#oneaday Day 929: PC Gaming: The ‘Master Race’ For A Reason

I finished Fortune Summoners tonight. (Go play it, it’s great.) I am not going to talk about Fortune Summoners, however; I am instead going to talk about something which came to mind while I was playing it.

PC gaming.

There’s still a bit of a funny attitude surrounding PC gaming. Some console players and commentators refer disparagingly to those who do the bulk of their game playing on personal computers using phrases such as “the Master Race”, and actively refuse to participate in it. The reasons for this are many, but the most commonly-cited ones include the supposed “expense” of getting started and the misconception that some things are just “better” on console.

Let’s address both of these points before moving on to the real reason I started writing about this.

Firstly, the cost issue. Yes, depending on what sort of games you want to be playing, there will probably be a higher up-front cost to get a gaming PC. But, realistically, this startup cost is not significantly more than a new console costs upon its first launch. And for that price you’re getting something that significantly outstrips current-generation games consoles in terms of performance — and will continue to do so for quite some time.

My current PC cost in the region of £650 to put together and is what I’d describe as “mid-range”. It plays most games at 720p (the resolution most Xbox 360 and PS3 games tend to run at — sometimes less) at 60 frames per second or more without breaking a sweat. At 1080p, it can handle most stuff you can throw at it without issue — it’s only really demanding stuff like The Witcher 2 and Crysis that will make it struggle a little. In short, stuff looks good on it — significantly and noticeably better than on Xbox 360 and PS3 — and given that the next generation of games consoles are yet to be announced, this system is going to maintain a comfortable lead for a year or two at least. We have no idea how much these new systems are going to cost at this juncture.

Insofar as the console experience is “better”, I agree to a certain extent, in that sitting on a couch with a controller in your hand is, for most types of game, much more appealing than hiding in your computer room with the screen a few inches from your face. However, there is a very straightforward way to solve this issue: connect your PC to that big-ass HDTV you have in your living room, and you immediately have the world’s best games console that also does all that “multimedia” shit far better than Microsoft’s gradually-worsening Xbox interface ever will — just compare the experience of using Netflix on the Web to Netflix on Xbox and you’ll see what I mean. Add an Xbox 360 controller and you can play sitting slumped back on the couch just like a console, but you have the added option of playing with mouse and keyboard for when accuracy and/or lots of buttons are required.

Take this approach and you’ll be set — you practically won’t need a console, except for exclusive games. Multiformat games are generally best on PC — even the worst console port is usually able to take decent advantage of your computer’s hardware, allowing you to run it at crazy resolutions and deliciously butter-smooth frame rates. Online communities are generally lively and active. And the vast mod community allows games to maintain their “life” long after console players have moved on to the next big thing.

The thing I really wanted to talk about, though, is diversity. There is no other platform on which you can have such diverse experiences as the PC. iOS certainly has a good go, but as days go on it’s abundantly clear that the mobile market is shifting very much in favour of “freemium” social games rather than truly inventive experiences. On the PC, meanwhile, the fact that it is such a free market out there — and easy to develop for (relatively speaking) — means that if you can imagine an experience you want to have, you can probably do so on PC.

Fortune Summoners is a prime example. Fortune Summoners is a Japanese platform RPG that combines elements of Castlevania, Zelda II, Demon’s Souls and ’90s arcade games to produce something that is endearing, charming and bastard hard. That certainly wouldn’t get a retail release on consoles (not that it did on PC, either) but even if it were to be released on a service such as Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network, it wouldn’t be an easy title to come across accidentally thanks to the closed nature of both Microsoft and Sony’s networks and their rigidly-defined criteria for advertising products. And would it even be released at all? A translation of a 5 year old Japanese game that was the start of a series that never continued? Would that be profitable? Would that be worth promoting? These are the questions that get asked when it comes to console games, whereas the PC marketplace has a lot more small-scale “enthusiast” developers and publishers more than happy to cater to “niche” markets — if not through Steam (which is generally pretty good anyway) then directly to their customers.

And there are plenty of niches catered to. “Grand Strategy” buffs can enjoy titles like Crusader Kings II and Civilization V. “Bullet hell” shooter fans can take on Gundemonium Recollection and those three games that Capcom released on Steam recently that I’ve forgotten the name of. Adventure game fans can enjoy pretty much the entire history of the genre, from King’s Quest I right up to more recent titles like Resonance or Telltale’s episodic work. Japanese visual novel enthusiasts can delve into JAST USA’s vast library of translated titles, and within that collection there are plenty of dirty and non-dirty titles. Simulation fans can drive anything from a First Great Western train to a garbage truck.

This isn’t even getting into the rich back catalogue of gaming that the emulation scene offers. While downloading ROM files for old consoles puts you on shaky ground legally, let’s face it — pretty much everyone occasionally has a hankering to play, say, Super Mario World or Blast Corps and thus finds themselves digging around in one of the dark corners of the Internet. While there’s a certain magic to playing it on old hardware, that’s not always practical. Old hardware breaks down; old cartridges lose their batteries; old CDs get scratched or broken. Through the magic of emulation, your PC is not only a bleeding-edge games console, but it’s also an archive of all the console games you owned in your youth, too. And an arcade machine. And a means of playing Web-based games.

So if PC gaming is considered to be “superior” by some, it’s certainly not without reason. Nowhere can you get the same diversity of experience that a PC offers. Nowhere else can you finish a game of Civ V and then have a quick rag on Dr. Mario to cool down. Nowhere else is there such an incredibly useful, multi-functional device that is ready and willing to hook up to your TV and serve pretty much all of your entertainment needs — both interactive and non-interactive.

So if you’re one of those people who dismisses the PC platform out of hand without even an iota of interest in engaging with it, I’d urge you to reconsider. You’ll be surprised how little it is about editing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS or slotting cards into slots these days, and how much it is about enjoying some of the finest digital entertainment experiences on the planet.

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