Sid Meier, as quoted in a nice Eurogamer interview:
“We definitely have an eye on the console market,” Meier continues. “We’re really happy with the response to Pirates!, which we brought out on PC and Xbox. It was our first console game, unless you count the Commodore 64 as a console. It’s got to the point technology-wise, and in terms of the types of games people are really accepting on consoles now, that we’re back in the mode of looking at the console marketplace as somewhere for us to grow in the future. So, no specific things that we’ve announced, but we’re looking forward to Xbox 360 and PS3; we think there are some great opportunities. Even on the handhelds, we’re seeing a lot of turn-based games.”
Has there ever been a turn-based hit for consoles, though? I know, there’s a first for everything, and why not Civ V for the PS3? But it just doesn’t seem like the console market would be all that friendly to something like a Civ, or even any sort of turn-based game like this. I’d imagine that Civ would go from being a big fish in a little pond to a little fish in a big pond in the move from PC to console, which I don’t know would be all that worthwhile from a sales POV.
BTW, how many more posts before this thread turns into another debate about piracy causing poor PC game sales?
Brett, Civilization was actually ported to the SNES, believe it or not. And there most certainly have been turn-based hits on consoles, if by ‘hits’ you mean ‘games that were profitable and found enough of an audience to lauch a series’. Ever heard of Koei? Their strategy games weren’t exactly real time. And I’d bet dollars to donuts you of all people would adore Romance X.
However, the main problem with your question is that you seem to assume Sid Meier is talking about Firaxis’ Civ franchise. They’ve got other properties, including the one Meier mentioned: Pirates.
Which, for the record, I thought was a pretty bad port of a pretty awesome game. So it kinda broke even in my book.
But Pirates is particularly alarming if it’s an indication of how Firaxis views the console market. They seem to think console games need to be faster, smaller, with stealth sequences and rapid button-mashing pattern minigames, and little ships bumping around in a puddle picking up powerups. If that’s their perception of what it takes to develop for the console market, then here’s to hoping they stick with PC development.
Portable Pirates! would make me buy a portable console. Portable Civ would make me weep with joy.
What are the handheld PC options for this sort of game?[/quote]
You could put it on a laptop, but thats where i think they really blew it with civ4. Why such a system hog even with scaled down graphics? I bet not one person bought the game for the graphics, so why not let it run on lesser hardware?
I was going to play around with settings before my next flight, but right now it just runs like crap on my laptop, which is beefy enough to play hl2 and other games.
Er… Final Fantasy? And all the myriad of tactical and non-tactical RPGs. I know, they aren’t strategy games. But they do have turn-based combat, so it’s hard to argue that console gamers don’t like turn-based gameplay.
There have been some really good TBS games on consoles with nothing to compare with in the PC world. FFT is probably the best and more recent titles like Gladius.
It was our first console game, unless you count the Commodore 64 as a console.
An interesting bit of lateral thinking there. Part of me cries “blasphemy” but the thing was so compact and (relatively) easy to use, and was more or less standardized (not counting the odd peripheral and rereleases/upgrades like the C64C or C128) and had such an insane quantity of games made for it, that I kinda see Meier’s point.
When people talk about the great console crash of 83-84 and the dearth of console gaming from ~85 to ~88, they forget that the C64 effectively occupied the niche of a console during that time, and was hugely popular. It cost $200 ($400 with disk drive, though many used it without), was standardized, was probably used by 70-90% of it’s user base primarily as a games machine. It was usually hooked to a TV, with a joystick or two, and could play games significantly better than the console generation that preceded it (Colecovision/Atari 5200).
Add the C64 back in the mix, and you see the years 85-88 not as a wipeout for the console industry, but rather as a severe downturn, only somewhat worse than what occurs these days in transition years.
Fire Emblem’s pretty darn good, too, though I don’t know how it’s selling.[/quote]
It sold 50K in October, compared to #1 Pokemon XD at 133K. It will probably sell pretty good in the holiday season, though. All the Gamecube games for Christmas are already out, except the Mario soccer game, and a large percentage of the November releases are ports.
Yeah, my family segued directly from the Atari 2600 to the C64 in 1983/84. However one side effect in our particular case is that we didn’t have much interest in the resurgence of consoles with Nintendo, choosing to stick with computers (Amigas at first; eventually PCs). In fact I didn’t have a true gaming console between the 2600 and the Dreamcast, although I frequently played on buddies’ NES’s, Genesises, and SNES’s.
That’s an interesting thought. I was eight-years-old in '84, which is sort of the sweet spot for finding your life-long hobby, and my family bought a C64 that year. If I was born five years later, it may have been a NES which sucked away my time, and I may have never started programming. I agree that the C64 was the mid-80s console, but I think it was also a gateway-drug/trojan-horse for becoming a PC gamer. I wonder if there are more PC gamers than average (whatever THAT means) in the 27-33 demographic for that reason.
