It’s me, live with it

Alright, I think it is the time for me to bring this debate to this very blog. Which is better, console gaming or PC gaming?

Short answer: none.

Long answer:

Grab some snacks, this will be a long post.

Let’s see now, where to start…

Nowadays, the price of next-generation consoles has declined a bit, putting them from expensive to slightly expensive. The cheapest 40GB PS3, for example, can be yours after you shelled out no less than IDR 4.800.000 (436 USD), including a free game. Similarly, a 20GB Xbox 360 will cost you IDR 4.250.000 (386 USD), including a two-in-one Game DVD (and also 10 pirated games, but don’t mind that) . There is a cheaper Xbox 360 version, but it has no harddrive, so I won’t recommend it as it probably won’t offer the same playing experience. And somehow, Nintendo Wii will cost you pretty steep, too. You need to pay IDR 3.800.000 for one (345 USD).

Now, with those prices, you can get a pretty decent PC. I tinkered with this PC configurator (Indonesian, though it should) a bit and came up with this:

Athlon64 X2 5000+ Dual Core
Kingston 1Gb PC 6400
WDC 160Gb SATA-II 8Mb
Asus M2N-MX SE Plus
Acbel Pure 420watt oem
Power Logic Futura 220/250
LG 22x (box) Sata
Digital Alliance 9600GSO
Logitech KB + Ms

for a grand total of IDR 4.307.000 (391 USD). Add another hundred bucks for a windows OS, if you need it. You can also throw in some games to put the price equal to the PS3.

Okay, with those price points settled, We can see that the price difference is rather small (at least here in Indonesia). Now let’s start categorizing. I’ll list every options with their potential consumers.

First, we have the behemoth of a console, the PS3. This console is populated with all-rounder games. For example, we have GTA4, Killzone 2 (not released yet), LittleBigPlanet, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Metal Gear Solid 4, and so on. Additionally, there are some interesting PS3-exclusive games to be released (FFXIII, anyone?). So, I think it should be appropriate for those who just love MGS4 and Final Fantasy series. As for other aspects, like controller preference, are for each person to consider.

Next, the XBox 360. I actually rather reluctant to recommend it whenever my friends are asking me which console he/she should buy. That is because I heard about the Rrod problem that arised in a lot of 360s. But I think they ironed the problem already, I’m not betting on it, though. With that warning aside, I see that 360’s games somewhat resembles those of PS3’s, excluding the exclusives, so I think it depends on your game and controller preferences. If this helps, I personally prefer 360’s curvy controller, not because it was more comfortable or something, I think it is just cute .

Wii is an interesting one, its strong points are not graphical prettiness, it is more of how you play games on it. The Wii-mote becomes the main attraction of Wii. This is supported by the facts that Wii games are more into fun games than serious games. Yes, you can play Call of Duty in Wii, but it just won’t feel right. Therefore, I recommend Wii to those of you who are looking for a console to play with your family, even including your grandma.

Now, the one I’m using to type this, PC. This is not a gaming platform per se, but since it can play games, and there are a lot of games for this platform, it is worth mentioning. PC have the largest game library compared to any of the console I mentioned in this article, not to mention you can do other things on PC. Working? check. Multimedia Applications? check. Jukebox? check. If you need all-in one media center, PC is the best option, not to mention there are some games best played in PC. That PC specification above should handle any task you throw at it nicely, even including some heavy gaming.

Which to choose, then? Like I always said, it depends on what you need. If, for example, you already have a PC and want a console to play your games on, by all means get one of them, what you get depends on your preferences. I can only say this: If you’re buying console for yourself, get a PS3 or a 360. If you’re buying it for your family, get a Wii. If you want all of your entertainment in one box, get a PC.

I didn’t know that they will be releasing a James Bond game until a few days ago, when I read about it at IGN. Being a Bond fan, I set out to find more. After a few minutes of researching (as in, reading this Wikipedia page), I found this game to be quite appealing.

I have been a shooter fan since the early days of counter-strike. Since then, I’ve played quite a lot of title, and finished nearly all of them. Among them, Call of Duty 4 is one of my favourite. It is great looking without being a major system hog, Nice story, no horrible bugs, and so on. And the upcoming Quantum of Solace will be using the Call of Duty 4 engine. So, at least, it should look good and hopefully not become a system hog. Unless the developers make a terrible mistake in building the game, the chances are slim.

The developer for this game is Beenox, whom I’ve never heard of before. From what I read, though, they made quite a lot of game ports to PC. So I think the game is in good hands.

Back to the game.

Daniel Craig, in my opinion, made great performance in Casino Royale. That is my favourite James Bond movie, if only because the first James Bond movie I watched was Tomorrow Never Dies.

So, this will be a game that is based on one of my favourite movie, using the engine of one of my favourite game. This, I will be looking forward to.

I just downloaded the Nurien demo from nvidia, you can find it here, more information here. The demo is basically shows some girls walking on a runway, while showing what Physx can do with their hair and clothes. Well, basically, it makes them (the hair and clothes) act more believable.

There is a catch, though. Back in the beginning of its popularity, we need a separate card to calculate physics. The only card capable of doing that was the Ageia Physx card. Now, though, Nvidia took over the fun by making Physx accesible using only nvidia cards, specifically the CUDA-capable one. My 8600GT is on the list, so I downloaded the demo and gave it a try.

This is the first girl on the demo. Like I said, this demo showcases what Physx can do with clothing and hair.

See?

Now, my 8600GT is already crawling helplessly with one girl on screen. And now there are three of them.

This is what my humble 8600GT managed. Remember, this card is still reasonably stronger than what most people are using, yet it was humiliated with this game. Granted, I was using the 175.16 driver, instead of CUDA-enabled one, so I’ll try with one of those later.

 Here’s a quote about Nurien:

Nurien is a new category of social networking service where we can give our users more powerful ways to express their identities by enabling them to create their own unique avatars, fashions, 3D objects, legacy media (such as photo, video, and text) and share them with the world via their own 3D rooms that are accessible from a web-browser as well as our software clients. Users will use their own unique avatars to play various fun games and also partake on social applications like fashion shows, and music video contests.

Now, let me ask you a question: How many social networking fans are actually using anything better than 8600GT?

And: How many of them are girls?

Yeah, I know, it’s sad.

UPDATE: I installed nvidia’s 177.89 beta drivers. With this, I managed to get around 10% improvement in nurien demo in software physx mode. Using Geforce Physx, I got 50% improvements, but with a lot of weird texture glitches. I’m pretty sure the problem lies in CUDA implementation. I still think this is a nice development over the old 175.16 drivers.

You need to dress like that if you want to survive.

As I stated in my previous post, I re-started Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (again, R6V2) on harder difficulty.

For your information, there are three difficulty settings available in this game: casual, normal, and realistic. Since casual and normal doesn’t sound too different, I went with realistic.

Let me tell you now, it is hard.

When I was playing at casual, I could sometimes rush into a room full of bad guys and survived to tell the tale. But in realistic, you need to make your goodbye letter before rushing in.

I don’t think there’s any difference in enemy AI between casual and realistic, it’s just that the damage we received in realistic is much higher than in casual. And I mean much, much higher.

In casual difficulty, a gunshot to the body will be shrugged of easily, around three gunshots will start disorienting you, and five gunshot could be lethal. A gunshot to the head might or might not kill you, I’m not really sure. Sometimes, I die even before seeing the person shooting me. While some other time, I got badly disoriented all of a sudden. Well actually, the latter is pretty much always followed by death, so there’s no big difference. 

In realistic difficulty, a gunshot to the body will disorient you badly to the point that you can’t see anything in the screen. And a headshot is pretty much a ticket to the loading screen. I stated before in my Bioshock review that I like games that is not too difficult. But I also like games that are challenging. And this game, I should say, is a challenging one.

Challenging (or, I should say kinda hard) difficulty in a game can either be good or bad. It won’t make a good combination with stupid/fun shooters. If you play serious sam and die every time a stray bullet hits your leg, you’ll end up getting frustrated at the beginning ogf the game. But this game is a tactical shooter. and this kind of difficulty is exactly what I expected from a tactical shooter.

And it even actually seems tactical.

 See?

Just before I started this post, I noticed Shamus’s new webcomic at the escapist.

Which is a nice coincidence since I am going to write about UT3 now. Well, here goes the article.

For some reason, the last installment of the Unreal series is not getting any good response. I am actually surprised with this, especially since I tried it. And I think it is fun.

Yes, Shamus made good points with his UT3-hate-post here. But none of the problems he mentioned happened to me. Okay, I see some of them, but not enough to make me dislike the game.

Now, he also complained about the story in his Shamus’s webcomic. Yes, I think the story sucks, myself. But then again, in my opinion, this game is a multiplayer-focused first person shooter. the campaign that included with it is merely a training ground for newbies, so that when they play online with the Gurus of UT3, at least they don’t do anything stupid and shame themselves.

Well, truthfully, I never played the original quake, quake II, quake the third, or even any of the previous unreal series. Nope, I never touched any of them. I had my time with OpenArena, though. And I might also pick up Quake 4 to fill the vacuum until later this year. The first multiplayer first person shooter that I played is Counter Strike, a half-life mod (I started playing Open Arena only about a year ago). I continued playing it for years, and the moment I finally got sick hearing ‘Go, Go, GO!’, which is about a month ago, I braced myself and grab a copy of UT3.

My first impression? Well, the whole create-your-online-profile is new to me (I play neither Airborne nor COD4 online), so I courageously create a new one, and go online… to find that the servers available are either full or empty. So I tried Instant action, which is playing with bots.

There are quite a few game modes available. The first is deathmatch, which is the standard shoot-anything-you-see-moving type. And then there’s team deathmatch, where the players are divided into two teams, and each team must try to kill the members of the other team. CTF, the standard capture the flag match and its variant, VCTF, which is pretty much the same plus vehicles. And the most irritating of them all (maybe I’m just sucks), warfare. The last one is a node-to-node controlling. Don’t make me explain it.

The bots in this game varies from ridiculously stupid to Jonathan Wendel, with a hugeload of vacuum in between. I am exaggerating, of course. But still, the difficulty should be more polished, giving learning curve to beginners, challenge for more experienced players, and hell for n00bs who started the game at hardest difficulty. But this game’s difficulty chart looks like andes.

The graphics, on the other hand, well… Let me say this. Medal of Honor:Airborne uses Unreal 3 engine, The graphics looks great. Gears of War uses Unreal Engine 3, the graphics looks even greater. Bioshock uses Unreal Engine 3, The graphics looks, pardon my intentional grammar mistake, greaterer. This game, though, is just stunning. It has all the goods of the other games combined. Large environment of Airborne, texturing and character design from Gears of Wars, and water effects in Bioshock.

I might get sued for saying this, but I’ll say it anyway: I like this game’s graphics more than Crysis, especially the fact that my PC can run it at maximum settings smoothly. What’s the point of a game having great graphics if you need to tone it down a lot for it to be playable? Those graphics options in Crysis are itching to be set to ‘high’, which will entertainingly render the game unplayable. I played through Crysis with medium graphics setting, always wondering what ‘high’ would look like the entire time.

A lot of people saying that the previous Unreal series are better than this one, especially the ‘99 one. But hell, I’m not buying any 1999 game in 2008 just to play with the game’s old timers. Besides, I’ve already like UT3 so much that I don’t have enough sleep this few days.

So, well, I like this game, but I’m not sure if I can recommend it to anyone, especially that this game is multiplayer-oriented. So, If you enjoy multiplayer first person shooters, try this one, you might like it.

And, by the way, try to find me online, my profile’s name is sdxaw. I live at GMT+7 timezone, though, so, unless you’re on holiday, it might be a problem.