Console Exclusivity

There’s always one thing that’s irritated me with new consoles as the hype for them reaches fever pitch and all and everything is promised of there capabilities games normally associated with the PC seem to get up and leave or even worse games originally intended for PC suddenly become console only, lured in by the Microsoft or Sony dollar, boasting there title portfolio for shiny console X.

Of course there’s several reasons why this is done, consoles are standardised things, technological snapshots of whatever was the cutting edge when they were made this presents an easy opportunity to push a new game to a consoles maximum capability's and not worry about the balancing act of high and low end pc architecture, when a console is brand new is the only time it will match the average gaming PC displaying a developers vision as well as possible but when publishers take time to port a next generation game say from the 360 to the PS2 a console now nearly 7 years old it makes you wonder why they don't bother with the PC a system arguably more than capable of hosting the 360 version. Of course sales projections come into it why bother porting a game to the pc if only X number of people are going to buy it? While porting it to the PS2 may ensures it has a massive graphical downhaul sales ensures this would be more than worthwhile.

This robbing of titles has been going on for years as far back as Elite moving from the BBC to the NES, if there’s any good from this I believe that the PC is where new games and genes are created and nurtured before they reach a level of recognition and size to be ported to a console, creating room for the next bi g thing, fad or genre all game genres began on the PC with the the possible exception of the dancing game (woo) and I can't see any reason why this isn’t going to continue.

Of course its just as bad as when traditional PC games are 'consolofied' (swish!) then ported back to the PC at a later date, Deus ex 2 while a passable game on the Xbox just doesn’t compare to the PC's original and the PC port of Halo is frankly more than a little lack lustre (sorry Michael it really is) when compared to thorough bred pc fps games.

Still in a few years we'll all be emulating 'Console title smash!' on our pc's so whets there to worry about?