Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 10 June 2008 08:25
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
By now shouldn’t we all be playing each other at Call of Duty 4 regardless of the hardware we own? What happened to having PC gamers facing off against Xbox 360 owners and then, sharing in-game assets across mobile devices?
It was touted by Bill back at CES 2007 as a major feature of this generation of gaming. Finally the horn locking of young bucks on both sides of the hardware divide could duke it out for bragging rights.
Mr Gates showed of games that allowed PC gamers to link up with Xbox 360 owners of the same title. LIVE was the key, enabling the cross platform magic an soon enough we would find out the answers to such humanity defining questions as ‘who are the superior first person shooter’s, keyboard and mouse wielders’ or gamepad jockeys?’
Bill also gave us glimpses of extending this idea to mobile devices. We could take a creation we had made in a game on either Xbox 360 or Vista based PC, such as a skin for a race car, download it to our phone and share the creation with our mates.
Since that time, the cross platform market has been awash with titles such as Halo 2, ShadowRun, UNO and errrrm… Hmmmm let me check the
Microsoft LIVE website , oh! That’s it, three games in total. And Halo 2 does not allow hooking up games between Xbox and PC.
What happened to this feature? Has Microsoft let the cross platform dream die?
Well for starters, it is a simple fact that despite mega cross platform releases today, most games are a completely different experience from platform to platform.
Perhaps your PS3 and Xbox 360 versions are hard to distinguish between. But try out the same game on PC, there are tweaks and altered content in the desktop release – or at least there should be. PC owners around the world will point to many examples of infamous console ports that fail to impress.
The Nintendo Wii, brings its own unique experience to the few cross platform titles that come its way.
Then there is the simple fact that, due to controller mechanisms and power considerations, some genres of game are better suited to one platform or the other. Real Time Strategy games for example are – apart from a couple of examples – best suited to keyboard and mouse, whilst brawling and fighting games are in there element with a button mashable gamepad in hand.
