Busting PC gaming myths #2: "The games are all crap console ports"

In part one of my Busting PC Gaming Myths column here on Made2Game, I laid to rest the often mooted opinion that playing games on a personal computer doesn't represent value for money when compared to the apparently much cheaper consoles. Now I've proven that as consummate nonsense, I’ve returned to debunk another PC gaming myth - today's PC games are just half-assed ports from the consoles anyhow, so the cost is irrelevant. Tosh.

I'll admit it, us PC gamers may have brought this particular mythology upon ourselves. We're all too quick to rant and rave when one of these 'crappy console ports' shows up – as I did myself when id Software's RAGE was released earlier this week. Admittedly Rage was designed with the consoles in mind, but many PC users suffered from various issues upon picking up the title and before it had even been released, John Carmack had admitted in an interview with PC Gamer that they’d made mistakes: “We should be focusing on building things efficiently on the PC and [then] deploying on to consoles.”

An angry PC gamer yesterday, waiting outside John Carmack's mountain lair.

But that’s not really an excuse, and while the last paragraph seems to confirm the exact myth I'm trying to dispel, there's much more to gaming on the PC than sub-par multi-platform releases. Not only do we get a bunch of titles in which the PC version is superior, but also a wealth of titles that never receive a console release – be it because of the open-nature of our platform, or that the controls and/or hardware in the consoles means it simply couldn't work on them.

The obvious trump card as far as multi-platform releases goes is the upcoming Battlefield 3. Having played the beta side-by-side on PC and PlayStation 3 – as well as seeing the PC version next to the 360 one at this year's Eurogamer Expo – there's no doubt whatsoever that the graphical horsepower of today's PCs can produce a visual fidelity that far exceeds both Sony’s and Microsoft's boxes. That's before we even start to look at the PC exclusive features such as larger maps and 64 player battles, something that, to me, is a staple in the DICE series.

Then we can look at games such as DiRT 2 and 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Metro 2033, all of which can take advantage of a nice little piece of technology known as Direct X 11. This allows for games to take further advantage of the PC's hardware with improved support for multi-core processors, better compression of textures, Shader Model 5.0 and hardware tessellation. Terms that may not mean a lot to most people -- and I could go into detail and bore you death with the all the nitty-gritty behind them – but ultimately Direct X 11 allows for major graphical improvements and much more life-like imagery.

All great stuff, but can we justify the existence of PC gaming just because of smoother edges on a rock-face? Or a gravel pathway that's actually bumpy rather than using a texture that looks it? All of these things can be experienced on the consoles, and thousands upon thousands of people will have one hell of a time doing so. While these PC versions can be seen as a great win for the PC crowd, some of the best times I've had playing games on my computer is with the games that are exclusive to this platform. Which is where the idea of a port doesn't even enter the equation.

Strategy games in particular are a love of mine. Examples such as the Total War franchise have afforded me hundreds of hours of deeply immersive gaming. Civilization III has been played among my peers for years, with single games that can sometimes span weeks in duration. Both games that are exclusive to the PC. Then there are games with much wider appeal, the Football Manager series for example; a type of game that, despite trying, just simply doesn't work right without the dexterity of a computer. MMOs such as World of Warcraft and the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic also take to the PC as exclusives; the consoles just don't really have the infrastructure for them to work as intended.

This is what happens every time Blackpool play away at Watford...

In recent times we've also had exclusives such as Magicka, the debut title from indie developers Arrowhead Game Studios. It sold over 200,000 copies in its first 17 days on sale, and proceeded to take the PC gaming community by storm. Magicka offers a parody-like RPG experience, with a multiplayer component that had my friends and I in absolute stitches from start to finish. It'd probably never have seen the light of day if it wasn't for the PC.

This is partly due to the barrier of entry for releasing a game for Windows being almost non-existent. Sure you need to be able to actually make said game, but you most certainly don't need to gain permission from Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo to get it out and into the public’s hands – which is the case with releasing a game on XBLA or PSN. There's also a bunch of games that have used the PC to get their name out there, many of which then see a console release after proving their worth, because it would've been near impossible to break out otherwise.

I could list pages of PC exclusive games from the last five years, and probably around 50 from the past 12 months. Some of the best include Frozen Synapse, Darkspore and Blizzard's StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty – which during the year since it launched has become my favourite game of all time. I've spent as muchtime (if not more) watching others play it as I have playing it myself. With an endless level of mastery it's now at the stage where professional players get paid salaries to play and represent their teams. Even IGN has gotten involved in the scene, running a huge competition this week in the Circus Maximus theatre at Atlantic City's Caesars casino, with $106,000 up for grabs across the weekend. Once again, this game would have to be massively simplified in order to work on a console.

You can win silly amounts of cash in tournaments if you're a top Starcraft II player. Sadly, we're not.

In summary, there's a bunch of reasons I could argue that PC gaming has the edge. But that's neither here nor there; I set myself the mission to show that there's more to PC gaming than some of the god-awful ports we've seen over the years. Hopefully, this post has done that – and next time I run my mouth about a one of these hack-jobs, I may just bite my lip, instead devoting my time to praising one of the many, many PC releases that has done it the right way.

Then again, I'm British. So I may not. We're a miserable nation, with nothing that satisfies us more than a good old rant about a subject we can ultimately have very little influence upon. Which is why in the near future I'll be delivering part three of my “Busting PC Gaming Myths” column, where I'll have a extensive moan at everybody that's ever said, “PC gaming is just too complicated!” Keep an eye out!

Bobby Gooding started out gaming on an Atari 2600, but these days struggles to shift away from his keyboard and mouse. You can find his words about PC gaming daily on Ironhammers.org, or hear his rants about which option menu was missing from the latest PC release by following @ironhammers on Twitter.

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