sdg wrote:
Also, I don't read every thread I only read a few but hasn't AE said about a few games recently he would rather get them on Xbox? I got the impression he had been trying to be more measured.
I will address this because it's a relevant point, I have covered it before but since I basically now seem to have my own 'please fuck off' thread it perhaps merits being repeated.
Believe it or not, I am actually 'platform ambivalent', I am an avid gamer first and foremost, I go where the games that I want to play are. (I've been a crossover console/computer gamer since the 8-bit days, as the boxes of stuff downstairs that I can't bring myself to throw away will bear testament to.)
I wasn't a 'day one purchaser' of the 360 but I was in there fairly early doors, I lashed out well over £1000 on a 40 inch LCD telly, one of the early JET TURBINE 360s and a 5:1 surround system, because I wanted to see all the cool new games on the latest console. At this point, the 360 pretty much had the drop on the PC in technology terms, as a fixed architecture platform it managed to do more with less, and for quite some time my PC was damn near relegated to being a glorified web browser and email machine - as I revelled in the awesomeness of the likes of Ridge Racer 6, the likes of which just didn't exist on the PC.
Indeed, the 'Saturday night crowd' - (these are the guys I've been playing online with for years, in some cases back to the days of dial-up modems in Quake) - all bought 360s and we had a lot of fun with them.
However, as the years went by it started to become obvious that the 360 was struggling with the games it was being asked to run, the 'Saturday night crowd' reached breaking point with DiRT and GRID, where the shitty framerate really started to piss us off, especially the dune buggy stuff in DiRT which deteriorated into a slideshow at times.
Add on the crappy VOIP, and the fact that we all preferred keyboard and mouse for FPS games (I bought Halo 3 on the 360 and just couldn't fucking play it), and almost without realising we were consciously doing it, we ditched the 360s and went back to the PC.
(From where I'm sat now I can see my 360 games collection, and it runs to many hundreds of pounds, and that's before you add in the hundreds more that I've spent on XBLA stuff, so the idea that I'm some kind of 'console hater' is just patently ridiculous.)
The last full price 360 game I bought was Need For Speed Most Wanted (launch day purchase), at which point I finally fell out with the massive compromises that were obviously being made to shoehorn games into the ageing 360's architecture.
But even now the 360 is my default choice for some games, Trials Evolution for example was an obvious 360 purchase, as was Pinball Arcade. I'm genuinely narked that GTAV is going to be a 'current-gen' title for the 360 because unless Rockstar have worked wonders with the engine, it's going to be the same shonky juddering mess that GTAIV was, and I would really rather much play a GTA game sat on the comfy sofa in front of the big telly with the 5:1 sound going on - I'd buy an XBox720 for that, I really would.
And IMO things have only got worse, entire GAMES are being broken across the back of the limitations of the platform, BF3 for example is a shockingly gimped travesty of a game on the 360, it's not just the pretties, it's the GAME ITSELF that is compromised and cut back and restricted at every single level.
And
that's why I go on about it, because I'm a gamer, and what some folks have seen as 'PC evangelism' is actually 'games evangelism', I was like, 'Guys, seriously, the games are better on PC at the moment, you should check it out' - did I go on about it too much? Yes I probably did, and yes I probably failed to appreciate that other people's priorities for a gaming platform might be different to my own, and on balance I could have done with just shutting up about it sometimes, I probably still should, I suppose.
But if there's just one single point I want to make here, it's always been about the
games,
and in my opinion, the PC is where games should be played to get them at their best
at the moment - that's really all there is to it. I just thought the guys here might be interested in that side of things, and yes I have yammered on about it too much, but it was never to try and piss people off and it was certainly never to try and fuck people off to the extent that they want to up sticks and leave.
I guess when people starting poking me about it I started poking back, and it escalated from there. But yes, I have to accept my part in that and I do so. I
have tried to be more balanced about it recently but I figure the damage was done, so even where I genuinely just made a single 'fact-based' post in the Borderlands 2 thread, hackles were raised, and I can understand why.
I'm happy to call a truce on this one, if everyone else is.