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Penny Arcade - Comic - Love Eternal
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Love Eternal
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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True, but it made sense for me anyway, since I play Dauntless on PC and find all those rivalries stupid, so I identified with this character right away.
I did have a small "platform racist" moment yesterday though; I got in matchmaking with 2 randos, one on PS4 and one on XB1, so we had all 3 platforms (just like in this comic) and the hunt was taking forever to start. I realized one of us hadn't readied up.
"Of course it's the Xbox dude who's holding us back".
I imagine that the third panel is what PC Master Racer people that do that think they look like, but I don't feel like what you think you look like/what you really look like meme, heh. Also condescending meme pics are what PC gamers do. Not us .. oh... hm...
I think it’s even a selling point in ads for games like Minecraft. Sony is even begrudgingly opening itself up, which is huge because being unable to play third-party games with friends on other platforms is just ridiculous.
True, I think there were cross-platforms before FFXI, but I'm pretty sure sure FFXI was the first to do cross-platform involving PC, X-Box, AND Sony.
Not if you think about it a little more. The very reason consoles get shat on, for the most part, is such artificial limitations and anti-consumer practices as the denial of cross-play. The scenario depicted here is genuinely what the PCMR wants.
Stating facts, even if sometimes in a smug manner, never was equal to "shitting on" anything in my mind. Consoles are strictly worse platforms than a custom built PC. There's nothing a console can do that a PC can't also do, and better, and with greater user control, and do more of.
The fact is that it's far cheaper and easier to set up a good round of Mario Kart with friends on the couch with a Switch than a PC, if the PC even can do that. It is not a strictly worse platform if it fills a need more easily.
Consoles and PCs fill different needs and deliver different experiences; there is only one way in which PCs are objectively better and that is pure technical horsepower.
And when I play Mario Party or Smash or Towerfall with friends, the thing none of us has ever said was "Golly gee I sure wish there were more pixels in that texture over there; that'd make the game more fun."
So yeah, it's extremely ironic to see the PC as the voice of reason here. But then again, it makes sense for the comic, since it's the one not involved in the Xbox vs. Playstation fight.
Certainly you can appreciate the irony as we argued back against the "30 fps is as fast as the eye can see" and "720p is high definition" crowd? I think most PC users had a pretty good sense of humor about it, but the Console crowd always took things a bit too personally...
For those not as old as dirt:
What world were you living in where console players didn't self-identify as nerds? Other than the 'only plays sports games & AAA FPS' types, but I seriously doubt they were engaging in online arguments over preferences for gaming platforms. If console gamers were calling PC gamers nerds, it was meant to be sarcastic, like the brunching shuttlecocks' geek heirarchy.
Edit: I'm pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to find that online after all these years.
1. Nobody over the age of 13 has ever said that without being sarcastic. I see "Ugh console PEASANTS!" used more often as a jab at PC gamers and PC culture than I have ever seen as an actual jab at console purists.
2. Yes you can, it's a PC, it can do literally anything you want it to. How hard do you think it is to set up an emulator and hook a PC to a television? You can have a PC that does your taxes AND sucks your dick if you are motivated enough.
3. You're talking about games and game hardware with tunnel vision for "My buddies and myself on my couch" only. That is an exceptionally narrow and limited set of games and gaming habits to judge anything by. I can game on my couch with my buddies and play Crawl on my television with my PC tower streaming to it with a controller for everybody, but I can ALSO play Overwatch with my buddies without them even being in the same room as me, or play Vermintide 2 with random people anywhere globally. You sure as dick ain't gonna get equivalent performance or graphical fidelity from those games on a console, not if you want a smooth 60fps. (Which reminds me, Dark Souls and Dragons Dogma on the PC were straight up superior because they could maintain an actually smooth FPS) What if I want to play Skyrim with a shitload of ENBs installed and blast my eyes out of their sockets? Or play with mods at all? That just ain't gonna happen on a console.
Sure, if you only want to play a limited set of games in a limited manner and never want anything more, or go beyond your current tastes, then nobody can say a console was not as good a choice as any other for you. But for literally everything and anything else, you'd be objectively better off investing in a PC.
Bubble Bobble on NES. You popped the cart in, pressed Power, you were playing.
Loading the arcade version from a 5.25" floppy on my 386 took 3 minutes.
Your first point (which I agree with) is kind of undermined by your tone for the latter points. Console games have a rich history of titles that never got ported to PC, and while you can emulate a lot of old singleplayer experiences, it just doesn't work for modern console exclusives with online components and/or DLC.
The smart answer was always to straddle the fence, to get the best of both worlds.
Then I'll play on my PC. You act like this is a war where you have to choose a camp and one camp's objectively better than the other, but purism of any kind is dumb and limiting.
Of course I have a PC, I use it for work + the Internet. Also for any FPS or RTS, no way I'm playing those with a controller. And PC exclusives, obviously.
It's almost as if consoles and PC serve different needs so I have both.
I don't begrudge people their choice of platform. It's the smug "Mine's objectively better" bs I dislike. Especially because it's wrong, 100% of the time.
When I explain how I game, I don't have tunnel vision. It is you who have tunnel vision when you discount other people's experiences, or needs or desires, or house setups, or whatever. There are situations where a PC trumps a console and vice versa, they are just different situations.
I'll admit I did yell "PC master race" whenever my computer crashed in the middle of a game. But now I'm reminded why.