Anyone played Kung Fu Chaos for the Xbox? How about Halo? Robotech: Battlecry? Playing PC games is starting to feel a little blase, and it''s scaring me. Why, for example, are there no good party games for the PC? Is it purely a lack of peripherals? A problem with the tv-out requirements? Or is it just not a lucrative market at all? Would Crystal Chronicles work with 4 pdas and a server box? Any opinions? ld

Party games are where the consoles excell at. Not everyone in the market quota tend to have 4 to 8 computers all hooked up in the same room. Computers are also cumbersome to have multiple players using one machine. Consoles however hook everyone to the same machine quite effectively and makes it easy for everyone to use in one room.
As for driving the quality of games ? I disagree. Its pretty much a war between the two fronts (PC an consoles) to see who can come out with the better technology. Consoles have pushed forward in alot of areas where PC''s have allways managed to match and up the anti. There''s never going to be just one leader in the market. The thrown is a game of musical chairs.
Right now I''d say the PC is the leader in setting standards. Look at any game on a console and it''s PC equivalent will blow it away most usually. (GTA3, GTA:VC, Halo BETA, FF7, MOH:AA, an the list goes on an on). This may change though with the next generation of consoles on the horizon.

I''d say that PC gamers have grown accustomed to extreme complexity and disdain games that seem too simple, no matter how much depth they may actually have. Think of genres that are traditionally simple; adventure, puzzle, etc. Adventure games are mutating into third-person shooters and puzzle games have been highly stagnant for years.

Conversely, the best party games are often ones you can just pick up and play.

Cool, some good points made there guys (girls?). I have more thoughts, if you have patience. First, when I use the term ''quality'' I use it primarily in the design sense, that is to say, quality = fun.

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Original post by iNfuSeD
Party games are where the consoles excell at. Not everyone in the market quota tend to have 4 to 8 computers all hooked up in the same room. Computers are also cumbersome to have multiple players using one machine.

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But does it have to be that way? Is there no chance for multi-tapping a PC? Working with four people on a monitor sucks, of course, but with a PC in, say, your living room, you can surf the net, watch dvds, and play games on your TV, right? Perhaps the mini-pcs could make a difference?

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Right now I''d say the PC is the leader in setting standards. Look at any game on a console and it''s PC equivalent will blow it away most usually. (GTA3, GTA:VC, Halo BETA, FF7, MOH:AA, an the list goes on an on). This may change though with the next generation of consoles on the horizon.

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I would argue the above list, with the exception of MOH:AA, which I admittedly haven''t played, won their way into the hearts and minds of millions on consoles, and much of their gameplay was derived from that market''s wants and needs. Even GTA3, which shone its boots on the PC, didn''t really ''click'' until they had to deal with the 90 billion people who own a PS2. Moreover, consoles get far more top-flight releases, primarily because it''s a larger market segment, of course. They do, however, have the significant disadvantage of zero "indie" releases.

On the other hand, technical innovation typically takes place on the PC, admittedly, simply because of its shorter hardware release cycles, but I try not to mix the concept of quality with that of technical superiority.

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Original post by Tisephone
I''d say that PC gamers have grown accustomed to extreme complexity and disdain games that seem too simple, no matter how much depth they may actually have

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That, I guess, is the crux of my problem. The indie releases I''ve played on PC are truly a lot of fun, especially the IGF finalists from the last couple of years, and they maintain that sense of fun by straying from this formula.

Interesting.

ld

I think console and PC games are (or at least should be) different genres. For example, can anyone imagine a game like Black & White or Civilization or even an RTS like StarCraft being a big hit on a console? Or flight simulators? Or The Sims?

Similarly, games like the Final Fantasy series, while a staple on the consoles have been poorly recieved on PC, and games like the 3D Zeldas which take features of the console controller and make them integral parts of the game are hard to transfer to PC where the only constants are mouse and keyboard (though even the mouse can be replaced by a touch-pad or track-ball particularly on laptop machines). And, of course, the console is indisputably better suited for party games - apart from the obvious hardware issues, the load time for a PC game can include the 5 minutes waiting for the system to boot, compared with about 5 seconds to put a disc in a console and turn it on.

That''s not to say that there aren''t games capable of overlapping the two - HALO for instance (though the mouse control on PC may end up swinging it)

Tactic Ogre. Ogre battle.
Fire emblem 4.
Most of console games needs higher complexity. And most of console games need mouse desperately. I think it would have higher complexity if console would be less restricted in memory and HD space, or equivalent.
Console games have somewhat advantage. Continuity and care about released titles. Don''t forget, becose patches were problematic to apply, console games were more stable. Just compare it to MOO3. That game is playable AFTER patch 1.25 .

It''s amazing how fickle and blasé most gamers seem to have become...

I remember when simple games like Space Invaders, Frogger and Burger Time were enough to keep people intertained for ages. God, the concept was so ridiculously simple yet it was truly, truly fun playing those.

Fastforward 20-some years in the future.

We have people debating wether the graphic engine of Game X will be better than Game Y''s. We have people claiming games suck because the combat system is too unoriginal. We have people with hopes and expectations towards some game''s support for multiplayer play. We have people laughing at these silly, primitive games of yesterday (they''re so OLD! LOL!!)

I pretty much dropped out of the loop when the 3D "revolution" came. Starfox was awesome. Frikin'' awesome. But that''s only because it was something new. Now that 3D is the norm, there''s nothing special about it anymore. In fact, now, 2D games are mostly considered inferior and rather stupid, to be blunt. Is this progress? I dunno, kinda sounds like regression to me.

I miss the "good old days".

RuneLancer, I honestly cannot tell if you''re being sarcastic or serious. If the former, well, heck yeah. If the latter, well, um, get a console and try some new games. They''re REALLY fun. Even some of the latest PC games are pretty darn fun. And Starcraft''s still worth playing, albeit only with friends.

rmsgrey:
I wouldn''t argue with your points, with the exception of flight simulators being a pc-only phenomenon - these really depend on where you define the boundaries of the genre, but there have been some amazing borderline flight sims for the consoles, some of which knock the pants off their pc counterparts.

Raghar:
Agreed. Console games tend to lack complexity. This translates, in my mind, to lacking tedium. Console games are typically simpler and cleaner because they have to be, although after playing HALO on the Xbox that opinion is changing, and I''d imagine if I ever got the opportunity to try Steel Battalions it would die a fast and brutal death.

Despite some interesting ideas so far, I still feel that the crop of PC games coming out are pretty tedious compared to their console counterparts, and I don''t think it has to be that way. Most of the console gamers I know still have at least one game PC in their life, and many have more than one. The console crowd, of course, is still statistically younger, but with consoles like the PS2 starting to stretch the role (and price range!) of a console into the adult world, I would be surprised if that''s not changing fast.

The most compelling evidence I have of my claim is held in the fact that although my close female friends wouldn''t be caught dead playing anything except The Sims on the PC, they''re far more right and ready to step in and watch and/or join in a session of Xboxing, or even PS2 fury. I wonder why that is.

ld

Oh, trust me, I''ve played the more recent games... Oh yeah, was being serious, for the record.

Starcraft, AFAIK, is an oldschool 2D isometric game. Actually, memory''s rusty, I don''t remember if it''s isometric or just tile-based. I think it was tile-based... Anyhow, my point is... it wasn''t 3D. It didn''t need 3D. It was 2D, sprite-based and dang, did it occupy a lot of COBOL class time.

I''m a huge RPG fan. RPG games and whatever''s got a solid dose of action in it (especially things that''ll test your reflexes; ever heard of DWI, a PC clone of DDR? Try playing a song at 9/5 speed with a 3.0x arrow modifier. That''s bloody fun. :D) Back when Final Fantasy 7 came out, I traded my N64 in for a PSX. Never did find any really fun games for N64... KI Gold was awesome, Starfox 64 too (I love good shooters, as well) but... that''s about all. More to the point, no RPGs. So I got a PSX.

FF7 blew me away. Heck, it''s a 3D RPG. The first I''ve ever seen. It was totally awesome. I''ll admit, it was almost scary. I also got Wild Arms that christmas, which I ended up liking even more in the end. For the record, it''s a sprite-based RPG that''s 2D but has a 3D oldschool battle engine (by oldschool, I mean turn-based à-la older FFs). The fact it''s 2D and that I liked it more than FF7 is just a coincidence, btw. But I loved FF7 nevertheless.

Then FF8 came out. At first, it was like 7. Awesome. Then, well, with all due respect to those who liked FF8 I felt it lacked a lot of depth. The story was crap, the characters were rather flat, dungeons were "realistic" and, frankly, totally boring, the whole battle engine had been changed... but the graphics were out of this world! Despite that, I realised that graphics alone were definitively not enough to make a game fun.

Then FF9 came out. I never finished it. I have a saved game right at the last boss. I just felt less and less interested in what was coming out and FF9 was pretty much the last straw. I''d look at FF2 and salivate. I''d look at 9 and sigh and wander off.

I eventually played FFX. Lovely game. Didn''t appeal to me at all though. I was considerably impressed by its looks and the whole voice thing but it just wasn''t something that appealed to me anymore. And I realised that as stunning as it looked, games are going to have to start looking as good as that (or close enough) soon if they''d want to meet the growing demand for better and more impressive media. What do "old" games like FF7 look like now? They''re like comparing a turd to a pile of gold. Well, not literally, though FF7, despite looking completely awesome when it came out, looks rather shoddy and unimpressive next to FFX now. What if a game like that came out today? It would be rated as having terrible graphics.

My point, as I am trying to head towards a tangible point after all ( ;P ), is that there''s just no going back. It''s not just graphics, it''s complexity (though I''m afraid I kinda overlooked that aspect in my post). We have games that try to become more choke-full of media and originality and anything that''s under par gets an often negative response.

"Dude, it''s yet AN OTHER save the world game. Sucks..."
"Ugh, look at that, the poly count is so low you can make out the flat surfaces on the guy''s ring."
"Man, this game''s music sounds like midi!"

Few years ago, the gaming crowd would''ve been completely wowed by a game that even had polygones (starfox) and were quite ok with midi-like (well, more like MOD actually) music and save-the-world plots (FF6, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Illusion of Gaia, Earthbound...). Now, if you saw a game like Starfox coming out on the PS2... well, the critics would be very harsh.

Kinda miss the simpler days when games didn''t have to be original or flashy or complex and full of different stuff to be fun...

Note that, for the record, I don''t blindly hate 3D/modern games. I loved GTA3, for instance. Dang, did I ever play that game to death... But frankly, I''ve also played Uplink to death. And I feel that despite the fact Uplink is nearly just a text-based game with a point and click interface, the money I spent on it was far better spent than on GTA3...

My two cents. Just my humble opinion.

Rune, go play Super Monkey Ball (1, not 2) on the cube with some friends. Then come back and whine about how simple games don''t work anymore.. ehem. ;P