1) I'm pretty sure he's joking/making fun of the elitist bastards. Ignore him or laugh along. Be careful when accusing someone of living under a bridge. Mods don't take kindly to that around here.maxtiggertom said:
2) Games will never all run on at 60fps, because often times developers have to choose between fancy graphics and performance. Many see 30fps as an acceptable compromise and seeing as these games sell just fine, they have no reason to change their mind. One notable exception would be Nintendo. Did you know most Nintendo games run at 60fps on Wii U? Barely anyone notices, because barely anyone cares. So... yeah.
3) Like I mentioned before: the average gaming PC isn't actually much more powerful than the average modern console. Of course this is no excuse for crappy ports, but even if games are ported properly, large groups of players will still have to make compromises to get the games to run well on their systems.
And as a bonus:
4) It's kind of surprising how big of a deal fps is nowadays. While it's true that 2D console games shown at were 50 or 60hz, they weren't actually animated at that rate. That 50 or 60hz is just the rate your tv/monitor refreshed at. For instance, a simple 1 second walking animation might actually have only a handful or so frames. High refresh rate or not, movements would still look choppy if there were only a few frames of actual animation. The refresh rate only caused problems when the animations were tied to it. Many old PAL games actually run slightly slower than the NTSC originals, because players were still getting the same amount of images, but at a slower pace (50 images per second instead of 60). As a result, games like PAL Sonic play a little slower than the original.
The first 3D games had fairly low frame rates as well, and that goes for both consoles and PCs. IIRC, Monster Maze went as low as 6fps. People were fine with this, by the way. And I recall some 3D SNES games being in the 15-20 range. It's not something people complained about, because animations were often choppy anyway. It was only annoying when there was a performance drop (like a game becoming all stuttery during a mode 7 segment) and you could see the game slow down.
The olden days were not the 60fps paradise some people imagine it to be. Not on console, not on PC either. Actually, high framerates could be a major headaches as it was not uncommon for developers to tie the clock to the frame rate. As a result, games sometimes sped up to near unplayable levels when played on hardware much more powerful than whatever the developers envisioned. Usually, framerates often capped to keep that from happening. I think Doom was capped at 30 or 35?
And I mean, sure, I totally get that smooth animations are awesome and we want to see developers make the most of those impressive 3D models and the subtle, realistic movements they're capable of. And yes, I'll readily admit smooth, detailed animations are important in action games where every movement counts, but some of the reactions to 30fps are just really, really silly. I imagine if those people ever discovered cartoons, they'd start worshipping classic Disney animations (as these were animated 'on the ones' - 24 images per second) and then, after they're done praying to the animations gods, build a time machine to burn Hanna Barbera studios to the ground.
