Specialisation is the only way forward, these days!

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Still, most (all?) the RPSians write for Eurogamer, and lots of great console games are great PC games at the same time or in a short while. You don’t have to go truly multiplatform (obviously) but you could certainly allow yourselves to post rants, deconstructionism, thoughts and comedy links about console games once in a while. Fable 2 is a perfect example; if Molyneaux had announced it would port over his dead body, you’d be prevented from linking to Kieron’s (fascinating) preview. Which people would have missed, which is a shame ‘cos it’s, well, fascinating.

What about a stance of “We’ll cover anything on PC if it’s relevant to PC gaming as a whole, and stuff on consoles if it’s relevant to gaming as a whole”?

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Also, good on you for being about PC games. There’s a million and three multiplatform or console focused sites out there, we don’t need another. RPS is fine just the way it is. ;)

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Then there’s Dead Rising, of course – though I still can’t play that one, not having an HDTV. In general a lot of 360 games seem to have squintily small, nearly unreadable text on SDTV, and Dead Rising pushes it over to completely unreadable. *sighs* And there’s Crackdown…

With a couple of predictable exceptions – Mass Effect, GTA IV (to a slightly lesser extent) – the games that *have* been seeing ports are mostly the ones I don’t care that much about. Gears? Meh. DMC4? Well…it might be fun (more fun than Gears, certainly), but I suspect it’s better played on 360. Or at least 360 controller. Viva Pinata? Eh.

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I sit and listen, and think, “Man. Now I know how to explain EVE to people.”

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Good. :) Like you said, I don’t see much reason to cover consoles anyway except for possible PC-links later on. The rest of the gamessites seem fine with mostly ignoring the real good bits about PC gaming, don’t mess up RPS with the same kind of laziness and general sucking-up/making-silly-sales-comparisons to/of the ‘big’ three.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t like some console games to show up on PC of course (The Darkness especially). Endwar is coming over some time after its console release apparently (might be a nice WiC-clone), maybe the newly revamped Chronicles of Riddick finds a home on PC as well with a new publisher, and who knows what other titles will make the jump to PC? Still, we’ve got enough PC(-exclusive) games to look forward to even without those possible ports and that’s the important thing to remember.

2008 is about to kick off for real in the coming weeks… ;)

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KG

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I used to call myself a PC gamer primarily because of the mod scene, the indie scene, and so on. However, with indie titles moving ever more towards consoles (I love you, Everyday Shooter, even if you are pretty much everyday), and some titles being moonlighted on the PS3 long before the PC (Bionic Commando: Rearmed was one of my sins, I could not wait), the console landscape is changing. Things are beginning to merge, and the lines today blur between consoles and PCs more than ever.

This is a good thing.

Actually, one thing my roomie said to me yesterday really made me think. Not just the “Blimey, he has a point.” kind of thinking, but more the “That’s an epiphany I feel bloody stupid not to have had first.” kind of thinking. Quoth the layabout; “Today we see the rebirth of an era, one where absolutely crazy and potentially unmarketably quirky games are now granted funding.”

It’s not that hard to see, all I have to do is look at the likes of Mirror’s Edge, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and LittleBigPlanet and all I can say is… well, stone me, he’s right… isn’t he?

Moreover, this isn’t just happening on the PC (which was where non-oriental quirky games used to go to die) but it’s happening on consoles now, and in the mainstream. I feel like I’m beginnin to step into the 80′s again, and it’s absolutely bizarre. I look at my collection of trailers and things I’m looking forward to, and I realise that I haven’t seen this much imagination in a line-up for a long, long time.

It’s hard to ignore consoles these days, one of the titles I’m most eagerly anticipating is LittleBigPlanet, and that’s a PS3 title.

For the longest time, the most heinous crime I’ve seen gaming commit is the macho bubblehead accompanied by the female action-hero who’d prefer to stable bits of cloth to various bits of her far-too-bloody-exaggerated body as opposed to actually wearing clothes. For the longest time I absolutely despised consoles for doing that to gaming, and robbing us of the strong characters we had in PC games before they came along. But to be honest… the console of today is doing much to heal those old wounds.

It doesn’t surprise me that I’m not the only one who’s gone through this particular evolution.

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Since you’re referring to the UK as “over there,” I assume we’re talking about the same “here.”

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Depending on your tolerance for mecha-musume and your ability to coax obscure games out of obscurer websites, there is a PC Advance Wars. Well, a fanclone, but fuck it it’s nearly identical and just as addictive from all accounts.

Name of Gadget Trial.

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