Last year Microsoft made exciting noises about the ultimate PC vs Xbox battle.  This sounded great, and not just because it would give the idiotic Live For Windows platform a reason to exist (”So I have to run another layer of Microsoft over my Microsoft operating system so that my system can operate this Microsoft game?“)  The software had more layers a stack of metaphysical pancakes, but the chance to play Xbox-owning friends would have made it worthwhile.  But then the whole project was quietly killed.

Because the PC players loudly murdered the console gamers.

This is actually the first time anyone’s played conkers since videogames were invented

The Xbox has an excellent controller for arcade games, a good controller for third person movement, a decent controller for racing, a terrible controller for fighting games and a downright atrocious skill-amputator for First Person Shooters.  Everyone knows this, especially the programmers, which is why so many Xbox games come with lock-on.  Shooting with a thumbstick is like performing heart surgery on a unicycle - you can certainly learn to get good at this ridiculous skill, if you don’t mind a lot of deaths, but there’s absolutely no advantage.

Even mediocre PC players were able to crush the console masters, in the same way a decent college team could destroy the Saints if you amputated the experts’ hands.  Sure, some of the more spectacularly sporty Saints could learn to catch the ball between their stumps or maybe hold it in their mouth, but you just can’t compete with someone who’s able to spin 180 instantly instead of over the course of three seconds.

An Xbox player turns like a tired tank and all their games have changed to account for that: the average Gear of War can absorb more incoming fire than an artillery testing range to give him time to at least see his attacker.  Even expert players - pouncing from cover and flanking like pros - turn into a spastic shotgun-flailing competition when enemies get within three meters of each other.  The thumbstick does its best to compensate (allowing adjustable sensitivity and scaling the response as you bend the stick) but it’s like programming a supercomputer to translate dog barks back into English so they can work customer service - no matter how much you tweak the software, it won’t work because that’s not what it does.

There are mountain ranges which can take less damage.  And act better.  And honestly?   Better looking.

A mouse doesn’t turn like a construction crane - you can instantly aim at any point on the screen, enabling far faster responses, actual accuracy (a concept rendered almost unnecessary by Halo’s shields and Battle Rifles), and murderously fast games like Counter Strike and the original Modern Warfare.

Unfortunately, the Xbox is winning.  You can see the coding for consoles creeping through into cross-platform releases.  Horrifically underrated score-attack gun-racer The Club features mouse response more sensitive than a screaming Jerry Springer guest with covered in salt instead of skin, and an “instant turn” button.  That’s not for cool kills: it’s because turning with a thumbstick doesn’t just give enemies time to shoot you in the spine, but to romance it into running away with them.  And Mass Effect 2, where you have to turn the mouse response down to “novocaine” levels to stop spinning like a tazmanian devil on a gyroscope.

Despite its own controls this game was a ludicrous amount of fun

That these adaptations are inflicted on mouse-users is horrifying.  It’s like carving the wings off a Golden Eagle to better fit a kit to its back.

Even our ancient records remember this problem.  In the mists of time, Doom and Quake masters remember the ancient idiots of the “keyboard players,” lumbering targets doomed providing free points to anyone who bothered to fire at them.

So PC vs Xbox isn’t going to happen again - this embarrassing experiment in annihilation escaped into the wild only once.  Luckily it was Shadowrun, so no-one played it.

Let us never speak of this again.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 9:13 am and is filed under Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare News, Counter-Strike: 1.6 News, Quake Wars News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.