Let me talk about Bayonetta for a second.

Bayonetta's character as a sassy, sexy, badass bitch who'll stomp your brains in and look awesome doing it is absolutely fantastic.

However, her character and the games that she is in exist in a cultural context wherein the finer nuances of the character are lost and while in another time and another context, would be absolutely fine, are used to reenforce shitty sexist ideas about women, specifically women in games.

Now. Hatred has pretty much the same problem. Looks like a fun game, but we're all stewing in a morass of toxic violent masculinity. If we weren't in a place where oh say as an example(of many), sexually frustrated men decide to violently take out their frustrations on women, and failing that anyone who's within firing range... Yeah. I don't argue that games *make* you violent, however I will argue that culture as a whole glorifies violence and this would just reenforce that narrative. Calvin sums it up here

Sure, they're developed by a Polish team, but do I think that it should be for sale? No. Not here. Do I think the Government should do anything about it? No, that's censorship. It sounds like a great game if I wasn't worried it was going to reenforce someone's crappy idea of dealing with life was to get a bunch of military grade weapons and go on a shooting spree.

No product, no credit.

With Valve, I'll believe it when it launches, and even then I'm skeptical it'll run.

They DID announce HL2 Ep 3 for Christmas of 2007.

Which well at this point, they might as well just release HL3.

Peter Molyneux's problem is that he over promises and under delivers. Valve's problem is that they over promise and sometimes never deliver.

As far as the Steam Machine thing goes, I didn't notice the Steam Machines are actually showing a release. Which, good on them.

As far as Valve's internal drama, It's not just Jeri Ellsworth.

If they get their shit together and start releasing things, I'll cut them some slack. But after really waiting around and watching, I'm just not impressed and I'm not "in love" with Valve like the OP says I should be.

YAMOBA 2 is out. After they bought it from another developer.

Neat hardware projects are coming out ... with no actual release date. Also one of those things is basically a wireless HDMI cable. Which has been long solved.

I'm just kinda done with Valve.

What I've seen for the last 10 years of watching Valve is seeing a company with seemingly no care about release dates. We all want to have a good laugh at Peter Molyneux for over promising and under delivering... but he delivers on time.

Valve isn't being serious about running their business. It's like children are running the company and they occasionally put something out.

I wouldn't be making this comment if the OP didn't mention loving Valve. I think it's absolutely lovely that Valve has done this, but I kinda hate Valve.

Valve seems to have problems internally that's lead me to believe that it's not worth hanging hopes that they'll usher in a true golden age era of PC gaming.

First, there seems to be some bizarre drama going on inside of Valve, as evidenced here. The flat structure isn't as idyllic as once thought.

Then there's problems inside of their online market place. Shit just doesn't work. Valve doing a bad job policing Greenlight. I'm not even going to bring up Hatred.

And of course, where the bloody hell is Half Life 3? Or the steambox? Or a stable release ready version of steamOS?

Valve can't be all things to all people and try to spread itself as thin as possible. It winds up doing nothing well and it's all starting to fall apart. I just hope they let us know what happened to Barney Calhoun before the company shits the bed.

I never meant to imply that they did. If I did end up implying so, please help me figure out where so that I can learn not to do so again. I'm only trying to understand how consoles are ideal for your use case with the intent of figuring out how to make other platforms less bad. Or is wanting to know what makes a platform good itself an "entitled attitude"?

This entire thread. It started with some other person suggesting that console games were pointless, then I said no, here's why *I* prefer console games then you decided that it's up for debate what *I* want.

If you're moving saved games from one console hard drive or memory card to another, or freeing up GBs on a console's hard drive for a downloadable game or for a disc game's mandatory install, that's a file system. And as for "system configurations", some console makers' naming conventions don't make this easy either: "DS" vs. "3DS" vs. "2DS" vs. "New 3DS", or "Xbox" vs. "Xbox One".

I have no idea what the path structure is like on a console except for the PS3, which currently has a limited form of custom firmware.

Deleting objects on screen by hitting triangle or Y or whatever, then hitting delete is an abstracted form of the filesystem. If you're looking at a full filesystem path and you didn't have to turn on some sort of debugging, dev or super power user mode, they blew it.

(Apologies to steve jobs, but I think he'd agree)

Nintendo is making their own games. Sony and Microsoft both have stables of studios that produce software for their own platforms that are wholly owned subsidiaries.

Examples being Polyphony Digital and 343 Studios respectfully.

My consumer choices do not require your approval.

Entitled attitudes like yours are making video gaming toxic. My opinions on why I dislike PC gaming aren't up for debate. I'm not asking you or the original poster why you folks bother with PCs am I?

Just to deal with fiddly and horrible, the second you have to think about a file system or running processes or system configurations, you've blown it as far as UX for games go. So there's fiddly and horrible for you.

Loud and power sucking? Well, you can build extremely quiet low end machines on the cheap, but it's not easy. Even if it is quiet, at *peak* a PS4 uses roughly 140 watts of power. Matching that on a low end PC is tough. I doubt a PC can match the idle power consumption or thermal envelope either.

right. Mods. So what? We're not talking about what you want out of gaming. PC games aren't going away because I bought a PlayStation or a Wii U or an XBox. Nor would I want that.

All I'm trying to do is explain why anyone would buy a console and what the upsides are. I'm tired of being told by every jerkoff who has a real fetish for shitting on other peoples non destructive, non infringing choices that consoles are all awful and I should go get a gaming PeeCee because it's so much better when I've already lived that life and it sucked for me. It's not what I want. I want a box that plugs into the TV and plays games with out being fiddly, loud, power sucking and horrible.

or maybe that the console maker themselves are making games?

Nintendo's not going to port to a Microsoft or Sony platform anytime soon. I mean, they might go Sega but not any time soon. Nor is Sony going to port Gran Turismo. Or Microsoft Halo.

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." - Alan Kay

For all the handwringing that happens over modern console firmware updates, very little has changed in the "I just want to turn it on and play games" space.

While I'm willing to concede that PC gaming has it's place, the superiority complex PC gamers have is really toxic.

The two points you singled out highlight that there are bigger problems here. You didn't read that I'm more interested in having a relatively tiny machine I can have sit somewhere, relatively little power at peak with very little noise that's tightly integrated.

I just want something to turn on and play. Citing that joypads suck for games always gets me angry because we're expected to just accept the idea that every game is an FPS where that kind of input scheme is necessary. Same with "Well our games look nicer." Well, maybe. Sure. But at what cost? What's the power consumption? What's the thing like living with?

I used to be a PC gamer and it just wasn't worth it. Appliances that play games and only play games have a place in the market because some people just want to play games and not have to fiddle with shit to make it work. Don't try to tell me it's not a thing anymore, Valve recently shipped out an update to CS:GO on OS X that broke. In order to make it work you had to uninstall then reinstall.

Maybe someday there'll be a glorious day where consoles literally are just gaming PCs with fast on and off and the binary that runs on a PC is the same binary that runs on a console and everyone's happy. But we're not there yet. Sure, both the XB1 and the PS4 use SOCs from AMD that run x86 but the OS right now is tuned specifically for games and entertainment.

SteamOS isn't it because enough of the underlying OS is still visible to both the user and the games that if a rogue process makes poor life choices, your day will get worse. I haven't used SteamOS since it's release after playing with it a bit, so this may have changed.

However, I don't think it has. And I don't think now is the time. Nor do I think Valve, which has had issues curating their own store(see: Flight Control; Hatred is another issue entirely) or releasing games they've promised on time.

Dear you

good for you. i have a tiny box that consumes less than 150 watts of power that fits neatly into nearly any place I put it. Not all games are FPSes and some are actually better controlled with a joypad. I have no interest in pushing everything to the limit. I just want to turn on and play(occasional 10 minute OS update not withstanding).

No love,

some console using jerk(me)

Yet, Apple hasn't backed down on their disk encryption.

My guess isn't that the NSA is demanding it, it's that vendors are more likely to be fucking it up.

Oblig XKCD. NSA has other ways to figure this out.

I hope you mean, malicious bots. Some markov chain generating bots on Twitter are great. So are some other automated processes like the who's editing Wikipedia from congress bot.