Jimquisition: The Beautiful Irony of PC Gaming

[jmarquiso]

Still, console gaming is cheaper. Not trying to undercut PC gaming and its apparent low standards for most popular games. However, even buying a decent rig, can sometimes cost a lot of money for someone who isn't used to shelling out $300+ dollars just so they can run something on mid to low quality. In that case, I rather just stick with the same console for eight years, then pay $120 dollars for the next console that holds my interest, or the next generation has come out.

Possibly, but then again, I can't do work, word processing, video editing and graphics work on my PS3. I CAN do it on my PC however.

So to me, the PS3 is the larger expense.

 

[Smurf McSmurfington]

I completely and utterly agree, though if I were you, I would've mentioned the oldschool BG games aswell as Planescape... but then again I am a massive BG series and Planescape fan.
Also, you write with a chainsword? I hereby declare you, Jim, officially awesome.

I am annoyed by the misconception that you have to upgrade so very often. Thing is if you have a relatively decent machine, i.e with a C2D CPU or something newer and a motherboard that takes PCI-e cards, upgrading wont cost anything even close to a fortune, 'cause basically all you need for gaming is a better video card and more RAM, if you currently don't have much of either.
Take my machine that I built myself for instance... while I did pay a fair amount of money with it (I could literally salvage nothing from my old P4 machine, and I wanted a high-end machine), and I bought me an AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE, a HD 5850, a midend Gigabyte mobo, 4 GB of DDR3 1600Mhz RAM, a high-end case(Antec 1200, love the bloody thing), coolers for both the CPU and video card, and a decent PSU (Chieftec 750W), and that alone didn't really set me back THAT much, 'cause I bought the video card aswell as the coolers later on, I also bought new big wooden speakers and a 24" screen. Now all that set me back a fair amount of money, but when you buy using your brains you wont have to upgrade for YEARS. I bought that machine a year ago, and it still runs anything I throw at it at max (or nearly the max) settings, and when I actually do need an upgrade, all I really need to change is the video card, and maybe add some more RAM (mainly because I tend to keep 100-150 tabs open on FF and that really eats up RAM, and I absolutely hate closing FF when playing games, thankfully not many games require much RAM).
And upgrading a video card is far cheaper than people think, especially if you don't look at the absolute highend and buy used. For instance, my HD 5850 set me back about 200 euros, about the same as my monitor in fact, currently you can get yourself a card that is FAR more powerful for even less than that. Upgrading a PC is FAR cheaper than people think, even I can afford it along with many other niceties(i.e trips, my love for photography, which inevitably requires the purchase of lenses, which in the end will end up setting me back more than my PC did, financially, and so on), and I come from a country where the average wage is two to three times lower than that in most of old Europe(not sure about the average wage in the US tbh). Also, you won't have to upgrade that often nowadays anyway, because games aren't getting much more demanding on average, most games run great on a now 5 year old 8800 GTX for instance.
And PCs technically allow for more depth gameplay-wise, simply because the keyboard holds more buttons than a controller does, too bad few actually make good use of it.
Also, don't think I hate consoles or anything, I've just never enjoyed playing the kinds of games that are better played with a controller than with a mouse and a keyboard enough to warrant a purchase.
Also, bananas and pandas.

 

[Arina Love]

all those titles he was talking about....yeah i don't want to play them, well except Recettear. for everything else i want to play on pc that is exclusive to pc : witcher 2 and diablo III and for them i have to spend money to upgrade my PC. good thing witcher 2 coming to xbox. if my core2duo+8800gts will run Diablo III on very low settings then it's will be first PC game i played in years. My reason i'm on consoles because i like J-RPGs and console exclusives and don't care about graphics so i play on consoles all those games that on PC too, i can upgrade my PC just don't see point.

The "irony" I found here is that it used to be the other way around. If you wanted the highest end graphics, you'd have to buy a console. Simple as that. The consoles set the graphics threshold, and now the opposite has happened with PC.

As for your preferences, well they're very console-biased preferences. Thing is, there is so much more out there and playstyles out there that you won't find anywhere other than the indie PC market.

yeah there is but not for me. i rather play (or replay) j-rpg then experiment with indie.

 

[CrystalShadow]

He's got a point.

I mention graphics sometimes, but at the end of the day the PC games that are actually interesting are precisely the ones you pretty much don't see on consoles.

Weird games. Complicated games... Things that don't make much sense. Heavy-duty simulations...
And so on.

So... Yeah. Makes sense.

 

[jmarquiso]

Man if he's going to talk about not needing great graphics for a cool game should mention Civilisation or something of the like.

Funny thing - Civ 4 used to complain about my graphics settings all the time (but ran fine). On the other hand, Civ 5 didn't, but the "lowest settings" at the time was almost unplayable.

 

[jmarquiso]

Oh for fucks.... look, Cthulu sold like shit on XBL Indies because it was PUT on Xbox Live indies, a service where nearly everything else is shit. If it had been sold on the main storefront it would have sold like gangbusters. On Steam, they pimped the fuck out of that game. The difference in exposure explains the difference in sales, nothing else.

So from this explanation, which platform is more indie friendly?

 

[jmarquiso]

Man if he's going to talk about not needing great graphics for a cool game should mention Civilisation or something of the like.

Funny thing - Civ 4 used to complain about my graphics settings all the time (but ran fine). On the other hand, Civ 5 didn't, but the "lowest settings" at the time was almost unplayable.

Well mind you, I haven't played since Civ3. I played the Civ4 demo but it turned me off, though Civ5 looks better with the new combat system.

I loved Civ 3 AND 4, but still considering Civ 5 for the same reason you did. The demo's pretty fun.

Civ 5 also sold itself on scalability so it could sell to more systems than Civ 4 did.

 

[jmarquiso]

Alas, I'm running my gaming on a laptop with integrated graphics, so I can't get my copy of Amnesia to run. Heck, it's even bugging trying to run 2-player TF2. True, I do love games like Cthulhu Saves the World, Torchlight and Recattear (wow, 3 RPGs... Guess my favourite genre ), but the reason why I prefer home consoles to PCs is that I like to sit back with a controller in hand and look over the situation presented on screen. Plus, I suck at shooters and RTSes, so having a keyboard and mouse over a controller is not a major problem.

However, I do have to agree that the versitility of a PC is wonderful. My steam is chock full of little indie games that wouldn't exist on a console, such as The Path (in fact, anything by Tale of Tales), Beat Hazard and the afformentioned Recattear. It's just that I prefer to play with a controller than a mouse.

Still, excellent video, and a discussion I often have with my more PC-focused brother.

Rigs with NVIDIA or AMD cards don't cost much more than integrated graphics systems. Next time you're in the market, look out for it.

 

[jmarquiso]

Yep everyone who proves you wrong is trolling. You are just that awesome. Man I wish I was you.

In your defense, I don't think you're trolling, you just bringing up non sequitors like they're some sort of valid argument. It's as if you went to the Jim Sterling school of making an argument.

 

[jmarquiso]

My problem with PC gaming isn't financial, got nothing to do with upgrading my computer or anything like that. No, my issue is that every single person I know who labels themselves as a PC Gamer is such an elitist fuckpuppet about it and all spend frighteningly large amounts of time telling me how inferior my consoles are to their PCs that it makes me avoid it almost entirely out of spite.

Hello.

I'm a PC Gamer, and I think consoles are perfectly fine. They're just slightly out of my price range as I need a semi-powerful PC to run programs for work. I'm also a freelancer.

If it were worth it for me to buy a console and, by extension, a television, I would probably also be a console gamer. Though in honesty console gaming isn't for me. I'm not a fan of the controller, for example. Though I admit that it's strange that one of the best gaming controllers ever developed was never developed for gaming at all (mouse and keyboard), but rather for graphical precision. But that's just my personal opinion built from an early lifetime of PC gaming and looking on forlornly at all my friends with console games and TVs in their bedrooms.

So please, do not judge PC gaming by the company I apparently keep. Please try it out and decide for yourself.

SO I hope you now know someone who labels himself a PC Gamer who is not an elitist fuckpuppet. Elitest fuckpuppets are so inferior to my open-minded neo-hippy ways.

 

[jmarquiso]

Well, console gaming does have one advantage: No DRM.

What?

Should say " None of the obtrusive, data mining drm that pc has to deal with, like origin."

Where do you think Bioware got all their metric data on how people played Mass Effect, they consulted a fortune teller? If the majority of their sales are on console, it would have to come from there in order to be accurate at all. Meaning that the data is still mined, and it had to be sent to the homebase somehow.

Valve is pretty open about Steamworks being one of the things that makes this happen, and continues to.

 

[PerfectDeath]

This has reminded me to pick up 40k space marine!

I could use some mindless violence to balance out all the strategy games i've been into.

A really crazy mention could have gone to Dwarf Fortress as the game runs on Ascii graphics. Thats text as graphics. However, its spawned one of the craziest gaming 'cults' around as DF is a sandbox of insanity crafted from kitten bone and studded with the loss of many hours of lives.

 

[Braedan]

This is so right... on every level... it's not about the graphics at all... I'm looking at the list of games I've been playing lately.

Deus Ex (the original)
Minecraft (not graphically great even if on highest settings it can strain some PCs a touch)
Dwarf fortress (HAHAHA. MASSIVE CPU hog if you make your starting area too big, but it is literally letters and symbols)
New Vegas (the only really graphical game, which is only hard on machines because the engine is SHIT)
Limbo.

Nothing that would rape my quite capable PC.

 

[Piecewise]

Well, console gaming does have one advantage: No DRM.

What?

Should say " None of the obtrusive, data mining drm that pc has to deal with, like origin."

Where do you think Bioware got all their metric data on how people played Mass Effect, they consulted a fortune teller? If the majority of their sales are on console, it would have to come from there in order to be accurate at all. Meaning that the data is still mined, and it had to be sent to the homebase somehow.

Valve is pretty open about Steamworks being one of the things that makes this happen, and continues to.

Actually they get it by monitoring sales, not by secretly monitoring consoles like you seem to think.

 

[jmarquiso]

So they got their information about how people played the game (i.e. using the default Shepard) from sales data?

 

[Hashime]

Thank you, just thank you for putting into a video what I am sure every PC gamer feels about the platform. Don't get me wrong, I have a massive rig as well, but you don't need one to enjoy most of what the platform has to offer.

 

[ShakenBake]

The real irony is: people who owns consoles ALSO HAVE COMPUTERS. Ask any console gamer, and that person more than likely also has a desktop computer or laptop, or both. Why? Because while you use your consoles to play games, you need a computer to do everything else. So how can you claim that consoles are cheaper than PCs when you must have a PC already? In fact, consoles are an additional expenditure on top of that computer you purchased. In other words, in every modern household a PC is practically a requirement (I'm willing to bet there are more homes with computers than washer/dryers), but a gaming console is just a luxury. If you really want to save money, why not just upgrade your computer with a decent graphics card? Then check out all the great games that are FREE (and I mean legally. How about a round of League of Legends?).

 

[I.Muir]

Also any big name title will not be half as much a challenge to your graphics card because the specs have been reduced due to the fact PC usually only gets ports of games that went to console first, which would explain why crysis looks better than crysis two or so Ive been told.