Posted January 21, 2004
For months now I've been living under the premise that consoles are for gaming and PCs are for work. There are quite a few benefits to this and usually very few (if any) disadvantages. I'm by no means trying to stir the pot of PC gaming versus console gaming (people will argue about anything), I'm just trying to explain why I slowed and have almost stopped playing games on the PC.
The first and most moving reason I game from a console and not my PC is money. The economic impact of constantly upgrading a computer is exponentially larger than the one time purchase of a console and games for that console system. These days the latest graphics cards cost more than the two hottest console systems (Xbox and PS2). Throw in a GameCube and you're almost breaking even in terms of cost of the card and cost of the consoles. Did you know that the human eye at most can only see sixty frames per second? So what good does it do you to have 250 FPS in Quake 3? The other side of that coin is when you're not dumping money on more RAM, bigger hard drives, faster processors, and better graphics cards is that you'll have more money available to buy console games. Some of the larger IDE drives available on the market today will cost the price of a console system or four recently released games. This is a remarkable numbers based argument for console gaming. As I mentioned this is the key reason I ceased gaming on my PC.
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| What good is 250 FPS? |
Quality control is another fine argument for console gaming. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have the final say in what games are released to their respective consoles. You won't find games that are an utter embarrassment to the publisher and programmers of that game on the major consoles like you will on the PC because anyone can produce a game for the PC. The openness isn't there but at least you know that even the worst console games are better than the worst PC games. With consoles you don't find yourself installing patches and new drivers like you do with a PC. I found myself spending almost as much time playing games on the PC as I did downloading and installing new drivers for my graphics card and motherboard chipset as well as patching the PC games I was playing. Sure, you can inch out every ounce of performance from your PC hardware, once a week it seems, where on the console the performance you see in your console games will be the same from the first time you play it to the last time you play it. The biggest compelling fact of PC software in general is code bloat. Ever notice that the console you bought two years ago has games with better graphics than it did two years ago? This is because programmers have to become more creative with their code and a lot less sloppy. You don't find console games getting worse over time because they need more robust hardware; you find them getting better because the programming gets better. This allows you to have more storage space available on your PC because you don't have games that require gigabytes upon gigabytes of hard drive space to function as their designers intended.
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| Ah... PS2 goodness. |
There are probably more benefits to gaming on a console than a PC that I haven't even fathomed yet. These are all very valid reasons to spend more time gaming on a console than a PC. Keep in mind that this is my opinion and my logic for my decision. You're more than welcome to sit in front of your PC and game until your eyes bleed and you get carpal tunnel syndrome. I'll be sitting on my couch gaming until I pass out with fully functioning eyes and wrists.
