GameSpot's Question of the Week
GameSpot's Question of the Week

Question of the Week
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Walter Morbeck
Programming Director
The main advantages that console games have over PC games are their ease of use, the fact that you can hook them up to TVs and that the controllers feel much better than the ones they've come up with so far for PCs. PCs do have pretty cool controllers for driving games and flight sims, but I haven't played many PC games where I felt the developers had controllers in mind when the games were designed. And being a fan of first-person action games, I can't imagine using a controller other than a mouse for those at this point. Most of the console-game traits I can think of that I'd like to see in PC games are already coming true. Well, almost. PCs should be small and portable, and they should easily plug into our TVs like the Dreamcast and the PlayStation - but then we are already seeing PCs taking their design cues from the iMac. These compact PCs aren't really geared toward gaming though. The lack of a set of standards, which every PlayStation game designer has to work with, will probably prevent any of those mini-PCs from being able to play anything effectively other than a Sierra Poker game or Pandora's Box. But if someone could come up with a set of hardware that could handle today's and tomorrow's best games and all fit within a little PC like the ones built for e-mail, then... what? I'm not sure where I was going with that thought. Oh, I know - you might end up with a PC that a lot of people might buy simply because it's small and easy to use and would play all the good PC games. I'm straying from the discussion I think, though. I'll just resist the notion then and say that I hope PC games learn nothing from console games. If PC games became more like console games, we probably wouldn't play them on our PCs anymore.

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