Author Topic: What Video Game System should I own?  (Read 9778 times)

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Offline Mongoose

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
I tried Microsoft Flight Simulator 97 back in the day.

The only amusing part was crashing my Extra 300S into buildings. :p

(Though that was admittedly far less amusing after 9/11...)

 

Offline Black Wolf

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
It's no less amusing, and I'm sure no less common. Exceptnow, people yell Allah Akbar while they're doing it. Just, err, don't tell people. :nrvous:

As for the original question, I'm loving my Wii. Quite possibly the best purchase I've ever made. Everyone who sees it has a go, and I've not enountered anyone who didn;t like it (Including 50+ year old rellies and people who flat ou don't play vdeo games, like my dad and uncle).
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Offline Mefustae

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
I know, Microsoft released an HOTAS for the XBox 360, but without a keyboard and a mouse you can't play a serious flight sim...
Because, as we all know, all modern aircraft are controlled with the keyboard and mouse. :doubt:

 

Offline Dysko

Re: What Video Game System should I own?
I know, Microsoft released an HOTAS for the XBox 360, but without a keyboard and a mouse you can't play a serious flight sim...
Because, as we all know, all modern aircraft are controlled with the keyboard and mouse. :doubt:
I was saying that an aircraft has so many function that you can't map them all on a joystick.

And AFAIK, Dassault is mounting keyboards and mice to control MFDs on later Falcon biz-jet models.
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Offline Asuko

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
Ace Combat may not be a flight sim but it still is a very good game.
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Offline Mongoose

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
Personally, I think it's a lot more fun than any realistic flight sim.  Why limit yourself to 8 missiles when you can have 80? :p

 

Offline Asuko

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
Haha, I'd have to agree to that. ;)

Also, the story and cutscenes are amazing.
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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
Realistic COMBAT flight sims do really suck, except when you are a total freak of it.
C'mon, carrying like 8 missiles, waiting 1 hour to get shooting permission and  no real combat involved at all, just firing your missiles, they hit, and there you go, boringness again.
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Offline Dysko

Re: What Video Game System should I own?
Realistic COMBAT flight sims do really suck, except when you are a total freak of it.
C'mon, carrying like 8 missiles, waiting 1 hour to get shooting permission and  no real combat involved at all, just firing your missiles, they hit, and there you go, boringness again.
Have you ever tried one? Have you ever challenged an enemy air cover which outnumbers you, then dove in a canyon to avoid the SAM defence, tried to hit the target while all around you there is AAA shooting at you, and when it's time to land you land on your belly because a ****ing Shilka hidden behind a tree got a lucky shoot on your hydarulic system?

Don't feel offended... If you actually tried some combat flight sims disregard my post. But I have seen too many people saying "flight sims suck" even without having seen one.
And before you ask, yes, I played Ace Combat.
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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
Red herring.  It's only prohibitively expensive if you ignore the supplemental costs and uses between the platforms.  Start factoring the cost of the display alone, and things stop looking so peachy keen in console land.  Start factoring peripherals, if you want to play with a second controller it's going to cost you.  Online subscription?  PC costs what your cable/dsl line costs.  X360 costs that plus an additional yearly fee.  And you're likely to be paying $10 more for every game.
1) I already own a TV, so the display cost is nil, just as it is for the computer.  I have no plans to upgrade to an HDTV until I'm forced to, so that has no bearing at all on console usage.

2) It's true that if you're looking to buy three extra controllers, the price adds up, but the same is true if you want to replace your generic keyboard and mouse with quality replacements, or buy a decent joystick.  In any case, said extra controllers are really only useful if you have people over for multiplayer gaming, which isn't a frequent occurrence for me.

3) I don't have much incentive to play console games online, or even to hook up a console online; the only one I'd probably do so with is a Wii, so that argument is moot.  Even if I did decide to go with XBox Live, the price of a yearly subscription is $50, which I consider utterly negligible.

4) I don't buy any games I play brand-spanking-new, so the $10 price tag doesn't mean anything.  Anyway, that'd only apply to 360 titles, as I believe the Wii's are $50, and even then, $10 more for a brand-new game isn't going to break my bank any time soon.

I'm not trying to bash PC gaming (how can I, when I partake in it) or just play a random devil's advocate, but I do strongly believe that so many of the anti-console arguments out there are deeply flawed and only serve to make the arguer either look snobbish or foolish.  There's this long-held stereotype among the general gaming populace of "elitist PC gamers," and I've seen enough to make me realize it's often a fair assessment.  The simplicity and value of a one-time hardware purchase that's guaranteed to play every game released for it at a solid framerate and a certain level of graphical quality for a good 4 years or so can't be just overlooked.

(As a side note, I'd like to know how many people making anti-console arguments have never benefited from a title released on a console in one way or another.  How you can call yourself a true gamer without having partook in things like Mario and Zelda over the years is rather beyond me. :p)


Of course, you've now limited it to your own situation, no longer generalized, which means the conclusion also is no longer general.  Though, considering your lack of an HDTV, you're obviously willing to settle for much, much lower quality graphics then gaming PC's are typically budgeted to put out, and maybe you should rethink your expectations.


And yes, there are plenty of benefits to consoles.  But claiming to not want to bash PC gaming when making an attack on it's price as your prime pro-console arguement leaves me scratching my head.

 

Offline Wobble73

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
The best thing about consoles is the ability to connect more than one gamepad/controller so that more than one person can play!
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Offline BloodEagle

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
The best thing about consoles is the ability to connect more than one gamepad/controller so that more than one person can play!

Do I really need to say it?  :rolleyes:

 

Offline Polpolion

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
The best thing about consoles is the ability to connect more than one gamepad/controller so that more than one person can play!

Do you really think computers can't do that?

 

Offline Asuko

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
The best thing about consoles is the ability to connect more than one gamepad/controller so that more than one person can play!
You do know that you probably said that without thinking, right?
FYI, USB controllers are cheap and you can connect more than one to a computer (with a hub or two if your computer doesn't have enough ports).
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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
Yeah, but how many PC games actually support that kind of multiplayer?  It's not an unfair statement - very very few PC games allow multiplayer of that kind.  Honestly, I'd have a pretty hard time naming even one that wasn't an emulated console game.

Difference in the expectation of environment and controls - who really hooks up 2 mice and keyboards for a typical PC game?  Plus, consoles are typically played from further away where viewing angles are less of a problem.

It's slowly dying off in consoles though, with the rise of online multiplayer, isn't it?

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
I'd say it's not dying off by any means, at least not in the realm of deathmatch-style gameplay.  (From what I understand, split-screen co-op is somewhat of a rarer bird as far as consoles are concerned, although you certainly have heavy hitters like Halo and Gears of War that promote it in spades.)  I don't have a 360 myself, but from the games I've played on one, I know of at least a few that allow you to utilize both split-screen multiplayer and XBox Live simultaneously.  And the meteoric popularity of the Wii is certainly a telling argument for people's desire to gather around a single screen and play together.

While it's true that I went into specifics in my counter-argument, at least one or two of them are generally applicable to the gaming public as a whole, particularly the majority of it that isn't of the "hardcore" mindset.  The game and multiplayer pricing hold true for anyone else as well as me, and as for buying multiple controllers, I'm sure you'll find that there are a lot of people out there who simply bring their own controller(s) along when playing at a friend's; I know I do the same when playing something like Smash Brothers around here, as does my video game club.  That just leaves the TV question, and frankly, I'm puzzled by your assertion that having a standard-definition TV automatically entails a massive graphics hit.  It's true that an SDTV can't display graphics at as large of a resolution as HDTV can, but that doesn't affect the fact that said graphics will still be using high-poly character models, detailed textures, shine/normal/glow/whatever mapping, HDR, and whatever else is in there, all anti-aliased.  To add to that, even my relatively cheap TV has a larger screen size than my computer monitor.  If I tried to obtain the same graphical appearance on my computer for a title like Bioshock as I could obtain as easily as plugging in an XBox 360, I feel quite certain that my PC would quite literally burst into flames.  This all becomes even more moot by the fact that an 8-year-old PC is still perfectly capable of being used effectively for word processing/browsing, while an SDTV is obviously useless for HD programming and will be rendered pretty much obsolete as soon as the great signal switchover takes place; convincing people to upgrade the former for gaming practices instead of the latter seems like a rather futile cause when you look at things that way.

I still stand by my assertion that I'm not bashing PCs as a gaming platform, but rather the faulty arguments that are often passed around to defend them as such.  Trust me, I've used all the usual arguments before on a few friends who are just about console-only gamers, and every single one of them was shot down quite spectacularly; in retrospect, it was perfectly reasonable of them to do so.  If you want to hold up PC gaming, by all means, do so for the modding capabilities (though even that gets a bit shaky when you realize that we're starting to see console games become capable of running mods, albeit ones created on PCs).  Do it for the control scope and customizability (though, believe it or else, there are a good number of FPS gamers out there who prefer a gamepad over WASD+mouse, not that that affects their ability to use the PC).  Do it for the ability to fine-tune your hardware to obtain the best performance and appearance possible out of a title.  Or simply do it for the fact that you enjoy PC-building as a hobby.  But when you try to toss around justifications like price and longevity that really don't hold up across the board, you leave yourself open for defeat.
« Last Edit: January 28, 2008, 06:37:15 pm by Mongoose »

 

Offline Polpolion

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
But does anyone really buy a PC and do nothing on it but play games? Of course PCs would fail most of the time in game playing aspects, because most computers aren't built for video games and video games alone.

 

Offline Asuko

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
What side of the argument are you on, sizzler?
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Offline CP5670

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
Quote
That just leaves the TV question, and frankly, I'm puzzled by your assertion that having a standard-definition TV automatically entails a massive graphics hit.  It's true that an SDTV can't display graphics at as large of a resolution as HDTV can, but that doesn't affect the fact that said graphics will still be using high-poly character models, detailed textures, shine/normal/glow/whatever mapping, HDR, and whatever else is in there, all anti-aliased.  To add to that, even my relatively cheap TV has a larger screen size than my computer monitor.

I agree with him as far as that goes. None of those graphical features are useful or even that noticeable when you have such a low resolution and that blurry, shimmering effect across the entire screen due to interlacing. Even AA (which is not present in most console games anyway) is effectively worthless at that resolution. The larger screen ultimately makes little difference since you have to sit much further away from it to counter the low resolution.

On the flip side though, I definitely see the appeal of having multiple players on the same system, which as Cole said is not so much a question of the hardware allowing it as the games supporting it. I have only played two or three PC games in my life with a splitscreen mode, and all of them are many years old. (the Jazz Jackrabbit and the Rollcage games)
« Last Edit: January 29, 2008, 12:07:20 am by CP5670 »

 

Offline Wobble73

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Re: What Video Game System should I own?
The best thing about consoles is the ability to connect more than one gamepad/controller so that more than one person can play!

Do I really need to say it?  :rolleyes:
The best thing about consoles is the ability to connect more than one gamepad/controller so that more than one person can play!

Do you really think computers can't do that?
The best thing about consoles is the ability to connect more than one gamepad/controller so that more than one person can play!
You do know that you probably said that without thinking, right?
FYI, USB controllers are cheap and you can connect more than one to a computer (with a hub or two if your computer doesn't have enough ports).
:shaking:  :nervous:
Hmmph!  Maybe it's just me then, I tried to connect one USB gamepad and one gameport gamepad to my PC and one cancelled out the other, (USB said connected, gameport said not connected, unplugged the USB pad and the gameport pad said connected!  :mad: :hopping: ) Oh well, I'll have to go and get another USB pad then!
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
 
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