PC Game Fun Time

TechRadar’s list of twelve reasons PC gaming is better than console gaming is a fun little read. I’ll admit, I was thinking of doing something similar on this site for awhile (although better fleshed out), but in the end thought better of it, because I don’t think gloating is particularly helpful. PC gaming faces some severe challenges over the coming years. Series that used to be PC-exclusive are now regularly being released on consoles as well for profitability rationales that are impossible to refute. Now while that isn’t bad on its face, the amount of dumbing down that too often goes along with it is.

The only genre that I would really say that is thriving on the PC above and beyond consoles is the MMORPG, which doesn’t exactly help me much. I have an MMORPG post still in the works, but the gist of it is that, following experience with The Realm Online, EverQuest, and then World of Warcraft, I no longer allow myself to play MMORPGs as a concession towards ensuring my own wellbeing. Other genres that are still doing well on PC over the console include strategy games, both the real-time and turn-based varieties. Regrettably, we seem to have lost the first-person shooter.

So yes, while it is mindless fun to point and gloat at consoles’ problems, including red rings of death, their “discovery” of high-def roughly a decade after the PC, and proprietary lock-in, I think it’d be more constructive to make a list of the the areas where PC gaming suffers in comparison to console games, and then make all efforts to rectify them. My number one complaint is how console games “just work”, while the Digital Restrictions Management software included in nearly all new PC games introduces a flummoxing plethora of potential pitfalls that turns many potential PC gamers to consoles in search of a less frustrating gaming experience. What’s your biggest complaint?

Unlike Grokmoo, I somehow didn’t end up giving up Far Cry 2 for Fallout 3. Having just beaten it earlier today, I’m ready to give my final impressions, as I won’t be playing it again.

My Far Cry 2 experience was a bit uneven. I wouldn’t say that I genuinely loved the game, but I felt a strange compulsion to keep playing it. I would feel this compulsion even after the game succeeded in frustrating me immensely (like never failing to put objectives on the diametrically opposite side of the map, on the opposite side of many manned guard posts), so it was not uncommon that I’d play the game for a half hour, take a short break, and then end up playing it again in another half hour after the frustration faded. These repeating cycles of frustration and compulsion occurred several times in some days.

It finally hit me what the Far Cry 2 experience feels like: an MMORPG. I wrestled with World of Warcraft around the time that it came out (and haven’t played another MMORPG since finally quitting it). Far Cry 2 shares a lot of the same game mechanics that make an MMORPG so addictive: the free-form roaming, the slow grind of achievement (earning scarce diamonds to purchase/upgrade weapons), and the side missions. I kept playing through Far Cry 2 even when I wasn’t enjoying the experience very much simply because I wanted to keep getting to that next “level”.

But thankfully, unlike World of Warcraft, Far Cry 2 does indeed have an end, an ending left me really dissatisfied because — spoiler alert — like much of the rest of the game, you are given a false choice between two “alternatives” that result in the same outcome. The final outcome of the game? Your suicide (and in one of the options, your completely unnecessary suicide). It’s like, after an entire game full of wanton mercenary killing, the developers want to jam a moral lesson into your head and force you to atone for your sins by paying the ultimate sacrifice. Except it’s not really atonement if you aren’t given a say in the matter.

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It’s been awhile since I last played a city-building game (since SimCity 4 came out in 2003, to be exact), and boy do I really need my fix. I’ve been addicted to the series since I filled up an entire box with floppy disks of SimCity 2000 saves on our family’s 386 many years ago. There’s nothing else that quite matches the thrill of being an urban planner — and no, I’m not being facetious.

So imagine my amazement when a friend pointed me to Cities XL, a city-building game in the SimCity tradition that I have absolutely no excuse for finding out about earlier. Cities XL is coming out in 2009 and will be a lot like the next release of SimCity, with an MMORPG twist — every other city on the planet in the game world is built by another player. That sound you just heard was the sound of me necessitating new pants.

In addition to the MMORPG element, and all the possibilities of trade/cooperation with other players that brings, Cities XL is also going to improve on the old grid-based landscape of all the old SimCity games. Roads can now be laid out in any direction, not just along the grid or at a 45 degree diagonal. Roads can even be curved. But it’s the highway construction that really has me excited. The video (you’ll have to navigate to it) shows the player fluidly constructing a major highway intersection, with multiple levels of ramps and curved overpasses. This is your opportunity to kick the clover-leaf intersection to the curb and make something so much cooler.

I’m definitely looking forward to Cities XL, and anyone who calls themselves a fan of the city-building genre should be as well. Will Maxis finally be surpassed in their own genre? Here’s hoping. If you don’t hear from me for several months in a row sometime in 2009, it’ll be because I’m constructing the most bustling metropolis on the face of the virtual planet.

We’re all probably at least <em>familiar</em> with MapleStory, the Korean 2D side-scrolling massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), even if we’ve never played it. I’ve played World of Warcraft though, and I figure that’s close enough to be qualified to comment on this bizarrely inaccurate news article from Yahoo: Online divorcee jailed after killing virtual hubby. If anyone reading this has played MapleStory, maybe you can fill in the details in the comments below.

Upon first glance, I thought the article was talking about, you know, something that actually mattered: murder. People get “married” in online games all the time, and I could see fallout from the virtual world spilling over into the real world and resulting in a deadly altercation between the players behind the characters. But that’s not what this article is about. After reading through the article a bit, I realized that the “killing” they refer to is about a woman who “killed” her recently divorced husband’s character. So what, I thought? MapleStory probably has PVP. That should be a fairly common occurrence then, and the husband probably deserved it for dumping her abruptly anyway.

But no, when the article says “killing”, what it actually means is that the man hadn’t yet gotten around to changing his account password, and the woman logged in and deleted his character. So by attempting to sensationalize the news story, Yahoo actually made the story sound less serious to those in the know. Not that I think this rises to the level of meriting criminal hacking charges, mind you, which the woman is somehow facing.

So once you’ve managed to slog your way through the massively misleading inflammatory article (brilliant computer game journalism skills on display there, Yahoo), the real question you’re left with is: Does a jilted wife deserve anything close to a $1,000 fine and five years in prison for deleting a character in an MMORPG? I’m going to have to go with no — he should just get over it and learn a lesson from the school of hard knocks on not sharing his password with anyone — but depending on the extent of real-money trading (RMT) he was engaged in, he could possibly have suffered a severe financial loss from the deletion.

Which would bring up another question about whether a couple bits in an MMORPG’s database are actually worth the money people are willing to pay for them, but that’s another gargantuan topic in itself.