(And of course, this reminds of the time when my sister was six, and she got really mad at our neighbors and chased them down the street wielding an axe. True story.)
I’ve been struggling with playing Dragon Age: Origins on my MacBook Pro, mainly from problems that have nothing to do with actual game play. From the system requirements, I would’ve thought that I have an adequately spec’ed machine to play the game, but I’m plagued by mysterious intermittent slow downs and lock-ups. I’m fairly certain it’s the game, since I don’t seem to have problems running other apps. But what it reminds me is why I tend to stick to consoles for gaming.
I have never bought a game for a console where I was worried about whether or not my hardware was adequate to run it. I have never had random lockups and crashes from a console game, unless I’ve actually managed to wreck the console itself. (Like spilling water on it, or throwing it against the wall in anger. Yeah, I may have anger management issues.)
I attribute this to the fact that every console maker has tight control over who can develop on their platform, and have final say about whether or not a game can actually be released on the platform.
In many ways, iPhone OS development is almost identical to developing on a console. For the three existing consoles, if you want to do any serious development, you have to pay for a license to obtain the developer kit. (OTOH, the iPhone OS SDK is actually free to download, although you have to register.) Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft has to approve your game, and you have to pay to distribute your game, and you have to adhere to their content guidelines. (Nintendo is notorious for tight control over developers, going so far as to prohibit cursing and religious references.)
(I also realize that while Microsoft does have a free development kit that lets you develop for both Windows and XBox 360, if you actually want to distribute your game on the XBox 360, you have to pay $99/year to do so.)
I understand the objections, though, to this kind of lock-down on development. On a full-fledged computer, even on a proprietary OS like Windows or Mac OS X, there are no such limitations. All you need is a development environment and a web host, and you can crank out your own apps and distribute it to the world without Microsoft or Apple breathing down your neck. But then you run into the problems of unstable, crappy apps possibly making your entire system unstable that won’t uninstall properly, leaving you with no recourse but to reformat and reinstall. Or you get suckered into buying a game that has deceptively low hardware requirements, find that it’s actually unplayable on your system, and now you’re left with either just eating the cost of a game you can’t enjoy, or spending more money to upgrade your system. Such is the price you pay.
And when I want to play a game to relax, I’m not sure I’m really willing to make that compromise. Anyone have any recommendations for a good console RPG?