TheBluePill
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2005
- Messages
- 3,773
This is baffling to me... This rant comes from an experience I had at Christmas. I bought the kids a Wii and a few games and some for their PS2. I received a couple of PC games.. After trying all of their new games over the course of the morning, the Kids wanted me to try out my new games.. I told them that It would have to wait, I didnt have the time right now to go through all of the installs and I needed to clean up several gigs of space on my 160gb HD, as it was getting too low.. They looked at me like I was crazy..
They just got done playing 5 new games on their consoles.. why couldnt I just fire my new games up?
Every console on the market is Plop-and-play. You Plop the disc in the drive, turn it on and you have instant satisfaction. Configuration data and saves are stored in a small file on a mem card or the consoles HD without the player seeing it. Anyone can do it.
Every PC game on the market is an exercise in patience and sometimes frustration. You plop the disc in the drive and the installer launches.. or doesnt. the first go-around involves anywhere from 5 minutes to nearly an hour of waiting with as much as 5gb of data being transferred to your pc. Then you typically have another session of punching in a 10-20 character code. then you have to run the games configuration program and set the settings. Finally, you attempt to play the game, but if something in your system isnt right, that just doesnt happen without a long period of research and/or tech support.
And what does all of this Copying and install get you? 9 times out of 10 you have to have the disc in the drive anyways..
Why do we put up with all of this, a lot of consumers dont and they now have consoles.
Why cant we insert the disc in our PC, let the program run a simple benchmark and set some basic settings in the background and make a small temp folder for all of this. Same for setting changes and user customizable data and save games.
Level loads could happen in the back ground in to a temp folder on the PC during game play, even 200mb of data could transfer in the time the title screens go by.. every console does it this way with a minimal footprint.. Bigger data that is needed for the next scene or level could slowly load to the temp folder during the current level..
There is just no reason for all of this head ache to play a game, ¾ of the games on the PC are cross platform too, those consoles dont make you go through the same procedures. I'm not using a stack of Floppies anymore..
They just got done playing 5 new games on their consoles.. why couldnt I just fire my new games up?
Every console on the market is Plop-and-play. You Plop the disc in the drive, turn it on and you have instant satisfaction. Configuration data and saves are stored in a small file on a mem card or the consoles HD without the player seeing it. Anyone can do it.
Every PC game on the market is an exercise in patience and sometimes frustration. You plop the disc in the drive and the installer launches.. or doesnt. the first go-around involves anywhere from 5 minutes to nearly an hour of waiting with as much as 5gb of data being transferred to your pc. Then you typically have another session of punching in a 10-20 character code. then you have to run the games configuration program and set the settings. Finally, you attempt to play the game, but if something in your system isnt right, that just doesnt happen without a long period of research and/or tech support.
And what does all of this Copying and install get you? 9 times out of 10 you have to have the disc in the drive anyways..
Why do we put up with all of this, a lot of consumers dont and they now have consoles.
Why cant we insert the disc in our PC, let the program run a simple benchmark and set some basic settings in the background and make a small temp folder for all of this. Same for setting changes and user customizable data and save games.
Level loads could happen in the back ground in to a temp folder on the PC during game play, even 200mb of data could transfer in the time the title screens go by.. every console does it this way with a minimal footprint.. Bigger data that is needed for the next scene or level could slowly load to the temp folder during the current level..
There is just no reason for all of this head ache to play a game, ¾ of the games on the PC are cross platform too, those consoles dont make you go through the same procedures. I'm not using a stack of Floppies anymore..