What can we do to save PC gaming?

[layten]

As mentioned earlier I was playing X-Wing at around the same time and thought Starfox on the SNES delivered a similar performance to a 386 PC.

If X-Wing ran in a quarter sized window with so few polygons you could count them on your fingers maybe.

[Joyrex-J9]

Because it was most likely the first time console owners saw a proper 3D (well low res and jerky) game.

I'd played a lot of Starfox before I saw Doom, and Doom still totally blew me away - I wasn't thinking "oh well I've seen this before on the SNES", I was too busy running around textured & lit corridors and acid pools, at a decent frame rate, firing my shotgun at hordes of Imps. I think it's hard to deny it was a massive jump in terms of 3D

[layten]

I'd played a lot of Starfox before I saw Doom, and Doom still totally blew me away - I wasn't thinking "oh well I've seen this before on the SNES", I was too busy running around textured & lit corridors and acid pools, at a decent frame rate, firing my shotgun at hordes of Imps. I think it's hard to deny it was a massive jump in terms of 3D

I completely agree, Doom was the most awesome gaming experience of my life when I first played it. Nothing could even hold a candle to it.

The speed

The graphics

The hordes

The chainsaw

A seminal moment in gaming history.

[Stanley]

No doubt the PC was much more powerful for displaying 3D graphics, but Star Fox was about the closest you could get, and it could certainly handle more geometry than your screen shot implies. Have a look at some X-Wing pics if you believe it's more impressive. I think you'll be surprised just how much it's dated too.

edit. The thing that impressed me about Doom the most, even more than the textures and ultra-violence, was just how smooth it was.

[layten]

No doubt the PC was much more powerful for displaying 3D graphics, but Star Fox was about the closest you could get, and it could certainly handle more geometry than your screen shot implies. Have a look at some X-Wing pics if you believe it's more impressive. I think you'll be surprised just how much it's dated too.

edit. The thing that impressed me about Doom the most, even more than the textures and ultra-violence, was just how smooth it was.

I do not doubt the game has aged badly and maybe I do have a case of rose tinted specs. But I do remember at the time not being at all impressed by SNES Starfox, probably because having access to a very fast PC (a 486 used for DTP was also an amazing gaming machine ) meant I had seen it all before.

[Stanley]

You have to remember how different it was back then though. Consoles did smooth side scrolling games, had great 16 bit graphics, amazing sound and so on, but 3D was for computers. There was talk about next generation consoles being able to deliver arcade quality 3D graphics, and using CDs (wow CDs!) but I was genuinely surprised when Star Fox came out and offered us a glimpse of the future. PCs were already the future of course, with games like Doom, and Rebel Assault (which was shit but did things only possible on CD-ROM). I just think since then the gap has got smaller and smaller to the point that now very few games are developed for PC only.

[Joyrex-J9]

This thread has gone way off topic and for once it's all the better for it!

[Scribblor]

Well, it was a bit stupid in the first place, wasn't it? PC gaming doesn't need saving. And if it did, the obvious way 'we' could save it is to buy more PC games.

Simple!

[Gwynster]

As mentioned earlier I was playing X-Wing at around the same time and thought Starfox on the SNES delivered a similar performance to a 386 PC.

I'm sorry to say this as it's a massive cliché, but that's rose-tinted glasses distorting your memory. X-wing was, graphically and kinetically, a far superior experience to Starfox. Massively so.

[Gwynster]

No I'm not and you always seem to miss the posts I'm quoting taking everything I say out of context. You are the reason people don't want to play PC games.

It's my fault? Well I'm not doing a very good job of it, am I?

Edit: Nice of you to ignore the post where I destroyed your linked machine point too.

[TehStu]

Meanwhile, the PC scene could do with piracy being stamped out. Here's a rant from THQ.

They wanna be doing a bigger push towards stuff like Steam to be honest. I fired it up for the first time last night and was pleasantly surprised.

[matt0]

Why the fuck is anyone even attempting to hold up Starfox as an example of amazing 3D tech?

There was already stuff like Gunship 2000, Hunter, Virus etc. etc. on ST/Amiga - not as amazing as what came out on the PC a few years later but a lot closer to the SNESs price point and they were free-roaming with landscape geometry, particle effects, real physics etc.

Then you had visually simpler stuff like Falcon, F15-II, Star Glider 2 etc. that completely murdered Starfox for frame rate.

[Stanley]

I'm sorry to say this as it's a massive cliché, but that's rose-tinted glasses distorting your memory. X-wing was, graphically and kinetically, a far superior experience to Starfox. Massively so.

I think overall it was yes. The presentation, and the speech, and the whole Star Wars thing just made it very desirable, but it was a much slower paced game than Star Fox which had more in common with Starglider, and fast paced arcade games.

The PC definitely will have shifted more polys, but I still think Starfox was technically incredible considering the SNES was never designed for that purpose.

[TehStu]

In fairness, PCs back then were just generic number crunchers and didn't have 3D hardware. Arguably, the SuperFX made the SNES more "designed for purpose" than the PC of the time was.

[Stanley]

Why the fuck is anyone even attempting to hold up Starfox as an example of amazing 3D tech?

There was already stuff like Gunship 2000, Hunter, Virus etc. etc. on ST/Amiga - not as amazing as what came out on the PC a few years later but a lot closer to the SNESs price point and they were free-roaming with landscape geometry, particle effects, real physics etc.

Then you had visually simpler stuff like Falcon, F15-II, Star Glider 2 etc. that completely murdered Starfox for frame rate.

Jesus Christ.

[matt0]

Jesus Christ.

It's true though.

[Stanley]

It's true though.

The SNES was designed to shift sprites around and produce smooth scrolling, and display lots of nice colours. It simply did not have the processing power to do Star Fox, or proper 3D. The Super FX chip embedded in the cart made this possible. It also marked a shift towards 3D for consoles. It was a turning point.

[Beertiger]

It's my fault? Well I'm not doing a very good job of it, am I?

Edit: Nice of you to ignore the post where I destroyed your linked machine point too.

Just taking a leaf out of your book and ignoring what I reply to, I find it makes it much easier. Thanks for the top tip.

Or I didn't see it.

The whole conversation is so far from the original point of the post that was itself taking the original post off topic. Which was that the PC leads the way in innovation and without it we'd be dooooooooooooooomed! Which is such massive bollocks as has been pointed out by the sane people in this thread. A clue, you're not one of them.

[MK-1601]

The SNES was designed to shift sprites around and produce smooth scrolling, and display lots of nice colours. It simply did not have the processing power to do Star Fox, or proper 3D. The Super FX chip embedded in the cart made this possible. It also marked a shift towards 3D for consoles. It was a turning point.

It was a brilliantly engineered folly. But I suppose that could be said of a lot of really excellent games.

[Shimmyhill]

I can't see pc gaming ever dying really. PC gaming has never been less inclusive with horribly bugged releases backed with horrible drivers on an OS thats worse than the last one and people still carry on buying and playing games. PC gaming was easier in the DOS days and yet it ahs got bigger as its got more frustrating.

What i think does happen is people get fed up of pc gaming but as it has got cheaper it will still attract new gamers and also people who have an ordinary pc that can play older games. I used to love PC gaming and spent lots of money enjoying it but i just got fed up with it and with consoles offering almost all the same and more in terms of action and sport games it wasnt a hard choice to drop pc gaming.

Another area it seems to fail at is what the consoles refer to as attach rate. I like most of my friends played CS and that was it for years, short of the odd game bought for online purposes (mohaa, cod, UT etc) i just didnt buy any games and this cant be good for the industry. Certinally the main pc gaming chap i know only plays Warcraft 3 and will pirate the new releases but has not bought a game since HL2. While good for gamers to have a constantly evolving game it cant be good for software houses.

And for the love f god someone take Gywn down, he will get all annoying being right

[Stanley]

PC gaming will never die because PCs will never die, simple as. Console gaming has more chance of biting the dust.

Unfortunately that makes for a boring discussion, that's why this has turned into PC vs consoles, but at least it's a bit more entertaining, and interesting.

[Rudi von Starnberg]

PC gaming was easier in the DOS days and yet it ahs got bigger as its got more frustrating.

Absolute bollocks.

Cocking about with config and .bat files was easier, was it?

[matt0]

The SNES was designed to shift sprites around and produce smooth scrolling, and display lots of nice colours. It simply did not have the processing power to do Star Fox, or proper 3D. The Super FX chip embedded in the cart made this possible. It also marked a shift towards 3D for consoles. It was a turning point.

I'm not denying that (EDIT: the technical stuff), and it looked nicer than the ST / Amiga stuff in stills with the mode 7 colour banding and the rotating bitmap in the background, but it wasn't a benchmark or a turning point in any real sense. More advanced 3D stuff was already out on home computers and 3D was coming anyway, Star Fox wasn't even the first 3D console game that gen, there were ports of F22 Interceptor and M1 Abrams on the Megadrive a couple of years earlier.

[daveodeth]

Absolute bollocks.

Cocking about with config and .bat files was easier, was it?

Or fucking boot disks, jesus.

[Stanley]

Dos was more difficult, but trying to run them in Windows often killed performance. There's no way it was easier back then though.

[TehStu]

PC gaming was easier in the DOS days and yet it ahs got bigger as its got more frustrating.

Now see, I contest that. A little easier when devs started using protected mode, but eeking that last bit of memory out of the 640k was frustrating.

Do people still get problems with PC games these days? Aside from clearly buggy MMOs, I can't think of any genuine problems I've had with gaming, especially after XP matured. It's been hassle free for me for years.

edit - unless you mean Vista of course, which does have teething problems, but that extends beyond gaming, and isn't a requirement.

[KieronGillen]

Dos was more difficult, but trying to run them in Windows often killed performance. There's no way it was easier back then though.

Yeah. Anyone saying otherwise is - a rare case on forums - objectively wrong.

KG

[Shimmyhill]

Absolute bollocks.

Cocking about with config and .bat files was easier, was it?

I had a few floppies with set things on them and never had issues after that. These days you need a certain driver to get the most out of a game and then the hacked ones work better etc etc. At least in the DOS days you were in control and could shave programs to free up mem - these days any new gfx driver is a lottery to see what it fucks up and where. Thats before we get into patches and copy protection knocking out other games and legitimate virtual drives stopping games from working.

[TehStu]

these days any new gfx driver is a lottery to see what it fucks up and where. Thats before we get into patches and copy protection knocking out other games and legitimate virtual drives stopping games from working.

What games are you playing and on what PC? Your experience is the antithesis of what mine has been for years.

[Stanley]

Well I've certainly had fewer problems with PC gaming now than back then. Most things have just installed and run right away for me, and if they haven't the solution is never too difficult.

edit. in saying that, I used to love it more back then simpy because the consoles just weren't capable. I remember when Quake came out and nothing else mattered.