thaddius' Console Roast 2014 Edition - Round 13

[Foxi4]

Why no "all" option?

Something, something, pcmasterrace...


All seriousness though, all consoles are really disappointing for me, underpowered consoles that frankly were overpriced when they came out (for what's inside them). You could spend £100 more on a pc (you could easily buy a decent pc for £450) , then after about 10-20 games, the price difference would be negligible since the pc counterparts of games are much cheaper, for example Xbox one COD:Ghosts is £32, pc is £23, Xbox one BF4 is £42 pc is £27, Xbox one titanfall is £40 pc is £30, etc you get the point. Not to mention steam sales which would save you loads of money.

I have a WiiU, but that's only because I love mario games, which is the only franchise that i care about that isn't multiplatform.

Here's the difference. If you spend 400-500 quid on a PC, it might be working perfectly fine now, it might even give you better performance than the consoles now, but in two years time it will be outdated and the games will start lagging while the consoles will have a guaranteed 7-8 years of top notch performance due to optimization for specific set-in-stone hardware. Don't think in categories of "I'll spend a 100 quid more and I'll have an equivalent or better-performing PC", you'll have to spend much more than that over the course of the gaming generation to keep up and that's a fact.

 

[stefer]

Putting the Ouya in there is like putting the iPad on the list, or any Android tablet. It's a whole different game altogether...
Yes Ouya games are not great... there's a proof of concept right now on their store with streaming games, they have lego batman, i've tried it, wasn't too bad! But the only thing i've used my Ouya for so far are the emulators and XBMC...

Next poll should be between Ouya, gamestick and all those indie android consoles.

 

[Foxi4]

Putting the Ouya in there is like putting the iPad on the list, or any Android tablet. It's a whole different game altogether...
Yes Ouya games are not great... there's a proof of concept right now on their store with streaming games, they have lego batman, i've tried it, wasn't too bad! But the only thing i've used my Ouya for so far are the emulators and XBMC...

Next poll should be between Ouya, gamestick and all those indie android consoles.

They're all devices specifically dedicated to gaming so I don't see why we should think of them any less just because they're running Android - PlayStation 3, 4 and the PSVita run custom versions of FreeBSD but we're not calling them PC's, are we (except the handful of people who don't grasp the idea of what a console is)?

 

[fojacko]

Here's the difference. If you spend 400-500 quid on a PC, it might be working perfectly fine now, it might even give you better performance than the consoles now, but in two years time it will be outdated and the games will start lagging while the consoles will have a guaranteed 7-8 years of top notch performance due to optimization for specific set-in-stone hardware. Don't think in categories of "I'll spend a 100 quid more and I'll have an equivalent or better-performing PC", you'll have to spend much more than that over the course of the gaming generation to keep up and that's a fact.

My cousins pc was built about 4 years ago for a similar price (i think about £450-£500) and it's still running great, he can play bf4 on medium and he hasn't upgraded anything. And when his does inevitabley become outdated, he can sell his gpu and/or cpu on ebay (i sold a Phenom II X3 for £60 late last year, and a geforce 7800 gt for £40) to put towards upgrading. Hell, i'd be willing to bet that in a few years you'd be able to buy a gpu and it'd last you ages.

 

[Foxi4]

My cousins pc was built about 4 years ago for a similar price (i think about £450-£500) and it's still running great, he can play bf4 on medium and he hasn't upgraded anything. And when his does inevitabley become outdated, he can sell his gpu and/or cpu on ebay (i sold a Phenom II X3 for £60 late last year, and a geforce 7800 gt for £40) to put towards upgrading. Hell, i'd be willing to bet that in a few years you'd be able to buy a gpu and it'd last you ages.

So in other words he spent 100 quid more and it took 4 years for him to get from top performance to mid-tier performance. Duly noted. Had he spent less, he'd be running on low detail within 2 years.

 

[Sakitoshi]

*snip*

by your logic the Wii U should be able to accept S/NES/64 carts and Gamecube discs but guess what, it doesn't.
and if you want to make the games look better and skip the modding part, just get a beefy PC and problem solved. sure it cost the same as all of the money you already invested on the multiple consoles and copies of the games.

 

[codezer0]

by your logic the Wii U should be able to accept S/NES/64 carts and Gamecube discs but guess what, it doesn't.
and if you want to make the games look better and skip the modding part, just get a beefy PC and problem solved. sure it cost the same as all of the money you already invested on the multiple consoles and copies of the games.

It took me until the middle of 2013 to find an emulator for ps1 that ran games well enough to effectively qualify. There are no PS2 emulators up to that level, much less had yet to qualify.

Emulation on the PC is just not possible for anything more recent. And even now, the cheapest I could spec out a computer I could be happy with was about $2700 just in the parts... nevermind the extra that I'd have to spend for appropriate cooling, a UPS to keep input power clean, et al.

Sony made backward compatibility matter with the PS2. And Since then, Sony has also changed their controller or their game medium of choice the least. Sony also retained all of the hardware IP for all generations of their consoles and handhelds.

Nintendo drastically changed their control interface from GameCube to Wii, but still provided ports to help allow people to use their controllers and play their games on the new system. Everyone knows that Microsoft failed to retain the hardware IP to the CPU & GPU in the Original Xbox, so of course they had to start from scratch when emulating the games to run on the 360.

That said, unlike Sony and Microsoft, at least Nintendo didn't automatically invalidate everything I had bought for my Wii with the WiiU. All my Wii controllers and accessories can work on the new system. And when importing my profile over, all my digital purchases would work, too. Sony and Microsoft chose to make it so that nothing you bought for the PS3 and 360 will work on the PS4 and X1. Sony and Microsoft chose to devalue everything that's available on the older platforms simply because they want to resell it to us for some outrageous price. Sony and Microsoft both chose to basically screw us over in that regard.

 

[Foxi4]

It took me until the middle of 2013 to find an emulator for ps1 that ran games well enough to effectively qualify. There are no PS2 emulators up to that level, much less had yet to qualify.

Wow, you must've missed major releases or your PC is really way behind the times. These days emulators have surpassed simple emulation and venture into the fields of improving games by post-processing, increasing native resolutions, adding filtering to textures etc. - just look at ePSXe or Dolphin. The PS2 is a particularly difficult platform to emulate hence the high system requirements, but other than that, every platform from or before that era has a good emulator except for the Xbox. That's not to say that emulation is in any way superior, by no means - I personally prefer to play the games on their original platforms, but emulation with upped internal resolution is a treat that can really put a fresh breath of life into the old classics.

 

[codezer0]

Wow, you must've missed major releases or your PC is really way behind the times. These days emulators have surpassed simple emulation and venture into the fields of improving games by post-processing, increasing native resolutions, adding filtering to textures etc. - just look at ePSXe or Dolphin. The PS2 is a particularly difficult platform to emulate hence the high system requirements, but other than that, every platform from or before that era has a good emulator except for the Xbox. That's not to say that emulation is in any way superior, by no means - I personally prefer to play the games on their original platforms, but emulation with upped internal resolution is a treat that can really put a fresh breath of life into the old classics.

ePSXe never worked for me. at all. Up until finding pSX, the only emulator I found that actually worked and more than once was Bleem! and well... you couldn't even buy it anymore.

never had a motivation for dolphin since... my Wii still works like a charm with the GameCube stuff.

 

[Foxi4]

ePSXe never worked for me. at all. Up until finding pSX, the only emulator I found that actually worked and more than once was Bleem! and well... you couldn't even buy it anymore.

never had a motivation for dolphin since... my Wii still works like a charm with the GameCube stuff.

pSX? Bleem!? Whoa...

Not sure if blast from the past or stone age... switch to ePSXe, using anything else in this day and age is redundant. pSX hasn't been updated since 2008 and Bleem! was an early emulator and understandably had "issues" with just about anything.

 

[Jayro]

How is this the 8th generation of consoles? Starting with the NES, Nintendo has only released 6 in total, excluding handhelds.

ePSXe never worked for me. at all. Up until finding pSX, the only emulator I found that actually worked and more than once was Bleem! and well... you couldn't even buy it anymore.

never had a motivation for dolphin since... my Wii still works like a charm with the GameCube stuff.

I never got ePSXe working either, and the PSX emulator for Android won't work well via OpenGL, so I can't even play with hi-res graphics like the screenshots show. :/

 

[Gahars]

How is this the 8th generation of consoles? Starting with the NES, Nintendo has only released 6 in total, excluding handhelds.

Because console generations started with Nintendo?

 

[thaddius]

Also I doubt he's including the Nintendo Color TV Game.

 

[Jayro]

Because console generations started with Nintendo?

Yeah, the ones that matter.

 

[Taleweaver]

Here's the difference. If you spend 400-500 quid on a PC, it might be working perfectly fine now, it might even give you better performance than the consoles now, but in two years time it will be outdated and the games will start lagging while the consoles will have a guaranteed 7-8 years of top notch performance due to optimization for specific set-in-stone hardware. Don't think in categories of "I'll spend a 100 quid more and I'll have an equivalent or better-performing PC", you'll have to spend much more than that over the course of the gaming generation to keep up and that's a fact.

This depends on what "outdated" means. Newer and faster CPU's, GPU's and the like are still being released roughly on a Moore's law kind of prediction, but games don't require top notch PC's anymore as they used to (except for ultra-high settings). It aren't the nineties or zeroties* anymore: your average PC has a much longer expected lifespan nowadays (at least, the average PC I bought seven years ago can still play the far majority of games I throw at it without hiccups. not on highest settings, but more than decent). On top of that, the price is dropping. More precisely: it's dropping faster than to be expected (if I had spent the same budget on my new pc as I had spent on my average pc from seven years ago, I would've been close to alienware).

*or however you want to call the first ten years of this millennium

 

[Foxi4]

Yeah, the ones that matter.

Yeah, no. You could argue that it all started with the Fairchild Channel F since it was the first to feature programmable cartridges to my knowledge (previous systems used jumpers to alter a logic chain that was in the system already so you couldn't really program anything for them, the "games" were already bundled) but the official classification starts with the Magnavox Odyssey.

 

[Gahars]

Yeah, the ones that matter.

3/10, step it up, senpai

 

[CompassNorth]

I never got ePSXe working either, and the PSX emulator for Android won't work well via OpenGL, so I can't even play with hi-res graphics like the screenshots show. :/

Take a look here.

 

[matpower]

Take a look here.

Updated link.

 

[stinkoman]

The ouya hands down. I owned one for about a day before shipping it back. The controller doesn't even work with anything between it and the ouya, which is goddamn ridiculous. The games are complete shit, most of them are laggy or bogged down IAP clusterfucks. The UI was atrocious, completely impractical. The controller was an oddly shaped mess. As for things that can actually be called consoles, the Wii U is probably lowest on my list. Coming from someone who owns one. It's just... not good. Third party support is a mess, it's day one dated, and it's probably going to be dead soon. Not really the best purchase.