See Colon Slash: Leave Consoles Out of This

Welcome to ‘See Colon Slash’, my new weekly column on Negative Gamer. As you might have guessed by the title, the series will be about looking at bleeding rectums. Oh, actually, I got that wrong. It’s actually about PC gaming. If you don’t get the clever pun in the title, perhaps you’re a Linux or Mac user. In your case, the title of the column should be mentally shortened to simply “Slash”.

You might have noticed that all of my Negative Gamer articles so far have been about PC gaming, an area of gaming that has plenty of support behind it, no doubt from a number of Negative Gamer readers. Not only that, but PC gaming is really cool. Perhaps even as cool as educational school videos think smoking is. For those of us who love PC games and wish they were better, Negative Gamer has thus far unfortunately been primarily console-based (although obviously multi-platform titles can be applied to PC users too), and in See Colon Slash I’ll be pointing out the rubbish bits of PC gaming, and rubbish isn’t cool.

Before I begin, I’d like to point out that this article will likely sound like it is coming from one of those much-hated PC gaming elitists. While that’s probably true, I like to think that the fact that I play console games on a regular basis, and that since I sometimes choose console versions of multi-platform games over the PC counterparts, I’m a little less rampant and irritating. That is, however, highly subjective, and it’s up to you to decide for yourself how annoying I am.

I’d like to use this soapbox to briefly complain about console standards sneaking their way into PC games. Features that work on consoles can be nightmarish when implemented in PC games. I’ve spoken before about PC ports of console games, but this I feel is slightly more specific. I’ll begin with menu systems, since that’s where the problems tend to begin.

The easiest way to explain the problem with menus being copied over from the console versions is simply to tell you to look at what is in your right hand right now. I am of course talking about your mouse, unless you’re getting off on this article at the moment, or you use your left hand for the mouse. That probably went on for too long, didn’t it? I should stop now. This has little to do with PC games.

Oh yeah, the mouse, right. It’s pretty obvious that navigating a menu with a mouse is much easier than with a controller. However, some PC games insist that their menus must be clunky and slow, and a few even decide that no, you can’t use the mouse. You must use the keyboard instead, because all who do not have controllers in their hands must be punished. A few examples are the PC versions of Fuel and Burnout Paradise. Both menu systems require you to navigate “pages” with different options on them. That’s fine when you’ve got shoulder buttons to navigate, but using the keyboard or clicking tiny arrow buttons with the pointer is just silly. I use a controller for racing games on my PC, but that’s besides the point. A PC game should be made with the PC interface in mind. Another good example of awful menu design is present in far too many games- the pointer travels at a speed about equal to the rate at which grass grows. What’s wrong with having the pointer travel at the same speed as it does in my OS?

A second console standard that doesn’t work (well, that is unpopular at least) in PC games is matchmaking systems in online games. The fact that on a PC one can easily search, scroll through, and sort hundreds of servers means that there is no need to shove us into a random server that we have no choice over. A big part of this problem on the PC is that sometimes one will be thrown into a game full of mods and end up in a noclip-only, partymod, infinite ammo, fisheye vision, nude mod server with no warning. Just let us choose where we want to be.

Set control schemes are another nuisance hailing from consoles. A big part of keyboard and mouse layouts are the customisability, and letting us choose only from a handful of set schemes is very frustrating. Sometimes games will just neglect to acknowledge that the mouse is being used, meaning that the default-mapped mouse is set in stone. Personally I use middle mouse often when setting my control schemes, and not letting me change its function is ‘lean-back-from-screen-in-mix-of-confusion-and-rage” territory.

Finally, a small mention goes to soundtracks. On a console, having a set soundtrack makes sense. On PC, I have no problems with that, unless of course it’s a nasty soundtrack. Surely, though, it’s much easier on the PC to allow players to import their own songs into the game. GTA4 on PC did this rather well: it creates a folder that one can drag and drop music into, which then plays on the “custom” radio station in-game. Fuel, however, does it wrong. A racing game needs a good soundtrack, and Fuel’s soundtrack is full of awful generic rock riffs. I had to manually delete the tracks from the music folder in the game directory and replace them with my own songs (and change their names to the same as the original tracks). It was then that I realised that the songs in the game do not shuffle.

The same song plays every time to go into free ride, and the same song plays on the menu, and the same song plays on the loading screen. I got sick of hearing the first five seconds of a load of songs pretty quick. It was like being on MySpace again. If the 360 version allows custom songs, why not the PC version? Jolly bad show.

I’m not saying that consoles are a bad thing. I’m not saying that PC gaming is better than console gaming. I’m not saying PC gamers are better or worse than console ones. I’m just pointing out that PC games need to be made for the PC and not consoles. The two platforms are much more different than a lot of developers (or perhaps just publishers) think they are.