I don't get why folks still think PC gaming is expensive, it's absolutely ridiculous. This is my current "gaming" PC's financial history (in Canadian dollars)
- In 2002 I got a 19" flat screen CRT monitor (The one I'm looking at now) for $75 from a university's upgrading sale.
- I bought an OEM copy of windows XP some where shortly thereafter for about $120
- in 2007 I put a system together a decent system (for the time) for $790 (Tower, mobo, AMD dual core 2.6 cpu, Nvidia graphics card with 256meg video ram, DVD burner, 2 gigs of RAM, 250 gig hard drive, mouse, keyboard),
- Summer 2008, Creative labs X-fi fatality soundcard for $120 (on board sound sucked), new Logitech game pad $20
- Summer 2010, ATI 5770 with 1 gig video ram for about $300, 500 gig Hard drive for $90, 4 gigs of ram for about $110 (can't quite remember that one)
This PC will run everything from 2010 backwards just as well as you like (2011 onwards it's starting to show it's age a bit with AAA titles) and through emulators it will run every CONSOLE and handheld game worth playing from the PSX backwards (don't get great frame rates on PS2 stuff) all at a price of $1625. Now that is a decent chunk of change, but that's over a period of 8 years! Someone who's more savvy than me probably could have done it cheaper. Let's not forget also that pc games themselves cost less than their console counterparts.
So all those yabbering about the cost of PC gaming can stick it up their nose, because that's not expensive at all.