As the owner of more than one gaming platform, I find myself in the enviable position of being able to choose whether I want to interact with releases such as CoD4 and Burnout Paradise via a 360 pad or a Dual Shock. “Well la-de-dah!” you may remark, and you would be entirely justified (if a little odd) for doing so. But beware my children, for though you may think I perch upon a jewel encrusted tower of ivory, bathing in the glow of multiple processors and bewitching fleets of impossibly attractive wenches with the promise of hot, cross-platform action, you will find me frustrated.
I agonised over this one. I twisted and turned, flipped and flopped, hithered and thithered. I wrung my hands with uncertainty and paced the boards in tortured indecision.
The cause of my hair-pulling hiatus?
Things didn’t used to be this way. The world was a simpler place once. One, if I am to believe the video footage, where colours were banned and everyone walked slightly faster than is naturally comfortable. There was a time, an innocent, naive time when children frolicked in cobbled streets with sticks and hoops, chicken tasted like chicken (because it wasn’t pumped full of water siphoned from the drains of public swimming pools) and different consoles had different games to play on them.
If you were fond of the little red plumber and his mushroom munching, turtle-twatting antics then you bought Nintendo. If navigating a blue hedgehog over a green hill fast enough to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time was more your scene, then your console of choice would sing “Seeee-Gaaaaaaaa” upon activation. Unless mummy and daddy were minted or your powers of persuasion were so effective you could talk an albino into a peroxide rinse, you generally found yourself with one machine or the other. This meant defending your choice of platform to the death in a playground situation and was arguably the genesis of the kind of raving fanboyism that has percolated forums and comment boards ever since. And did I mention that my dad is bigger than your dad? Yeah, you just think about that while I’m cataloguing my POG caps and not talking to girls…
Nowadays though, thanks to a combination of hardware-based missteps and the promise of huge, vault-filling volumes of cash we are able to watch Mario and Sonic duke it out in Smash Bros Brawl or even compete one-on-one in the inter-species Olympics. Software exclusives are thinner on the ground than they used to be. Huge titles like Prince of Persia, Assassin’s Creed and Fallout 3 are made immediately available to both Sony and Microsoft customers, while core franchises such as Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto have long since traded platform monogamy for open relationships with multiple partners. Modern console owners find themselves in a unique position: if they have their eye on a particular conquest it doesn’t really matter which type of bed they own, chances are they’re still gonna get laid.
Which brings me neatly back to my current bedfellow, Resident Evil 5. With Capcom now giving Xbox owners the chance to sample Resi’s fetid delights, my purchase was no longer based on which console it arrived on, but rather which console boasted the better performing version. With this kind of conundrum cropping up more and more gamers have embraced the emergence of the ‘Head to Head’ article, the consumer advice columns provided by several gaming sites which pitch one console iteration of a particular title against its cross-platform counterpart.
So, I set about weighing up the specs. More environmental effects (smoke, heat haze etc.) are present on the 360 version, and it employs 4x anti-aliasing to remove the jaggies (verses the PS3’s 2xAA) for a smoother overall look. The major difference between the two comes in their approach to coping with frame-rate issues; the 360 version has v-lock disabled, meaning that it drops fewer frames but is susceptible to screen tear, while the PS3 has v-lock engaged, meaning a more variable frame-rate but no tearing whatsoever. I was therefore given the option of playing a game that stutters when things get frantic or one which separates my partner’s torso from her legs when I turn around too sharply. “Would sir prefer a slap in the face or a kick up the arse?” Capcom seemed to have said, and then left it to me to decide which pair of cheeks I was willing to present for punishment.
In the end I steadied my nerves, bent over and took the steel toe-capped boot of Microsoft, with the Xbox 360 version rated superior by the majority. And you know what? The screen tearing in 1080p is so bad I have to drop the resolution to 720p in order to play without developing a migraine. I can’t bring myself to play the PS3 version and discover that I made the wrong choice, but in all honesty I imagine that the frame-rate problems would have bugged me just as much. I wonder: could these issues have been ironed out if all the developmental resources had been poured into one definitive version for just one console? I’m not suggesting that we return to the Mario vs Sonic situation; the fact that everyone can have equal access to the same game regardless of platform is, I think, something to be extremely grateful for. It’s just that all this bed-hopping, multiple-partner malarkey, whilst undeniably convenient, does seem to increase the risk of STDs.
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