Hello everybody,
Tired of the 30 days game challenge? Enjoy my own personal revisitation of a classic challenge! Instead of 30 daily posts that fill an entire month, this challenge is more diluted in time and it will cover all the year 2018. 52 weeks, 52 questions to understand who’s the person behind this blog. Me!
Week 14 – Your game system of choice
Another tough question but this time the answer is probably easier than what I thought.
For most of my life I’ve been primarily a PC gamer. Until the very recent years, when I started collecting consoles and games from every kind of platform, the only console I owned in my whole life was the NES (I still own 🙂 ) and since I got my first PC, a 286 in 1994 I kept playing games on PC.
I think the PC, while is not a platform designed specifically for games, it’s the best system to play games (or at least it has been the best one, at the moment I’m not so much into PC gaming because I still have the same entry level laptop since 4 years…).
The main reason, as far as I’m concerned, is that the PC offers a larger range of playable games. While some of the games designed for console were exclusively for console, a big part of them were cross-platform. Plus some of the best games of the 90s designed for PC, even if they weren’t PC-exclusive, they played way better on PC than on console. Let’s consider some of my all-time favourite games like Doom or Wolfenstein. Made for PC, they were ported on console but these version are a bit more difficult to play mainly because if you use a keybord you have almost endless possibility to assign an action to a specific key: consider for example the weapons selection in Duke Nukem 3D: 10 weapons, 10 keys (0-9) so you can easily switch from a shotgun to the RPG in a second.
On the other hand let’s consider some games released first on console and then ported on PC: Resident Evil, again, one of my favourite games that I’ve played a million times so I can spot the differences. Well, even though at first getting used to the keys instead of the joypad is a bit complicated, after a few minutes it looks like the games was designed for the keyboard.
So I can say that the games designed for PC struggle whn ported on console and on the contrary the games designed for console play well on PC.
In the end there are a lot of games I have never seen on console that were great fun on PC. Platformers like Superfrog, Commander Keen or Jazz Jackrabbit, RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, FPSs like Rise of the Triad and racing games like the immortal Grand Prix 2.
What about your system of choice? Let me know in the comments section!
I ❤ Old Games! 
I nominate the Nintendo 64. I would like to say the Nintendo Wii because of the innovative control system and the way it makes the games more interactive, but I feel the games available on the Nintendo 64 were more enjoyable. I remember the games I played on the Nintendo 64 were more prominent in my childhood, with a large number of good games (such as Super Mario 64, Goldeneye, Goemon and Goemon 2, Super Smash Bros, the Legend of Zelda games, etc.). I also liked the graphics, which were 3D, but not too realistic, so the games had a slightly fantastical quality. I can understand why you would enjoy the PC so much, particularly as there was such a wide range of games available on it and I remember using the number keys to equip weapons in shooters.
Can you still play old PC games? Or are they affected by compatibility? Did you find all genres of games were enjoyable on the PC? I found shooters difficult to play using a mouse.
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The NES has always been mine. Too many games to list.
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The PC’s been mine almost since I started gaming. It was the system that had the greatest concentration of the sort of games which really got me into gaming in the first place – strategy, simulation and FPS games in particular – and the continuing backwards compatibility has given me a rather more substantial library for my PC than for any other system.
I’m a big fan of the Amiga’s library as well, although I’ve only ever played Amiga games through emulation apart from a brief try on an Amiga 500 at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.
As for console systems, I think that the SNES, Mega Drive and PlayStation form a triumvirate just below the PC and Amiga that is hard to separate.
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I fully agree with what you’ve said about PC. Has an incredible backward compatibility and I can’t imagine another way of playing certain Simulation games or RTS if not with keyboard and mouse.
About the Centre for Computing History, is it worth a visit? Next time I’ll be going in the UK I’d really love to go therr but I don’t know if it’s so good as it seems…
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Regarding the Centre for Computing History, I loved it; there was plenty of opportunity to get hands-on with the hardware there and I spent the whole day there. On the other hand, if you do go, it may be worth planning a contingency plan and selecting another place to go for the second half of the day, because I found that the appeal for me centred largely around that hands-on experience and the actual premises is rather small.
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I had to cheat on this one. I love the PS4, XBOX1, and PC all for different reasons. We’re allowed to cheat every now and then, right?
https://nolongerpick3dlast.wordpress.com/2018/04/15/week-15-whats-your-game-system-of-choice/
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