Reading 03: Hooked on Wolfenstein

This was a fun reading assignment to say the least. It was great to see some of the old games that were popular for the first early popular PCs. I went and played Wolfenstein 3D, Zork I, Pac-Man, The Oregon Trail, and Connect 4. I played Wolfenstein for a while honestly and at least went through a little bit of each level.

It was super fun and once I got better at actually aiming quickly I ended up doing pretty well. It kind of made me want to go out and find the rest of the Wolfenstein games so I could play them all since it isn’t really a series that I’ve played through before. If I think I have enough time this semester I might go get one of the newer ones and binge play it. I then moved on to something just a little bit different, Zork.

This was more fun than I really thought it was going to be which is good since we’re making a game based off of it for our first project. I definitely could’ve benefitted from making a little map of the world as I went along, but I did okay and explored the house, got a sword, found a canyon, and maybe I’ll do a more legitimate play through soon to get some ideas for our game. I needed something a little mindless again after confusing myself trying to get through the land of Zork, so I went back to classic Pac-Man.

Nothing new there, just as fun as I remembered it, and I was just as bad at it as usual. Oh well, I always heard a lot about Oregon Trail so after going through Pac-Man games a few times and thinking about if it was actually originally called Puc-Man, I changed course to follow the trail.

I originally started playing really well. I was cruising along with no issues and it was an interesting straightforward game. I thought I had picked a good time of the year to leave and had picked a good amount of supplies for everything. I had no money but I wasn’t worried about it, and I hunted a couple times very successfully. Then the trail came for my good fortune, and my companions made going difficult.

No one was safe. No good thing came without three bad things following short behind. We did not survive. I’m scarred and can’t go on talking about it. So, I went on to try to do something I knew I could win, Connect 4.

But even then, things wouldn’t go my way.

I got a draw twice, and I walked away.

Even just going through these old games, you can see the differences between playing on your computer and playing on a console. The biggest thing is just the way you play. The input is keyboard and mouse versus a controller specific to each console. This automatically makes playing on a computer more universal than anything else. You’re not going to pick up a computer and have no idea how to use it, because they’re all the same. But if you’ve never used an Xbox before, there’s going to be a learning curve of what buttons are where and remembering them all. It may be a small learning curve since there isn’t much to learn, but it is still there and recurs every time you go to a new gaming system you haven’t used before. There’s also a lot of portability with gaming on your computer now. Maybe not if you have some crazy gaming computer you built yourself, but if you’re a casual that’s just playing on your laptop you can do it wherever you want. I’m not seeing a lot of people whipping out their Xbox Ones or PS4s in a coffee shop however so that’s another big difference between the two. You could argue that gaming consoles are more powerful, or maybe built in a way that all the components work together better to make a more powerful product, and there’s probably some truth to that, but with how crazy you can get with building your own computer I think that’s more a product of your budget than a real difference in the two systems. But that’s probably where the differences end in my opinion.

I think the advantages and disadvantages of either platform are pretty much outlined in their differences, there’s the universality of using a computer, the portability of computers, and more power in consoles unless you have a good budget for building your own computer. Granted there may be more advantages for playing on your computer, but I’m a console gamer, and I don’t even play as often as I used to any more. I think the only games that are really more suited for computers than consoles are text based games, or board games that are turned into video games, or games like Civ. There just isn’t a good input option for those types of games in consoles in my opinion. I think pretty much all other games can be easily played on both platforms.