Why did most early PC games suck so much? Sure you have a few

There's no single reason you can pinpoint, but the gap between PCs and consoles back then was easily explained. Consoles had hardware design for playing games, which meant sprite generation, parallax and other things were entirely done through via hardware, which made games programmed on a 2mhz processor play like a dream. On the other hand, PC was this clusterfuck of technologies and standards (CGA, VGA, etc) that quickly superceded one another and made stuff harder to understand for programmers.

You can probably look around the internet for some of the pitfalls of PC game programming before 1994, but in a nutshell: to show sprites on screen, you had to initialize a "dumb" buffer, put all the graphics in there and "keep watch" over it, so stuff wouldn't be overwritten, or fed garbage. While in consoles, you just pointed to the index of the sprite (where it was on the ROM), and the hardware took care of the rest.

When we finally got stuff like Glide, 3dfx, DirectX and OpenGL, was when PC gaming finally started to take off.

>>3615930
Paratrooper was pretty fun. Simple but has high replay value.

most devs were shit at making fun games

Lack of quality control.

>>3615930
You'll have to be more specific. There are tons of early PC games that are great like Police Quest, Oregon Trail, etc. If you mean ports or franchise entries, what >>3615950 said nails it pretty easily. You don't see anything that big in the public zeitgeist because back in the day EVERY PC producer had their own OS, so collective reminiscence is harder to find, and convincing people to find old hardware or emulate obscure systems to play shit like Hunt the Wumpus is difficult.

>>3615950
This pretty much explains why so many games did feel so 'jank'. Because it WAS a jank way of making sprites in games.

>>3615997
>There are tons of early PC games that are great like Police Quest, Oregon Trail, etc.
Those games usually worked with the thing PC games were good at. It always worked better with point and clicks because you didn't have to worry quite so much about speed or precision.

Don't forget that PCs were the easiest platform to develop for by far. Anyone could release a shitty PC game but you had to have a bit of technical skill and money to make a licensed console game.

Because all the best developers were still programming on home computers, like the Amiga, or home consoles, like the Mega Drive.

>>3615930
But why a toll booth? Is megaman entering a foreign country?

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>>3615930
The selection was tilted towards simulators.

And RPGs.

And adventure games.

And turn based strategy.

And maybe puzzle games.

>>3615930
Many were never meant for gaming. They made for spreadsheets, graphing, and other things a business would want.

There were a lot of PCs that were good for gaming. The Commodore 64, MSX, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and the Atari 8-bit lines were full of great games.

The issue in America was the implosion of the home video game market, which not only hurt dedicated consoles but also low-cost computers. Europe and Asia were unaffected.

Americans began to only trust things like the Apple II, which was big in education; and IBM, which was big in business. As IBM made their machine out of off-the-shelf parts competitors began making compatible clones, often at a cheaper price.

The competition lead IBM compatibles to become cheap enough for home users to access, allowing Average Joe to do his taxes and little Billy to write his school reports.

By the time the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST came out, which were excellent game machines (especially the former,) they cost significantly more than IBM clones, and if you wanted games Nintendo was gaining traction.

>>3615930
>most early PC games suck so much
>example is literally Mega Man DOS
>Mega Man DOS
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>>3616449
I forgot the name of the website, but there's a series of articles that explains how Magic Carpet was made. Remember this game was released in 1994, before DirectX was released and even 3DFX didn't exist yet. The articles explained the problems with doing simple stuff like video output and creating some of the terrain effects. If you look at some videos, you'll notice the game lags quite a lot, and the pixels explode when you get too near some stuff.

Nowadays we have libraries (Directx, Opengl) that deal with this for you, but back then, you were on your own. Another thing is that most of the game programmers were on consoles back then, even if they knew technology that could be used to program for PCs. For example, the PSX and N64 use MIPS Assembly, which nowadays is considered to be hard as fuck to learn and comprehend, while back then it was the norm, because every console programmer knew it.