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Athelas

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So many things wrong with that article...

First, the gamepad nonsense. Before Microsoft standardized (i.e. forced) their incredibly expensive gamepad on PC users, you could plug in any random gamepad and the game would recognize it. But for the last several years, Microsoft made it so that games would only recognize the X360 controller.

And the article overlooks the fact that those multi-platform games were made with console limitations in mind. Meaning you are restricted to things like linear maps and a handful of characters on screen at any time.
 

Cowboy Moment

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Kotaku said:
for the first time in its life, the platform had a standardized control pad.

I can't even think of a witty oneliner for this, the sheer ridiculousness is too overwhelming.

Xbox 360 controller became a de facto standard, it's true. Most games that can be played with a gamepad are automatically configured to use it. Before that we only had lots of different dualshock knockoffs.

The platform had standardized control devices since the very beginning, they're called keyboards and mice, you may have heard about them. Only thing the Xbox360 Pad did is let people play console ports on the PC with the control scheme they were designed for, instead of half-assed KBM support, without the need to fuck around with custom drivers and settings.

How is that a bad thing? It's also obvious from the context of the article they're talking about gamepads. And keyboards and mice are hardly standardized, there are dozens of variations with different resolutions/numbers of buttons/mechanisms/function keys etc.

It's not a bad thing, just irrelevant. Certainly not a big deal for the platform in general.

Besides, if you don't understand what "standardized" means, as is clear from your post, then I'm wasting my time here. Have fun trying to troll someone else.
 
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But it's true, games nowadays are usually released on X360, PS3 and PC. In the era of PS2 and the original Xbox, it was a very rare event.
See: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-xbox-one-revealed.80070/page-95#post-2713854
It's actually the other way around, Microsoft headbutted into the console market and bought off/turned PC developers or PC titles (like for instance the first Halo) to be console only, as well as propagating the "PC Gaming is dead" nonsense for over half a decade because they wanted to kill the PC as a gaming device to bolster their new Xbawks console business.

In the process they also mostly destroyed "console gaming" too that was unique on the early PlayStations and whatnot, only Nintendo still remains from most of the old guard and most Multiplatform games are some sort of abominable mix between what used to be PC games and "mass market appeal" of consoles.

If anything you should be blaming these assholes for what they have turned both PC and console gaming into, not thanking them. They tried to kill it for almost a decade and in the process helped turn large parts of it into shit, now that there is a renaissance with Digital Distribution, Indies and KickStarters they're trying to rewrite history as if people should be thankful for what was done, claiming that what were inherently PC games and genres (like for instance the shooter market or Open World games) were "console games ported to the PC".
For that matter, coming next generation there really isn't any appreciable difference between a PC and "consoles" other than the type of OS they use and the openness of the platform.

This confirms and collaborates my suspicions about microsoft.

Damn. I never knew Gaben was partly responsible for saving PC gaming. GLORY TO GABEN!!
 

Xor

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Besides, if you don't understand what "standardized" means, as is clear from your post, then I'm wasting my time here. Have fun trying to troll someone else.

plz enlighten me. I want to know what you think it means.
You're an idiot.

Well I for one am grateful that consoles came along. Without them, Thief DS and DX:IW could have turned out terrible
I was going to post something similar.

Yeah, fuck this revisionist history. Console games went to shit when they started trying to push the same graphical fidelity that PCs enjoyed on inferior hardware, necessitating smaller levels and simpler control schemes, among other problems. I don't think it had as much to do with console gamers being idiots - that's more of a symptom than a cause. When all the games you have access to are dumbed down, that's all you know.

Even today when developers make a multiplatform game, they still have to obey the limitations of consoles. And now we have an entire generation of developers who only know how to develop these simpler, linear games because that's all they've worked on. AAA games will probably continue to slide downhill.

Fortunately we've had the indie gaming boom, the rise of open digital distribution platforms, and kickstarter to create an ecosystem of PC games that don't need publishers, so there's hope for the future even as the publisher system crumbles under the weight of its mistakes.
 

Oesophagus

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The PS2 and the Xbox had severe memory limitations, but that's not the only way that consoles were detrimental to gaming. Now, Beat-em-ups and racers, that's all fine, but when it comes to RPGs, there is the quite prominent problem of reading text on a TV screen from your couch, which migh be quite a far way away. Hence we get pseudo RPGs with dialogue wheels and very poor writing, because you simply can't fit the same amount of writing as Torment or Fallout had on a TV screen. And never mind tha fact that console pads have few buttons, much less than the standard mouse and keyboard has. Should we be thankful that Microsoft was selling us a device which was wholly unnecessary, since a mouse and keyboard were entirely sufficient up untill that point?

In fact this is all nitpicking, because the problem runs much deeper. Before the PS2 and Xbox, there was a tangible division between console and PC gaming. It's only because PC developers decided to focus their efforts on making console games ( as mentioned in this thread) that the PC market became second class. In essence, that horrendously lamentable article is saying that console gaming saved PC gaming from console game limitations.

Thank you, I guess?
 
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DalekFlay

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First, the gamepad nonsense. Before Microsoft standardized (i.e. forced) their incredibly expensive gamepad on PC users, you could plug in any random gamepad and the game would recognize it. But for the last several years, Microsoft made it so that games would only recognize the X360 controller.

In fairness it used to be "press joystick button one" and other annoying nonsense that made me never want to touch controllers. At least standardizing to the Xbox style pad brought with it useful in-game prompts and standard control configs.
 

tuluse

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In fairness it used to be "press joystick button one" and other annoying nonsense that made me never want to touch controllers. At least standardizing to the Xbox style pad brought with it useful in-game prompts and standard control configs.
At the expense of being able to use 3rd party controllers.

It's the classic walled garden vs wall-less wasteland.

Give me my Vault 13 jumpsuit and a 9mm pistol any day.
 

Duraframe300

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You can still use 3rd party controllers. And it's not even that hard even if your game does not support them.
 

DalekFlay

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It's the classic walled garden vs wall-less wasteland.

And usually I'm a wasteland kind of asshole, but I never wanted to use controllers before due to the cumbersome nature of it and in-game shittiness. So this would be an exception.

Also there's now plenty of third-party controllers designed around the Xbox standard.
 
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Logitech f310 is cheap and good for emulators/popames.
You flick a switch it acts like an xbox controller for the ms whoring popamoles who dont suppprt the other standard for controllers.
Certain emulators don't support the xbawks controllers, so flick back the switch and you have a regular non xbawx controller. No need of 3rd party wrappers.

No way I givinh my jewgold to microshit after how they tried to and and succeed in repeatedly raping PC gaming.
 

Hirato

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The xbox controllers can still be polled like a regular joystick, eg via DirectInput and SDL's joystick API, albeit with a few caveats.

caveat 1: the dpad is treated as a "Hat" with a directional state rather than 4 buttons - just about anything post-DOS should have supporting code for this.
caveat 2: the trigger buttons are pressure sensitive and are therefore actually an additional 2 axis (Yeah, the controller has 6 axis) - The old games usually don't have code to bind actions to an axis, and if they did, they probably didn't expect to poll the value -32768 when at rest
caveat 3: the analogue sticks trace (0.7, 0.7) (*) on diagonals, not (1, 1) this may mean that movement doesn't register properly and you'll constantly switch between walking and running in applicable games.

(*) If you traced the values and moved the stick in a circle, you'd end up with a rather coarse circle.


Since I'm a Linux guy, I can just fire up the userspace driver with --trigger-as-button and --square-axis to bypass caveats 2 and 3 respectively if they're ever an issue.
And seriously, if any emulators give you shit about the controller (and not others) that doesn't have anything to do with the above caveats, then it was assembled by morons.
 

RK47

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