How different were the console and PC gaming spaces from each other back then? Were they completely separate worlds? Were PC gamers known for bragging about playing “patrician stuff” like RTS and spending time tweaking graphics settings and display drivers to get everything working?

Who the hell sets up a retro gaming rig in their kitchen?

>>11842396
People without wives.

>>11842396
you don't play video games while cooking?
someone post the xenogears on the crt in the kitchen

In the 90's PC gaming was the most versatile there existed. Every single genre was covered. It was in the 00's that PC gaming became mostly about a few select genres, and nowadays people pretend that it was always that way only because "retro gaming", the trendy youtube following plastic collecting hobby, is all about console gaming so they tell themselves all kinds of copes to pretend that there is nothing to see beyond consoles.

>>11842426
>Discworld
Nostalgic title for me because the Demo Disc we had also had Diablo Spawn edition on it, played the shit out of that.

>>11842426
PC never got any good platformer games

>>11842523
perhaps not many exclusives
but i still name Prince among the others yeah

>>11842738
Saying that Prince of Persia was good was pure cope.

>>11842396
people in 1998

Everyone I knew in the late 90s had a family PC with games like Command and Conquer, Starcraft, Sims, etc, and also had either a SNES, N64, or Playstation.

>>11842754
for a game released in 1990 it's not just good but pretty good yeah
your post is pure ignorance among all the other things

>>11842754
and btw considering what the anon you were replying to said which is the pc was rather versatile well
that comes with some compromise so fuck off will ya

>>11842754
Prince of Persia was the first video game I remember ever playing (on mac). It is truly bad.
It is also on console, and bad on console, too.

>>11842523
xargon, jill of the jungle, jazz jackrabbit, duke nukem. there are tons.
if you want to bing wahoo you can emulate. pc does ot all!

>>11842426
>>11842523
>PC never got any good platformer games
By the time people had PCs, platformers were pretty much done perfectly on consoles. There wasn’t much reason to offer them on PCs. I remember a few console platformers that got Pc releases and they really didn’t move the needle much. PC has always been good (or better than consoles) at games that take advantage of a pc layout:
>puzzles
>strategy (rts or turn based)
>fps (it’s always better playing on a pc, fight me)
>adventure and point+clicks
>simulations
>rpgs and mmos

>>11842828
Yeah well that's exactly the kind of discourse I'm talking about. Meanwhile outside of FPS games on PC I was playing Jill of the Jungle, Aladdin, Street Fighter II, Wacky Wheels, Jazz Jackrabbit, Battle Arena Toshiden, Blockout, Pinball Mania, Carmageddon, Need for Speed, Raptor, Alone in the Dark and all kinds of other things.
Saying PC was only good for those few select genres is like saying the NES was only good for platformers and the SNES only for JRPGs etc,

>>11842840
There was a wild re-write of history in the 2000s retroactively declaring the SNES the "JRPG console", when that wasn't what was driving it during its active lifetime.

compare a magazine like EGM or GamePro to a magazine like Computer Games Magazine or CGW. The tone, the writing, it's all far more mature and adult in the computer game mags.

PC games and console games were kinda different beasts. The PS1 era started merging the two worlds to my eyes. There weren't much fighting games or platformers on PC. There were notable good exceptions (one of my absolute favourite was Abuse dot com) but generally speaking console were better on console style games or arcade ones.
On the opposite side PC games had a more distinct more mature feeling (not all of them, of course) and one thing I would love to say: they were not afraid of complexity. Very often the UI for some rpgs were counterintuitive or just too chaotic. There was genuine ambition behind many games of that era

>>11842392 (OP)
>jug of water on top of the tower unit next to the CRT

>>11842893
>There weren't much fighting games or platformers on PC.
*good
There were definitely many of both.

>>11842936
Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat trilogy, Battle Arena Toshinden

>>11842927
are you such a wildebeest that you can't have containers with liquids in them around you, or?

>>11842938
are we implying that the Toshinden PC port was good?

>>11842392 (OP)
>How different were the console and PC gaming spaces from each other back then?
could hardly be more removed
both types of hardware could do/specialized in totally different things, and thus the software tended to reflect that in a major way. early PC had really, frankly, garbage platformers, because scrolling had to be kinda hacked-together so that the PC hardware could convincingly fake it. whereas NES was an 8-bit little childrens toy, but it had specific hardware in it exclusively for smooth screen-scrolling, and so the japs put that to work.
on the flipside, PC allowed for much larger and MUCH more complicated games, thanks to its more elaborate control scheme. thus you had far better, more complex RPGs, and text-based games. PCs had more colors, and mouse input, so that gave rise to point and clicks.
etc
once consoles started doing analog controllers, you again had a major split in the software available to each platform. consoles took off on spamming out 3D platformers, while PC was still on M&K so kept pumping out newer and more impressive/complex shooters

for all these reasons, ports were usually either non-existent, or just fucking terrible. so basically totally different libraries. it mightve even continued that way for another decade had xbox not set the standard going forward of consoles just being cheap-o PCs

>>11842940
Do you really keep water in precarious positions on top of your electronics? Were you not taught basic safety as a child?

>>11842396
i know a couple ppl who had the family PC in the corner of the kitchen. it was kinda common. even into the 00s
i still remember my friends mom used to sit in the kitchen and chainsmoke and scam little boys out of their gold in runescape. then she got rly into guildwars and did the same thing

>>11842962
I DO, AND I WASN'T!!!!
OOOOHWAH AH AH AH

>>11842783
I know I had at least one friend whose family PC was set up in the kitchen.
>>11842392 (OP)
I don't know, I was a kid through the 90s, but I never differentiated between them. When I wanted to play a computer game, I played on my computer. When I wanted to play a console game, I'd play it on whichever console it was on. Of course I had my favorite game companies, consoles, and franchises, but I was never a "warrior," be it for a particular console, for PC, or for age ratings. I thoroughly enjoyed playing Genesis when I visited a friend who had one (and got my own in the early 2000s), and I would happily play Duke Nukem 3D on the computer before playing Pokemon Red on the GameBoy.

>>11842392 (OP)

Very different, and very tribal until the early 00s. PC mags actively mocked console players for being immature meatheads, and console mags actively mocked PC players for being boring virgins. I.e. both spit mad truth.

You guys are way too obsessed with what people did 30 years ago.

>>11842396
Growing up, the PC in the house was in a fairly common room, actually our dining room. I never understood why until I got a little older and realized it was to deter me and my siblings from looking at porn and let our parents monitor what we were doing. It was kind of a head's up move at the time, but after we started getting old enough to drive everyone started getting PCs in their room instead.

>>11842392 (OP)
The jar with water/flower up there made me cringe painfully.

>>11842790
This. And emulators.

I almost count the time I spent mostly on the SNES and 64 and the time I spent largely on the computer playing RTSes and similar as two different childhoods.

>>11842396
My dad and I would build our PC's on the kitchen table as it was the widest open space to work on. Back then, getting everything running could take all week consulting manual, making boot disks, solving IRQ conflicts.

Dad's PC's would often remain on the kitchen table for months because carrying a CRT up a stair case isn't the sort of thing anyone is enthusiastic to do after a 9 to 5.

Needless to say, mum wasn't thrilled, so... >>11842397 is a good answer too.

>>11842396
It was pretty common in the 90s. Home PCs were communal like the house phone, and if you needed to connect to the internet, every kitchen had a phone jack that could be used for dial-up.
Mom wouldn't have tolerated a hideous computer in the living room where guests could see and would ruin the decor, so they pretty commonly either ended up in the dining room or kitchen if the parents didn't want it in the bedroom.

That aside, picrel is authentic to the my original PIII build. When that DVD-ROM launched, it came with copies of Riven, Thief, Deus Ex, and Unreal Tournament GOTY (and an MPEG decoder card, of course), and I used my Audigy (had TOSLINK and SPDIF) to run my MIDI controller.

>>11842397
She can get a say in when she learns to be a better cook than me.

>>11842995
>I would happily play Duke Nukem 3D on the computer before playing Pokemon Red on the GameBoy.

Literally me

>>11842523
commander keen, crystal caves, secret agent, bio menace? also >>11842813
i don't think they all held up strongly against all console platformers but to say there weren't any good ones is nuts

>>11842995
>I thoroughly enjoyed playing Genesis when I visited a friend who had one (and got my own in the early 2000s), and I would happily play Duke Nukem 3D on the computer before playing Pokemon Red on the GameBoy.
most of the people i knew growing up were the same. we all enjoyed playing warcrat 2 and final fantasy 3 and mario bros and doom and pokemon, games were games regardless of platform

>>11844023
For the Retro Gamer™, any platformer that isn't Japanese and plays just like Mario is "bad design", as lectured by the holy youtube scriptures.

>>11842392 (OP)
There were three types of gamers back then and each lane felt very different. Console offered a lot of variety in genre of games, but there were genres like FPS an RTS that you could only find on PC. Arcade was the third type which was fighting, racing, lightgun, and shmups. Arcade games faded away in the 2000s and just became console games.
I did know this fairly wealthy kid who had the most insane PC at the time with SLI Voodoo 2 in 1998. He was defintely on his high horse about that. Most people just had a mid range family computer.
Yeah, they all felt totally different and the overlap was fairly minimal for awhile. I think it was better that way.

>>11842392 (OP)
Most just played what they had, its like not they had the choice to not get a pc and get a console instead, maybe the super nerds acted superior but no one like them. Anytime I heard someone say ha ha my pc is better the reaction would be shut up nerd.

PC magazines use to be full of that crap though. In PC gamer USA version in the Street Fighter 2 review summary they say something like its for those people entertained by those very old basic console games. This was in the 1995 issue mind you, they had a big list of reviews from previous issues.

Later on I saw a review for Colin McRae Rally 1, they said something like the ps1 graphics were just so unbearably blocky and low rez. They could really be obnoxious acting like their turn based games made them so smart.

>>11842754
On an 8086 its seems incredibly smooth and fun, on a 486 its seems super bad. I think they might have jacked up the speed and movement when moving it from the Apple 2.

>>11842959
By todays standards wipeout and Megaman x on dos are really bad but people were happy enough just to have something decently playable, it was either that or nothing at all. It was almost like you had to sort of emulate the other system. Today its a pretty weird novelty like Castlevania on dos, you can't blame the programmer for the hardware, if its so bad why do I have so much fun playing it today.

>>11843010
Pretty much, ps1 mags would make fun of pc players having to do yet another upgrade.

People love to point out bad PC ports but in my experience most PC versions were better. The Tomb Raider and Resident Evil trilogies: all better on PC. FF7, FF8, even MGS1 which is badmouthed on PC for some reasons was great. Moto Racer, Need For Speed, Colin Mc Rae Rally 2, all had better graphics and framerate. Dino Crisis 1 and 2, AitD4, even Mega Man X4 and arguably even X3 is better than on Saturn/PSX.
It always seem to be insecure console warriors who insist on shitting on PC versions too as if they needed to reassure themselves or something and always using the same two known examples like DOS Mega Man probably because they saw it on AVGN ("This is work/This is play"). I've never seen a PC gamer laugh at console gamers for having shitty versions of Doom or Comand & Conquer, they just don't care, but the contrary is so common.

It's a symptom of a greater disease, the fact that "retro gaming" is mostly a console oriented hobby, and I'm not even a PC warrior, I just stand by the opinion that if you don't game on everything, computers, consoles, arcade and handhelds, you don't know shit about video games.

>>11842962
>flat surface twice as wide as the base of the glass
>precarious

>>11844447
People shat on FF7 and FF8 on PC for having shit MIDI audio, though with FF7 it could be good but you needed the right sound hardware. Irrelevant now thanks to mods, of course.

>>11842392 (OP)
>Were they completely separate worlds?
Very much so. Some experimentation and dabbling both ways, but players definitely considered themselves one or the other.
>Were PC gamers known for bragging about playing “patrician stuff” like RTS and spending time tweaking graphics settings and display drivers to get everything working?
Absolutely.