimed movie, or a prized work of literary accomplishment, a video game.

It blows my mind. The writing and execution of this game are so well done, that if this is the direction games are going to be taking from now on, I am so happy to be in the position that we are as gamers.

Online Multiplayer Experience

The online experience is very enjoyable, and well done from what I’ve been able to experience so far. I don’t have too much to say about the experience itself because I don’t feel I’ve spent enough time to truly evaluate the bits and pieces of the COD4 multiplayer yet. I enjoy the level-system and equipment increases you get, which allows the game to increase its depth as you spend more time playing it. Hopefully down the road I’ll be able to revisit the online multiplayer to check back about my total views about this aspect of the game.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

AI

My first and biggest frustration of the campaign came from the AI of your supporting teammates throughout the story. Since I was playing on Veteran, the levels were considerably hard, and there were many times where I was playing a specific section over and over again, and I would be dying because of dumb mistakes a freaking twelve year old wouldn’t make, let alone a Marine or SAS agent. Covering my back when I move forward or take a turn, covering fire, using flashbangs and grenades just to name a few of the things that weren’t present when playing through this. At points, the presence of the teammates just gave me a false sense of security that if I went one way down a path, that the other would be covered and taken care of, yet time and time again, I would be killed by enemies that I considered to be my teammates responsibility. Many times I would be cussing the teammates out, wishing that I would have been doing the mission on my own, since at least I would know that no one is covering my back. Not only that, but especially in close quarters, the AI seemed to be moving slowly along scripted paths, and was non-responsive to any nudging by the player. In my fifty-sixty tries at the “Mile High Club”, there were about 15 times where I was too slow, and got behind one of my teammates who were crawling through the aisles in the airplane, and were killing the mere 60 seconds I had to clear an entire 747. Sadly, I needed to restart these levels because apparently “Friendly fire will not be tolerated.” Know what else shouldn’t be tolerated? Crappy AI that gets in your way. Intelligent? Yeah right. Artificial? Definitely.

Animations

While I’m no expert, I have watched clips and some short shows on the hand-signals for SWAT teams, and it’s pretty cool how the game’s animations do a good job at putting these into play in the characters that are playing with you (regardless how stupid they are). I did notice though a few times where the movement of your teammates was very scripted, and seemed choppy towards what I would consider a in game cut-scene. This wasn’t incredibly prevalent, but when it was there, it was noticeable and took me out of the moment, if for a few seconds.

Modern Weapons

When you’re moving up the coverage for a tank in the Middle East, and your tank pulls up to a corner of the building and says “switching to thermal”, and then blows the crap out if through the side of the building, I became a little jealous. This is “modern warfare”, we’re using positioning for air-strikes, battling nukes, using guided rockets to blow up tanks, and the most advanced weapons we get to use is sticky C4 and night vision? Where’s my thermal imaging, and other neat technology that these counter terrorism groups get to use nowadays?

GUI

This isn’t that big of a complaint, but the GUI doesn’t always lend to letting you know what you’re holding onto. The air-strike logo looks more like a bayonet attachment to your rifle, and there was no way for me to know what type of grenades I’m holding, until I’ve thrown one. The one scene where you need to fight your way up to the farm, then fight your way down back the hill to get to the landing zone annoyed the crap out of me, and was pretty hard, until I realized I wasn’t holding onto flashbangs, but smoke grenades. After that, it only took me two more tries to figure out the best placement of the smokes before I was able to get to the bottom of the hill to the helicopter. Small thing to nitpick on, but it’s important to properly convey this information to your players.

Keybinding

With a game that is presumably feature rich, why do you force me to a specific set of button choices for the game? I stuck with the defaults for the game, but switching between this and Halo has been annoying, and I wish I could have moved some of the buttons on my own to fit my own play-style.

Sniping

Sniping in this game was fun, and probably had a perfect balance with everything else but I wish there were some bonus features that let you play with the gun a little more than what the game offers. Moreover, when you needed to snipe Zakaev, you’re told to remember about the “Coriolis effect“, and that threw me off guard. Some sniping practice like the initial training in the game would have been pretty fun.

Local Online (Multiplayer)

I’m not sure who to blame for this, because I’m sure internally, stories could differ from department to department. COD4 has online play, and it has split-screen local play, yet it doesn’t have split-screen online play. Maybe we could attribute this sole reason to why COD4 has had consistently more players playing on XBOX Live than Halo since Janurary. So, you’re not going to tell me its hardware/software limitations. This is just unforgivable, and incredibly annoying to me, as I can’t enjoy a game – which is preferably the best FPS out there right now, with my friends unless they’ve got an XBOX hooked up too, which means we can’t be playing in the same room unless we’ve got two TVs as well. Come on!

Match Searching (Multiplayer)

While I’ll talk about it a bit more next week, one of the few redeeming things about Gears of War is that you can filter your online search for maps and gametypes that you want when you play online. Halo and COD4 have a veto system, which is not as feature rich as things could be. This frustrates me when playing online, because there are definitely enough players that would allow for the filtering to exist in a fun manner that allowed players the choice of what they wanted to play, rather than forcing a seemingly normal distribution of map-play.

Own this game, it’s worth every penny.

I’ve been thinking similarly along the lines of where console gaming has been taking the industry over the recent years, and wondering if we’re experiencing a similar response, are consoles the next step in gaming? Sure, there’s been a pretty defined split between the two throughout the past, with certain genres (most specifically FPS) generally being dominated in the PC market, while other genres would dominate the consoles (such as platformers, racing, sports, etc.). That line has become more and more split with the growing success of the consoles, and there aren’t many games for the PC that you can’t pickup for a console nowadays.

Three years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers released a report predicting the rise in console success and the slowing of the success of the PC. I used some of this data to show the aggregate growth of online gaming as a whole for Zapdot’s business plan, hoping that they’d be wrong down the road. I was primarily a PC gamer then, and have my roots in gaming from the PC FPS (Rainbow 6, Quake 2&3, UT2K3, and CS and CS:S). Competitive gaming had bloomed on the PC platform, and has had some amazing appeal to network television through its success: from interviews to short segments, to full blown TV shows. Not surprisingly, PWC wasn’t off their marker three years down the road. While I haven’t had access to current numbers to correlate to their estimates, it goes without saying that console gaming is flourishing now, with thousands making the switch daily.

Wednesday’s Penny-Arcarde post made me revisit these thoughts, and they made some of the same arguments I’ve been barking at for awhile.

First and foremost, Computers have been always the best platform out there in terms of the technology that can be utilized for the games themselves. They have always looked better, provided more vast experiences in online play, and for awhile, put you in touch with a much larger community. The biggest selling point for me (and the deciding factor for most hardcore PC gamers) was the precision of input on the computers always trumped that of its console counterparts.

However, I’ve even found myself spending more time on consoles lately, and the answer as to why is pretty easy: comfort. I can sit down on my comfortable couch, and pick up a game for a few hours on my HD TV, enjoying surround sound if the system I’m in provides it. Moreover, the TV and surround system I’m using doesn’t have to be solely set aside for just a gaming system (or systems). With broadband I can just as easily play online with my friends as I could with my computer, with an interface that is centralized around the gaming experience

To get a similar experience on a computer, the price is higher, and includes more wires, more setup time, and potentially, a bit more of frustration and hassle. Tycho put it best, saying that someone who would prefer this simplicity doesn’t make them an idiot, it makes them pragmatic.

So take the PC Platform, and look at what made it better than the console system: online interaction, hardware, and input devices. These major issues are being addressed by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE service is utterly amazing compared to what is out there right now. Integration with its games are near seamless, communication and community itself work very well, and with online collaborations like bungie.net to allow screenshot and movie sharing is a giant leap in the right direction. Sony had the right idea with the hardware, putting out the most powerful gaming console that the market has ever seen. This is effectively their biggest issue right now though, as it will take years for coders to even fathom the use of six cores to their benefit in game design. Regardless of this point, we’ve got the “power” concept that we are constantly revisiting in the PC segment being addressed and dealt with. Lastly, we come to the incredible precision that a mouse and keyboard provides to the user. I won’t go out and say that Nintendo has covered this angle, but they are pioneering the industry in the right direction. Nintendo had the melons to release a completely new form of input into games, and tear the industry away from the standard stick-button controller approach that it had been comfortably relying on for the past two decades. This input isn’t the best in the world for trying to convert PC gamers into a hardcore FPS shooter, but it’s a step in the right idea that we need to rethink the hardware we are giving gamers to interact with their virtual environments as they toil through them, and that we should take a direction that is not only fun, and simple but intuitive as well.

So I wouldn’t jump and say that PC Gaming is starting to see it’s demise, because the lines of what PC Gaming is has become more and more blurred, where the typical boundaries that defined PC Gaming has been adopted and translated into today’s modern day consoles. Furthermore, while a PC will be considerably more powerful than the latest console, console hardware specifications are catching up. I think (and certainly hope) that while games will still be available on the PC as time continues, we will start seeing a movement towards a better input system that potentially mimics or improves the PC’s dominating stance in this area, and a more unified console experience for gamers. As a whole, I think this generation is just the final step before we get to see the next evolution in games in how they’re delivered, played, and experienced by gamers.

But until then, I still need to decide if I want to buy Bioshock for the PC or my 360.