To PC, or Not to PC

Posted 10/22/2005 at 2:36pm | by

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By Thomas McDonald
I spent the past month doing my annual Game Immersion Ritual, in which I leap into a pile of games and swim through them like Uncle Scrooge going for a dip in his money bin, emerging with a list of the top 100 releases for the year. The PC-exclusive titles that made the list are few enough to repeat in full: SWAT 4, Battlefield 2, Empire Earth 2, Act of War, Knights of Honor, Silent Hunter III, Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, and Guild Wars. Frankly, we could have done without every one of them.

Oh, the games were great, but we’d have done almost as well playing last year’s versions. In some cases, we’d do better. Battlefield 2, for instance, took the wonderful, smooth experience of the old Battlefield and turned it into a painful bout of expensive hardware upgrades, with frankly nebulous net benefits.

My disappointment with this year may simply be a matter of timing. Warming up for late release is Civilization IV, Age of Empires III, F.E.A.R., The Movies, Black & White 2, Star Wars: Empires at War, and City of Villains, all mandatory PC titles, at least for the foreseeable future. Of these, AoE 3, Civ 4, B&W2, and City of Villains are all strong, at least in their preview versions, and are known quantities. No real surprises. F.E.A.R. is shaping up to be this year’s Half-Life 2, an ambitious FPS with a creepy Ring vibe.

Empires at War may finally break the curse of the Star Wars strategy game, but I’ve said that before. As for The Movies, it looks good so far, but Lionhead games usually preview well, and often wind up less-than-best in the gameplay department.

Some other big games in the making—Star Wars: Battlefront II, King Kong, and Quake IV—are multiplatform, with the Xbox 360 versions perhaps delivering better performance than their PC counterparts. This of course will leave us once again wondering: Is this the year we forgo the $1,500 PC upgrade and simply cross over to the console dark side? I don’t think so, but we’ll know for sure in a few months.