PC verses Console Gaming

How many of us have played a game on a PC, then later played the same game on a console, for example the PSX? How about the other way around. I've done both recently.

For over a year, I've been playing the Pro Pinball series on both my development PC and on my PSX. The Web and Timeshock are, as anyone who has paid attention to my ramblings will know, two of my favorite games of all time. What I have always found impressive is just how close these two pinball simulations are when the two versions are compared. Indeed, in some ways I prefer playing the PSX versions, because the sound is implemented better, with no skips in the gameplay or delays in the music as the appropriate track is located on the CD.

More recently...like today, I was playing Warzone 2100 on a new PC that my wife and I blew our bonuses on. Let me digress a moment. We purchased an emachines e monster 500. It's a 500Mhz pentium III with 64MB of RAM, a 13GB hard drive, an 8X DVD player, a Crystal on-board sound card, and a Voodoo 3 2000 graphics card. It cost $899. Not a bad bargin, we figured. Add in a 17" monitor and the total cost with tax came to $1208. We looked around for quite a while and couldn't find anything to match it in the price range. So if anyone's looking for a gaming machine on a budget, bear emachines in mind. They do an iMac lookalike for about $900.

Ok, that's the crass commercial messages out of the way, back to the main topic of the article. Inevitably, I couldn't resist putting games on the new PC, despite my previous dedication to console gaming. So, all three games in the Pro Pinball series have been loaded and tested, as has Warzone 2100.

Warzone 2100 is one of my favorite games on the PSX. It is a real time strategy game, featuring a rotatable, zoomable 3D landscape, a vehicle design system, and a rewarding style of gameplay in that each mission builds on the construction and resources attained during the previous mission.

Now running it at 800x600 under 3DFX or D3D obviously results in a look that is much better than the Playstation, though it is recognisable the same game. What is truely surprising is that the software version actually looks worse than the PSX version, though obviously on a 500Mhz Pentium III it runs a lot smoother. Nonetheless, it is truely a credit to the ancient hardware of the PSX that it can come so close.

What other games has anyone played that they prefer on a console rather than a PC? Are there other games that are deserving of praise for how close they come to the PC version while running on much-inferior software. I've never seen Future Cop: LAPD on a PC, but seeing how it looks on a PSX (very good indeed), I feel it probably does justice to the PC version.