Rageometer: RageometerRageometerRageometerRageometer (4/5)

Welcome to 3 Angry Gamers.  We are a trio of long time gamers, reaching back to the twilight of DOS and Windows 3.1, who believe the PC is the best platform for innovative gaming entertainment.  We believe that great games like Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Close Combat, the Half Life series, the Elder Scrolls series, and Company of Heroes have brought gaming to the masses as a legitimate form of entertainment in its own right.  However, the latest generation of super consoles (Xbox 360 and PS3), hugely popular and certainly home to a few decent games, have become trapped by their own popularity.  As a generation of gamers comes to “maturity” (I use the term very loosely here) that has known only, or mostly, consoles we’ve begun to see the game developers cater to these platforms and all of their limitations.  Any PC gamer is aware that their platform offers greater flexibility in graphics and control schemes and the ability to modify hardware as it progresses instead of waiting for the next iteration.

The real problem with the consoles is the marketing scheme applied.  Since most console gamers have never known the real ability of PCs, they’re content with relatively stagnant games.  Resident Evil 5 is little more than a two player version of Resident Evil 4.  Gears of War 2 innovates little beyond is progenitor.  The real killer for us, however, was Modern Warfare 2.  Here is a game that traces its pedigree exclusively through the PC.  While Call of Duty 4 was certainly an incremental advance of sorts over the older games, it was no great advance.  Nonetheless it was an entertaining game.  Modern Warfare 2, however, has renounced the PC roots of the series and is indicative of a trend that we have seen with other franchises in the past (see EA and DICE, who are only now beginning to reverse their silliness).  The game isn’t balanced for more than 9v9, yet you can give a sniper a silenced shotgun as a backup?  No dedicated servers, just local hosts  that change as people leave or join the server (yeah, that lag won’t kill anyone)?  It’s not balanced for leaning?  MW2 is a massive step backwards for the series.  Why take out features that worked?  Why destroy the entire multiplayer balance with stupid weapons loadouts and perks?  Why no dedicated servers??  This isn’t a PC game, it’s a console game directly ported to the PC.  PC gamers are rightly very upset at this treatment from Activision and Infinity Ward.

Console gamers have no idea what was cut from the game to make it more palatable and easier to develop for their low standards.  True innovation on the console simply doesn’t seem to happen.  Are we, as PC gamers supposedly to rely solely on Valve for quality, PC-focused shooters?  Will we be betrayed by other developers in the same fashion?  Will Bethesda and THQ start making shovel-ware they force upon us simply because console gamers’ standards are so low?  We hope not, but we’re going to rant about it anyway.

The format of the site hasn’t been firmly established yet.  As of right now, we’re going to move forward with a primary post by one of us that will be followed by a single response from the other two.  I’m sure there will be times when all three of us would like to post further rebuttals, but we’ll refrain to keep this from turning into some convoluted hot mess of a discussion tree.  I’m not sure any of us have any real experience running a blog, so we’re making this up as we go along.  Content and format are likely to change as time goes on.  We hope that you enjoy the content.  We get angry.

-Scrimshaw