On a recent stumbling through the web, an article got me thinking again about first person shooters (FPS) and consoles. The article had said that, despite ‘elitist’ propaganda on the contrary, console controllers were no worse that a keyboard+mouse for FPS’ers. Now in the interests of being open, i should state straight up that I cannot, in any way, play fps’ers with a controller. I end up falling off cliffs and generally not getting very many kills. Granted, on a PC I might not be the worlds best, but I like to think that I could rate in the top half of a kill list for any game I have a little experience with.

That said however, I know there are some people who are incredibly good at this style of game with controllers. So, finally getting to the point of this post, surely there’s an easy way to find out if one is really better than the other….

Of course there is! You simply make the two multiplay on the same server, ie both PC and console players can be in the same game, without even knowing what platform anyone else uses. Get the server to gather some stats on winning’est platform and Robert’s your fathers brother.
There, that wasn’t so hard was it? Now I’m not the most console experienced person in the world so it might be that there are a few titles out there that allow this already, but they certainly aren’t the big ticket items, your Halo’s, Unreal Tournament’s etc. This got me to wondering why this is the case.
The first thing that comes to mind ‘Surely its not a technical thing?’.
Surely multiplayer games just work on a protocol of sorts between the server and clients? As long as both console and PC client’s speak the same language the server doesn’t even have to know the difference. OK, it can’t be technical.

What about financial? Maybe there’s simply not the interest there for games companies to bother investing time to make this work? But no, thats silly too because surely anything that increases the number of people playing online is a good thing? If they weren’t interested in online numbers, they wouldn’t code in multiplayer in the first place.

So, this just leaves the consipracy theory. The console land is owned basically by 3 players, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. I’ll pretty much ignore Nintendo for the purposes of this post as there aren’t that many fps’ers for Nintendo platforms. So getting back to Sony and MS….

Basically these two companies, for whatever reasons, feel the need to completely own your online gaming experience. Its not like on the PC where someone can run their own server where the rules are changed or so that clans can have organised practice sessions etc, everything goes through them. Now sure, there are legit reasons for this, well, 1 legit reason I can think of and thats to reduce cheating. But cheating (Sorry ‘sploitin) isn’t a rampant, out of control problem killing the PC gaming world. Its present, but no more so than on consoles. Why would they need or even want this level of control?
Well, in my sceptical, consipracy theory loving, big-faceless-corporation-holding-the-man-down type mind, it all comes back to the reason I wrote this article. I wanted an answer about which was the better fps interface device, but simply put, Sony and MS don’t want me to have that answer. The problem being of course, is that it exposes a lot more than simply controller vs keyboard+mouse.
These companies fear that the answer will cause them lost sales to the PC’s if people see that there’s potentially a better way. The best and worst thing about consoles is that every single model of a console (eg every PS2) will play the game the same way, they’re on a level playing field. As soon as you allow PC’s into the game though, that all goes out the window. The die hard players will no longer use a console if there’s a PC that’s twice as powerful available.

Now this might all sound like I’m pro-PC and anti console. Heck, maybe to a degree I am. But I’m trying to be objective about this. I can’t imagine that too many PC owners would convert to consoles if this mythical console/PC game convergence ever actually happened, its the consoles that have something to lose. The simple fact is that PC’s allow for more freedom to improve your gaming experience (IE upgrading). This leads to an advantage in game and, as sad as it is, there’s a lot of people out there that would go to some fairly large lengths (by ‘normal’ standards) to get that edge.

So that’s it, PC’s are a superior platform for fps gaming, as proven by Sony and MS’s  restriction on a direct comparison. *Ducks*
Don’t get me wrong, I love consoles in their own way. They are the best, hands down, for ‘social’ gaming, where everyone sits around on the couch just having a good time. When was the last time you saw a group of normal (ie non-nerd) people huddling around a PC for hours on end doing the same thing? In the fps world though, they compete for 2 reasons:

1. Price
2. Ease of use

People start with a console for these two reasons. They’re not addicted at that stage, they just want to play the odd game. Of course, before too long, they’re raving, obsessive gamers that simply have to teabag that assclown whose killed them the last 17 rounds. We’ve all been there. But by this stage, they’re used to the controller, even worse, they’re evangelists for the controller. They’ve spent 300+ hours getting used to it and there’s no way that a keyboard and mouse could possibly be any better. A fanboy is born.
In a world where this conversion from happy, productive member of society, to mad, obsessive gamer, takes place on a PC rather than the console, MS and Sony find themselves short a ton of profit.

So there it is, my rant on consoles, controllers and first person shooters. In the end the conclusion isn’t all that new (Consoles compete with PC on price and simplicity, der) but its an answer to the controller vs keyboard+mouse debate, which is good enough for me.