Until last month, I was pretty much exclusively a console gamer. I have a competent laptop that could play most stuff, excluding newer AAA games and several other "heavy" games (even then it was mainly just the laptop overheating that prevented play and not the power of the system).
There are a multitude of reasons. The main one is that I'm a sucker for convenience - being able to buy a game and know it just works (albeit now with a probably install time, grrr) is wonderful. Another one is that I've always enjoyed collecting physical copies of games and having a nice long line of them all looking good together, where PC games come in a variety of physical formats. Also, couch co-op is a must for me.Last month, I decided to totally finish the living room collection with a relatively beefy PC. It sits near my Xbone, PS4, Wii U, RetroN 5 and several older ones as well all ready to feed me games on the one TV. OPINION TIME LADSLike: The cross-generation games. I would kill for the Xbone and/or the PS4 to be backward-compatible, but that's a concept dead in the water. But on PC, I have one system that can play games I've loved from many different generations, including many of my PS2 favourites. Seriously, not having to swap systems or controllers and being able to play Worms Blast and Burnout Paradise from the same system is beautiful.Like: Better couch co-op than I was anticipating. I love just how many games have surprised me with their total ability to plug in 3 Xbox 360 controllers and have three-player sessions with zero effort.Like: Obscure shit. Gang Beasts is insane fun. Mount Your Friends is good. Loads of these weird-ass games that never turned up on consoles are great fun, cheap as hell, just awesome.Like: That it's Windows. Which means that I can play my games in the living room. I can play other people's games in the living room. Me and my mates can spend time on Sporcle, or Google Feud, or basically any website without having to use disgusting piles of shit like that filthy PS4 browser… thing.Dislike: Steam can be a pain in the dick. I tend to use Big Picture mode so I can put the keyboard and mouse to one side. Now, Steam has a system I believe is only in BP that shows you whether a game is entirely playable with a controller or not. And it's wrong as fuck. 90% of the games listed as K+M only work perfectly with a controller (some even popping up that a controller is RECOMMENDED to play them). And a couple listed as controller-friendly totally are not. Drunken Robot Pornography was literally K+M only, and some games are clearly not designed for controllers.Dislike: As I expected, a lot of stuff is a bit more of a faff. I guess it's the system being freer to develop for than a console, but it's irritating having to do a pass of every new game I play to get them fullscreen, 1080p, high settings etc. And there's a mess of wires protruding from the tower's USBs - keyboard, mouse, up to 3 controllers… yeah I could fix this by getting wireless ones, but then it's a bunch of stuff I have to either charge or keep a supply of batteries for.Like: …but then SOME things are LESS of a faff! Going back to PS2-era games like Worms Blast and Mashed, I now don't need to make sure we have two DualShock 2s and a valid memory card, I just run em off Steam and they're there with everything else.Dislike: I really do wish that EVERYTHING was on Steam. I have Steam installed and over half of the 460-ish games I've arbitrarily accumulated over the years installed, so that's most stuff. But then goddamn ruddy Origin has The Sims 4. And the worst thing of all is the number of games I'd love to revisit that don't have ANY presence on ANY digital stores. I'm looking at the Tony Hawk's series (I tried THPS HD. I did not want). I'm looking at The Sims 1. I would fork £30 over for Tony Hawk's Underground, which had a PC release, but I either get a pre-owned disc copy or I'm SOL.Dislike: Also, Steam is full of early access shite.Like: But if you wade through it, the selection of games massively trumps any of the other systems.Neutral: Graphics. I've yet to really play something that could trump the graphics the PS4 and Xbox One can do, and it's not really why I bought the PC. I'll stick to YouTube videos of GTA IV mods for my graphical "cor, nice!" fix. Next Car Game/Wreckfest was quite perdy though. CONCLUDEI'm going to stick to consoles for most AAA games, at least for my "main playthrough". The convenience is still there! PC will probably be more for revisiting games, GTAV (because 3DTV and I'm a sucker as I've been through before), and those odd games that only take a few hours to finish but are really good fun bitesize games. I've already finished Grow Home, Fez, and DLC Quest, and am presently eyeing up Portal 2, Deus Ex: HR and Burnout Paradise for replays, and several others for new games to play. Including Hell Yeah.Fuck the PC Master Race, Disposable Income Bastard Owning Everything And Is Basically A God Gamer is where it's at \o/
you CAN put everything on steam, just link to the EXE with "add non steam game or shortcut"
it even lets you use the steam overlay on it, meaning you can also get things like chat and broadcasting in gameI think for older titles your best (legal) bet is probably GOG.com. They have a lot of new titles AND very old ones as well. Like moikle said, I believe you can link them into your steam. But if you're like me, thats too much hassle. So, what I do is have one button on the desktop for steam and another one for my 'Games' folder that has anything else organized by system or genre.
I think what the consoles have going for them is their simple interface for chatting while gaming and 'party mode's. XBL on 360 was unparalleled with their party system that got groups of players together with very little effort.But I guess for me, I liked the idea of playing a game for a short while, than quitting and going right back to work on my PC… Either console games are getting less appealing nowadays, or I'm just getting older… can't seem to tell which yet..Sounds like you're pretty anti-pirating
(says the guy who pirated the Game of Thrones leak)I used to love consoles, and I still love my Wii U, but nowadays I mainly use PC for gaming (and usually Linux, rarely Windows), not because PC is better than consoles, but because all my development tools are there!
I also wish all the games were natively on Steam.I do own consoles for the sake of playing games with other people… which I guess may be why I dislike a lot of the new games for console. I kinda prefer playing solo on a PC instead.
@Toast: Pirating games/software is a little different from other things, I find. I don't have any pirated software partially because I don't really want to go around running EXEs from torrent sites.
Yeah it's not exactly reassuring installing some Russian fix to make your game work without a CD or DRM
Is that the thing that beeps sometimes?
It's absolutely fine to download anything and visit any website as long as you install at least 3 concurrent AV programs.