I own a ps3, wii and a medium spec pc and if I want to play a game where I can loose my self completely I always turn to the pc, I just can't take consoles serriously enough. Don't get me wrong I love playing on my ps3 and can have hours of fun, but, if you can learn to use a mouse and keyboard just like you learnt to use a controller then nothing comes close. To understand what I mean let me take you back to when I was growing up, to the days of windows 95/98 when there was only one choice for serious gaming, the pc. When you had games that defined genres and paved the way for what we have now, games like C&C, Total Anhiliation, Doom, might and magic, the origional Call of Duty. These games where above and beyond anything that the consoles could manage, and as such consoles were always more of a 'casual' thing. At this point most serious developers were making games for the pc and not consoles. To me this should still be true, the change over happened not because of cost of pc's (which were far more expensive then) or a lack of a market but because of clever marketing from sony with the launch of the playstation, that was the begining of the end for mainstream pc gaming. And at the risk of being unpopular with non pc gamers, console games to a certain point still have this 'casual' edge to them if you compare say a modern FPS to its older cousin the legnth and difficulty are both significantly less than in the origional. To back up what I'm saying I'll give you a couple of examples. To start, scince I've mentioned it already I'll go with Call of Duty, if you compare playing the origional two in the series with the later four ( I've never played big red one) playing the main campaign on normal is the same as hard on the later episodes, also the legnth is about a quater of the origional. For my next example I'll move to RTS, I play most games on hard but there are certain games (most of which are only found on pc) where the ai own me if I put the difficulty up and I like this kind of challenge, that is what real gaming is to me.
Another point I want to touch on is that people are starting to talk about how one day maybe we will have a time where we don't have separate platforms for games and how much better that will be, but we've already had that time and have left it for a one where we all have lots of seperate devices to do what one used to. I have a friend who has an ipod for listening to music, an iphone for checking email and browsing the web, an xbox 360 for playing games, an ipad for checking email and browsing the web and a laptop for the same and doing a bit of work. Me I have a pc that does it all, yes I understand the benifit of portable devices but do you take them all with you everytime you leave the house? if not then they loose their benifit.
To close, I never meant this to turn into a rant although I'm aware that at times it may seem like it. If you feel that I'm acting like a pc elitist, thats because I am. Not because I'm better than you or that I have more money but because pc's will always have an advantage over a console.
Another point I want to touch on is that people are starting to talk about how one day maybe we will have a time where we don't have separate platforms for games and how much better that will be, but we've already had that time and have left it for a one where we all have lots of seperate devices to do what one used to. I have a friend who has an ipod for listening to music, an iphone for checking email and browsing the web, an xbox 360 for playing games, an ipad for checking email and browsing the web and a laptop for the same and doing a bit of work. Me I have a pc that does it all, yes I understand the benifit of portable devices but do you take them all with you everytime you leave the house? if not then they loose their benifit.
To close, I never meant this to turn into a rant although I'm aware that at times it may seem like it. If you feel that I'm acting like a pc elitist, thats because I am. Not because I'm better than you or that I have more money but because pc's will always have an advantage over a console.
