It’s already a clever little word play. The term “master race” (you know, as in “PC master race”) is a Nazi term. The Nazis called themselves the “master race”. And here the PC country is titled “PC reich” as an allusion to the “third reich”, another name for Nazi Germany.
It’s already in there.
(Btw, “PC master race” was a parody allusion to the nazis, as in “You PC players see yourself as the supreme race of gamers, like the nazis”)
Got a bit loaded with negative connotations after the third one, though.
Nuclear Anomaly
20 days ago
Love it. Years and years of (inconsequential) war in Arcadia while the PC Master race just plowed on, minding their own business and building their empire.
Little do they know there is a little revolution going on in their home territory. Laptopians have secretly been plotting and became ever more powerful. The big boxes always thought they would outcompute them, but it seems this is no longer the case.. the status quo is about to be broken! [Insert spin off storyline here]
However, there are two factions in Laptopia. The self reliant Engineer Laptopians who build and trust on their own strength and the Lites. The Lites have contacted the Cloud Nation and forged an unholy alliance. The Cloud Nation’s intelligence gathering ability and thought control algorythms allow the Lite Laptopians to forgo the need to do any the computing by theirselves. They can simply “connect” and the Cloud Nation Hivemind provides them with any intel they might need. Little do the Lite Laptopians know that by relying on the Cloud Nation to do their computing for them, they essentially enslave theirselves… Read more »
There are UI mods for Windows to make it look like Mac or Linux. And their government are forcing them to unmod themself every month with the new update.
MacOS isn’t really a faction though. Gamers rarely chose a mac to play games. Those fleeing windows tends to go to linux.
If MacOS was a faction, its incarnation would be a bunch of children stacking cubes while under the direct supervision of a megamind. The cubes have no sharp corner, of course, for the safety of the users. Users that are forbidden to leave the premise of the campus. You can enter, but you can’t leave.
Remember we do have the “religious” war going on, I don’t know if we got all the faction names, but the (I’ll call them) Church of Gaben, the Originites, the Uplayers, and now the Church of the EGS. https://cad-comic.com/comic/console-war-p65/
Big boxes always will out-compute laptops and handhelds. They’re the only ones not constrained by physical size and battery life, they’re the only ones that can have massive coolers and draw as much power as they want. I don’t think big boxes, laptops, and handhelds would fight each other though. They’re just different methods of PC gaming for people with different use cases. No reason to battle it out. If anything, the little revolution going on in their home territory is upstart Epic Games Store VS the well loved reigning king Steam. Although after all these years, it’s clear that… Read more »
I don’t think the Laptopians are the threat, since they pretty much have the same parts and OS, diversity is strenth.
I believe the greatest threat to the PC Reich is far more nefarious. It’s those Mobiles with their Androids and MacOS that are attacking with unstoppable numbers of low grade “gatchas”.
There is zero possibility for a laptop to match or exceed the most powerful desktop, so that wouldn’t make for a believable story. Whatever tech you can fit into a laptop, you can fit more of it into a desktop.
ReaverRogue
20 days ago
I legitimately just laughed out loud. Over 100 issues of the Console Wars, and this is a brilliant punchline!
Eldest Gruff
20 days ago
I don’t believe it. Not for one damn second. This is a shadow war. No, not even that – this is simply a change in tactics. For Microsoft only. Why, is Sony bringing God of War to Game Pass? Is the next Smash Bros launching on all three consoles, bringing in Sony and Microsoft reps? No and no. Sony’s partnered with Pocketpair and made “Palworld Entertainment,” a move which looks extremely similar to Nintendo partnering with GameFreak to make The Pokémon Company. Nintendo’s gone and apparently funded an entire exclusive FromSoft game. Nintendo still has full dominance of gaming in… Read more »
Anhanguara
20 days ago
The condescendence in those faces is gold 😀
Eldest Gruff
20 days ago
So apparently my post got eaten. Either due to length, or perhaps because I referred to a word that starts with T and rhymes with “sheriff.”
But just because the Greeks have put down their swords and are now building a giant horse statue, does not mean that the long war is over.
“This market ain’t big enough for the two of us, Nintendo.”
MJC
20 days ago
Honestly don’t understand the portrayal of the PissFives as the victors when the Switches have a far larger number of soldiers as well as superior numbers and quality of firepower. PissFives sure didn’t win with the Concord BB Gun, or the cancelled The Last of Us, Twisted Metal, and God of War Live Service Rifles. They’re lucky they have Insomniac Manufacturing pumping out so many weapons, or they’d have nothing to fight with at all (like the Xboxes). Maybe I’ll pretend that the Switches all live in PC Reich, since so many people’s real life mentality has been “I’ll get… Read more »
Actually, Switches actively wage war with the PC Reich, having destroyed a number of the strongholds that capture and interrogate their troops.
PC Reich doesn’t acknowledge it as a war. Small skirmishes and disagreements with lesser nations, etc. etc.
If these guys weren’t still in competition, Nintendo would never have forked over the cash to get Hidetaka Miyazaki to develop Duskbloods as a Switch 2 exclusive.
Those Illegal interrogations are carried out by “unaffiliated mercenary groups and open C++ Pirates”
Steve
20 days ago
Heh, as someone who only ever had an NES (played a friend’s Sega Genesis in College) and an old Wii for the kids, I must concur with this analysis. Probably 95%+ of my admittedly limited (relative to this comic’s author and typical audience) video-gaming has been on PC.
If you’ve played mainly by keyboard for 40+ years, a system using a controller isn’t going to be that appealing, Arcadia. Especially now that you’re middle aged and you’re starting to inherit your mom’s arthritis. And can’t quite keep up with those action games anymore. “Hypothetically.” 😜
Verdiekus
20 days ago
PC has always been king. The ability to play any game or even rewrite the game itself. Long live the MOD community!
Paul
20 days ago
Perfect ending for the series (if this is really the last one).
toughluck
20 days ago
Tim, this is such a missed opportunity. The big country could have been called PC MASTER REICH…
I don’t think I missed anything. Reich means “empire” or “realm,” so it would make no sense, and the word Reich doesn’t even rhyme with ‘race,’ so there’s no clever wordplay to be had.
I called it the PC Reich as a dig at the clowns that have been running around for over a decade happily likening themselves to Nazis by declaring themselves a “master race.”
I’m gonna be honest, those always irritated me, and I always preferred your approach of trying to focus on consoles and simply leave the PC out of it. And then got, well, irritated by the constant “master race” comments people kept leaving.
I appreciate the attempt at a dig, but sadly, far too many of them seem to be PROUD that they “called it.” V_V
If I was prescient, I’d have sold off some investments 2 weeks ago when I wrote this comic.
Terrycloth Monkey
20 days ago
Is the ambassador a Steam Deck?
AustynSN
20 days ago
I’m a bit confused. Is “Arcadia” where all the consoles are fighting with each other? If so, then where would the nation of actual arcade games (“cabinets”) be?
That reminds me we did get a nice historical console war a while back, might be an interesting direction to take this section. Also, We could address the whole Piracy Vs. Ownership Vs. DRM situation in some comics, too. We’ll just have to see what Tim is feelin’ about it all.
This was it. Right here. The remnants of their once great civilization can still be found scattered across the countryside, full of treasures that honestly should be in museums, but are often snapped up by collectors.
The Native Arcadians still reside here, only in tiny reservations. Two of the largest tribes of Arcadians – the Chuccichees and the Davenbussers, own and operate these massive facilities where tourists come, spend a ton of money, all hoping to walk away with fabulous prizes.
Bryce
19 days ago
I know you’re looking to end the Console Wars storyline but boy oh boy did Nintendo give you a bunch of content with the Switch 2.
Pyre
19 days ago
A fitting ending to the Console war saga (with just enough ominous foreshadowing for any future sequels.) Congratulations on PS5’s “apparent” victory indeed….
Playstation “winning” the war? Pfft, bwahahaha! Meanwhile Switch is running circles around in sales and Sony IPs (Patapon, Hot Shots) are showing up on Nintendo hardware. Not to mention Xbox stuff, too.
24
Damn right.
PC Master Race.
If you want to get REALLY specific, every “console” these days is basically just a PC with a custom operating system.
So PC master race for all.
The better to hack them with.
Basically it’s “how hard is this to upgrade”. Ranging from “open case, swap piece” all the way to “we would sue you if we could”
This is such a missed opportunity! Should have totally been captioned PC MASTER REICH.
It’s already a clever little word play. The term “master race” (you know, as in “PC master race”) is a Nazi term. The Nazis called themselves the “master race”. And here the PC country is titled “PC reich” as an allusion to the “third reich”, another name for Nazi Germany.
It’s already in there.
(Btw, “PC master race” was a parody allusion to the nazis, as in “You PC players see yourself as the supreme race of gamers, like the nazis”)
“Reich” is simply the German word for “empire” or “realm”.
Got a bit loaded with negative connotations after the third one, though.
Love it. Years and years of (inconsequential) war in Arcadia while the PC Master race just plowed on, minding their own business and building their empire.
Little do they know there is a little revolution going on in their home territory. Laptopians have secretly been plotting and became ever more powerful. The big boxes always thought they would outcompute them, but it seems this is no longer the case.. the status quo is about to be broken! [Insert spin off storyline here]
However, there are two factions in Laptopia. The self reliant Engineer Laptopians who build and trust on their own strength and the Lites. The Lites have contacted the Cloud Nation and forged an unholy alliance. The Cloud Nation’s intelligence gathering ability and thought control algorythms allow the Lite Laptopians to forgo the need to do any the computing by theirselves. They can simply “connect” and the Cloud Nation Hivemind provides them with any intel they might need. Little do the Lite Laptopians know that by relying on the Cloud Nation to do their computing for them, they essentially enslave theirselves… Read more »
Too bad they don’t get any AMD. 😂
Took me a while
Inside the PC (gaming) Reich you now have Windows, Mac and SteamOS (Linux) as factions battling it out.
There are UI mods for Windows to make it look like Mac or Linux. And their government are forcing them to unmod themself every month with the new update.
MacOS isn’t really a faction though. Gamers rarely chose a mac to play games. Those fleeing windows tends to go to linux.
If MacOS was a faction, its incarnation would be a bunch of children stacking cubes while under the direct supervision of a megamind. The cubes have no sharp corner, of course, for the safety of the users. Users that are forbidden to leave the premise of the campus. You can enter, but you can’t leave.
Remember we do have the “religious” war going on, I don’t know if we got all the faction names, but the (I’ll call them) Church of Gaben, the Originites, the Uplayers, and now the Church of the EGS.
https://cad-comic.com/comic/console-war-p65/
Also the secret society of handhelds is getting out of the shadows trying to assassinate the established power
Eh, the Laptopians will always be hotheads that turn on and cook themselves as soon as the battle gets too intense.
Big boxes always will out-compute laptops and handhelds. They’re the only ones not constrained by physical size and battery life, they’re the only ones that can have massive coolers and draw as much power as they want. I don’t think big boxes, laptops, and handhelds would fight each other though. They’re just different methods of PC gaming for people with different use cases. No reason to battle it out. If anything, the little revolution going on in their home territory is upstart Epic Games Store VS the well loved reigning king Steam. Although after all these years, it’s clear that… Read more »
I don’t think the Laptopians are the threat, since they pretty much have the same parts and OS, diversity is strenth.
I believe the greatest threat to the PC Reich is far more nefarious. It’s those Mobiles with their Androids and MacOS that are attacking with unstoppable numbers of low grade “gatchas”.
There is zero possibility for a laptop to match or exceed the most powerful desktop, so that wouldn’t make for a believable story. Whatever tech you can fit into a laptop, you can fit more of it into a desktop.
I legitimately just laughed out loud. Over 100 issues of the Console Wars, and this is a brilliant punchline!
I don’t believe it. Not for one damn second. This is a shadow war. No, not even that – this is simply a change in tactics. For Microsoft only. Why, is Sony bringing God of War to Game Pass? Is the next Smash Bros launching on all three consoles, bringing in Sony and Microsoft reps? No and no. Sony’s partnered with Pocketpair and made “Palworld Entertainment,” a move which looks extremely similar to Nintendo partnering with GameFreak to make The Pokémon Company. Nintendo’s gone and apparently funded an entire exclusive FromSoft game. Nintendo still has full dominance of gaming in… Read more »
The condescendence in those faces is gold 😀
So apparently my post got eaten. Either due to length, or perhaps because I referred to a word that starts with T and rhymes with “sheriff.”
But just because the Greeks have put down their swords and are now building a giant horse statue, does not mean that the long war is over.
Ah. Tsheriffs – like tsars, but on a smaller scale
“This market ain’t big enough for the two of us, Nintendo.”
Honestly don’t understand the portrayal of the PissFives as the victors when the Switches have a far larger number of soldiers as well as superior numbers and quality of firepower. PissFives sure didn’t win with the Concord BB Gun, or the cancelled The Last of Us, Twisted Metal, and God of War Live Service Rifles. They’re lucky they have Insomniac Manufacturing pumping out so many weapons, or they’d have nothing to fight with at all (like the Xboxes). Maybe I’ll pretend that the Switches all live in PC Reich, since so many people’s real life mentality has been “I’ll get… Read more »
Actually, Switches actively wage war with the PC Reich, having destroyed a number of the strongholds that capture and interrogate their troops.
PC Reich doesn’t acknowledge it as a war. Small skirmishes and disagreements with lesser nations, etc. etc.
If these guys weren’t still in competition, Nintendo would never have forked over the cash to get Hidetaka Miyazaki to develop Duskbloods as a Switch 2 exclusive.
Those Illegal interrogations are carried out by “unaffiliated mercenary groups and open C++ Pirates”
Heh, as someone who only ever had an NES (played a friend’s Sega Genesis in College) and an old Wii for the kids, I must concur with this analysis. Probably 95%+ of my admittedly limited (relative to this comic’s author and typical audience) video-gaming has been on PC.
If you’ve played mainly by keyboard for 40+ years, a system using a controller isn’t going to be that appealing, Arcadia. Especially now that you’re middle aged and you’re starting to inherit your mom’s arthritis. And can’t quite keep up with those action games anymore. “Hypothetically.” 😜
PC has always been king. The ability to play any game or even rewrite the game itself. Long live the MOD community!
Perfect ending for the series (if this is really the last one).
Tim, this is such a missed opportunity. The big country could have been called PC MASTER REICH…
I don’t think I missed anything. Reich means “empire” or “realm,” so it would make no sense, and the word Reich doesn’t even rhyme with ‘race,’ so there’s no clever wordplay to be had.
I called it the PC Reich as a dig at the clowns that have been running around for over a decade happily likening themselves to Nazis by declaring themselves a “master race.”
I’m gonna be honest, those always irritated me, and I always preferred your approach of trying to focus on consoles and simply leave the PC out of it. And then got, well, irritated by the constant “master race” comments people kept leaving.
I appreciate the attempt at a dig, but sadly, far too many of them seem to be PROUD that they “called it.” V_V
Yup. Top comment confirms it.
I think Australians might disagree 😉
They might, but I’m not sure the Australians get to decide how a German word is pronounced.
nah, the Australians would not disagree
As an Aussie, we pronounce the word “race” like “ray”, and “reich” like, well like “rike”. They in no way sound the same.
I love PC, been with it since DOS Doom, and have always hated the “master race” shit
Umm.
Wow.
This page has some new meaning given the current real world trade situation.
Is Tim prescient?
If I was prescient, I’d have sold off some investments 2 weeks ago when I wrote this comic.
Is the ambassador a Steam Deck?
I’m a bit confused. Is “Arcadia” where all the consoles are fighting with each other? If so, then where would the nation of actual arcade games (“cabinets”) be?
That reminds me we did get a nice historical console war a while back, might be an interesting direction to take this section. Also, We could address the whole Piracy Vs. Ownership Vs. DRM situation in some comics, too. We’ll just have to see what Tim is feelin’ about it all.
This was it. Right here. The remnants of their once great civilization can still be found scattered across the countryside, full of treasures that honestly should be in museums, but are often snapped up by collectors.
The Native Arcadians still reside here, only in tiny reservations. Two of the largest tribes of Arcadians – the Chuccichees and the Davenbussers, own and operate these massive facilities where tourists come, spend a ton of money, all hoping to walk away with fabulous prizes.
I know you’re looking to end the Console Wars storyline but boy oh boy did Nintendo give you a bunch of content with the Switch 2.
A fitting ending to the Console war saga (with just enough ominous foreshadowing for any future sequels.) Congratulations on PS5’s “apparent” victory indeed….
I think by player base, revenue, and engagement hours, smartphone gaming probably has even PC gaming beat by a large margin. (https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/50-years-of-pc-vs-console-gaming-revenue-visualized-pc-maintains-lead-over-consoles-vr-mobile-and-handheld-market-data-included)
Invaders from space, maybe?
Playstation “winning” the war? Pfft, bwahahaha! Meanwhile Switch is running circles around in sales and Sony IPs (Patapon, Hot Shots) are showing up on Nintendo hardware. Not to mention Xbox stuff, too.