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A long, long time ago, first-person shooters and their third-person bastard children were actually good. Does anyone remember Duke Nukem 3D? Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force? MoHAA? American McGee's Alice? Great games, all. However, they didn't tend to port well to consoles, the reason being that consoles suck ass. Initially, console-makers decided to get around this problem by making keyboards, mice, and - god forbid - even hard drives for their machines! Then Halo came along and proved that first-person shooters for consoles could work if you crippled the game design in such a way as to work very well with the limitations of consoles.

Of course, this proved to be a bit of a problem when trying to make a game that both PC gamers and console gamers might want to play. Thus, between the 2004-2005 season of games (Far Cry, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, etc.) and the 2007-2008 season (Bioshock, Crysis, UT3), game designers - who apparently are all Marxists hell-bent on the equal sharing of misery - decided that the solution to the conundrum was not to make consoles as awesome as PCs, but rather, to make PC shooters as crappy as console shooters. A few games, like Unreal Tournament III, managed to mostly escape this curse. Most didn't. Transformers: War for Cybertron is one of the latter. It has all of the hallmarks of playing a console shooter on the PC, including, but not limited to:

- The two-gun limit
- "Halo healing"
- Checkpoints as a crappy substitute for an actual save/load system
- Zero interactivity with the environment whatsoever beyond what is required in order to win
- The expand-o-matic reticle, offering neither the precision of a real targeting reticle nor the luxury of auto-aim.

I can't say that the ultra-linear level design helps matters much, either. So why is this game so popular? Has everyone just forgotten what good shooters are like? Has everyone forgotten the joys of walking up to a toilet, pressing a key, and hearing Duke say "Ah, much better"?

Meh. I'm gonna go finish chapter III, then drink myself into a stupor.

Short version of the stock argument you just used: "Boo hoo, games aren't the same as when I was a kid, and are therefore awful." I guess they must REALLY suck when you consider you don't have to go to an arcade and convert your allowance into quarters to play them, huh?

Games evolve, that's just the way it is. Doesn't make them any worse or any better.

EDIT: Also you used the "consoles are bad, PC is good" stock argument.

Shadowman wrote:Short version of the stock argument you just used: "games have been deliberately crippled for one platform in order to pander to users of inferior platforms, and are therefore awful."

Fixed.

Something else that annoys me: NO SKIRMISH/"INSTANT ACTION" MODE!

Shadowman wrote:Also you used the "consoles are bad, PC is good" stock argument.

Let me know when I can do digital video editing on a console.

cotss2012 wrote:

Shadowman wrote:Short version of the stock argument you just used: "games have been deliberately crippled for one platform in order to pander to users of inferior platforms, and are therefore awful."

Fixed.

Oh, the return of "PCs Superior, Consoles Inferior."

cotss2012 wrote:

Shadowman wrote:Also you used the "consoles are bad, PC is good" stock argument.

Let me know when I can do digital video editing on a console.

I dunno, Rooster Teeth has had a long, fruitful career making videos out of console games. I've never done it, though, I'm far too concerned with actually playing the game.

Are you really looking at this objectively Shadowman?

How much PC game play have you done? Because as far as i'm concerned, PC games were vastly superior. The only advantage consoles have over gaming PC's is the price.

But frankly if I wanted to play Age of Empires, Dawn of War, or other strategy games i'd definitely take PC over console any day.

Boiling it down, certain genres work better on PC, while other genres work better on console. But if PC versions are being limited so they "stay in line" with consoles, then yes, cotss has a very valid point.

But considering this particular franchise and that they want it to get to the masses, it will have to be developed primarily for the consoles. Thankfully there's still plenty of PC orientated games out there.

Shadowman wrote:Oh, the return of "PCs Superior, Consoles Inferior."

Sort of. I admit that modern consoles, with the proper accessories, can actually be superior to PCs for gaming purposes. Unfortunately, modern console games are still designed with traditional console restrictions in mind.

Shadowman wrote:I dunno, Rooster Teeth has had a long, fruitful career making videos out of console games. I've never done it, though, I'm far too concerned with actually playing the game.

The RvB footage was created on an XboX, then presumably run through a capture card and edited on a computer. I'm not too sure about PANICS or The Strangerhood.

Burn wrote:Boiling it down, certain genres work better on PC, while other genres work better on console. But if PC versions are being limited so they "stay in line" with consoles, then yes, cotss has a very valid point.

The problem with this is he's citing the consoles as the fault for poor game design as opposed to the developers. For example. Two gun limit and halo healing (I assume you mean recharging health). weren't problems in past versions of console games. Things like goldeneye and perfect dark allowed you to carry every single gun you could find, and even dual wield some of them. They also didn't have regenerating health, so you could focus on finding health packs to your hearts content. I also seem to remember these being console exclusives. (not counting goldeneye source, mind you). Neither of these things happen because the game is on a console, they happened because the game developers planned them that way. The same thing with checkpoints. As for environment interactivity, I seem to remember a certain mickey mouse based game that allowed you to paint the environment or destroy it to achieve your objectives. Red Faction Guerrilla featured fully destructible buildings and environments, and this was a multi-platform. Certainly not limited by the inferior abilities of the console. All this really boils down to is a preference for control scheme. Some people prefer mouse and keyboard, some people prefer controller.

(also perfect dark's CIM50 had an auto aim feature)

Burn wrote:Are you really looking at this objectively Shadowman?

Looking at what? I'm pointing out he's just using old stock arguments that don't really have a whole lot of meaning. Yes, certain genres do work better on PC. No, PCs are not inherently superior.

Burn wrote:How much PC game play have you done?

A few hours.

Oh, AND there's no LAN support. And even online play requires creating an account so that you can be snooped on. Bastards.

Tweezy wrote:Two gun limit and halo healing (I assume you mean recharging health). weren't problems in past versions of console games. Things like goldeneye and perfect dark allowed you to carry every single gun you could find, and even dual wield some of them. They also didn't have regenerating health, so you could focus on finding health packs to your hearts content.

But how well did the multi-gun-carrying system work with the standard N64 controller? How well did traditional healing work with the four-save limit?

Tweezy wrote:As for environment interactivity, I seem to remember a certain mickey mouse based game that allowed you to paint the environment or destroy it to achieve your objectives. Red Faction Guerrilla featured fully destructible buildings and environments, and this was a multi-platform.

But could you do stuff that had no relevance to the objectives at hand? Could you make prank phone calls and kick enemies' heads around like soccer balls like in Blood? Serious question, not rhetorical. I've never played those games.

cotss2012 wrote:Oh, AND there's no LAN support. And even online play requires creating an account so that you can be snooped on. Bastards.

You're right about LAN support, but how many online games don't require you to create an account?

cotss2012 wrote:But how well did the multi-gun-carrying system work with the standard N64 controller? How well did traditional healing work with the four-save limit?

Goldeneye is considered one of the best FPS games ever made, so I'd say quite well.

cotss2012 wrote:But could you do stuff that had no relevance to the objectives at hand? Could you make prank phone calls and kick enemies' heads around like soccer balls like in Blood? Serious question, not rhetorical. I've never played those games.

I know the last leg of Half-Life 2 (And the first leg of HL2: Episode 1) involved using enemies and bits of environment as ammunition. Ooh, and the Ghostbusters game, in which obliterating the environment was practically a gameplay mechanic. Also Just Cause 2, where the entire game is "Find something that hasn't exploded, and make it explode." And the Arkham games, in particular the Riddler Challenges, which involve digging through the environment to find things.