What is the best system for gaming PC or Consoles ?

[BlobVanDam]

12 years and 6 gaming rigs later, I am tired of trying to always stay on the cutting edge of PC tech. I can no longer dedicate that much time and resource to my PC. I bought myself a Wii and a PS3 and vowed to never chase gaming PC ever again. Though I never spent anywhere near the time on these gaming console as I did on PC.

That's pretty much just like me. My PC was getting a bit long in the tooth and I didn't want to upgrade yet again just to be able to play the latest games, so I bought a PS3 recently and I'm not looking back. There are a few things that I'll still use my PC for, but not recent games.

And once consoles are previous generation, you can pick them up dirt cheap, as well as the games. No good if you like the latest games of course, but if you're a casual gamer who likes to play on the cheap, consoles are good there. My current PC is 4 years old and would suck big time for current games, I would think.
The most recent game I even have on my PC is GTA: Vice City. That goes to show how much I've kept up with PC gaming

And reading through this thread, I'm remembering now why I'm not a PC gamer - I hate FPS games and RTS games. There goes 95% of the PC gaming market right there

 

[infinix]

And reading through this thread, I'm remembering now why I'm not a PC gamer - I hate FPS games and RTS games. There goes 95% of the PC gaming market right there

GASP.... BLASPHEMY. Thou speaks evil against the great FPS. Thous shall be burned on a stake to cleanse thy soul.

On a serious note, what types of games are you into? RPG? Racing?

 

[Cutter John]

For me its a no-brainer. PC. For me its just a matter of convenience. I don't have to buy a seperate console and television to play games. And if I get bored, I can shut off the game and go check e-mail or read a forum.

And for the $300 I'd pay for a console, I can do one hell of a system update.

 

[BlobVanDam]

And reading through this thread, I'm remembering now why I'm not a PC gamer - I hate FPS games and RTS games. There goes 95% of the PC gaming market right there

GASP.... BLASPHEMY. Thou speaks evil against the great FPS. Thous shall be burned on a stake to cleanse thy soul.

On a serious note, what types of games are you into? RPG? Racing?

I overall quite dislike those genres too. No wonder I stopped playing games if these are my choices.

The only genre I'd generalize and say I'm into is platformers, which aren't that common any more (although they've made a bit of a comeback recently), so you can tell how long ago I was into games. Aside from that, no particular genre I'm into, just a lot of general stuff, like GTA, and a lot of Nintendo's first party games.

 

[lurok]

As a loyal Macaddict (and therefore small choice of games) I gravitated towards consoles. First was modded Xbox, currently 360. Like sandboxes (GTAs) and modern fp shooters (CoD, R6). Haven't yet found console SF game like, and Legacy on the 360 was an abomination. Now can play PC games on dual-boot Mac, big disadvantage find to console games is inability to mod them, or transfer PC mods to console format. That would be a big revolution if someone knew how to crack...though I doubt Microsoft would allow them...

 

[Owain Taggart]

And once consoles are previous generation, you can pick them up dirt cheap, as well as the games. No good if you like the latest games of course, but if you're a casual gamer who likes to play on the cheap, consoles are good there. My current PC is 4 years old and would suck big time for current games, I would think.

Yeah, that's a good point, and actually the current console generation is in a good place right now where they actually won't feel dated like previous generations. I don't know about the XBox 360, but the PS3 seems like it has a lot of room to age, and maybe it's the fact that they're both HD consoles. We've come to a sort of plateau where I don't think we'll see any higher resolutions for awhile as everything is maxed at 1080p, and it will be years before we see anything higher. That said, the next generation will likely focus more on getting more polygons onto the screen and better AI and physics.

 

[Amaris]

^ That's how I got my GameCube, which was used and on the cheap. To most Gamers it isn't much, but I don't play a lot of games. I used to be total PC when it came to gaming, but I have to watch every penny I have now, and while I can do some serious upgrading of my PC hardware, what I love about my GameCube is that I just slap the disc in, power it up and I'm playing a game in about 10 seconds, with no concerns about framerate, compatibility or instability.

 

[FPAlpha]

As usual PCs dominate the strategy market.. i've yet to see a comparably good strategy game on any console. The controls are just not very suited to these types of games.

Action games, most likely shooters, are a preference type of game.. i've played shooters on consoles and they are usually designed in a way that you don't need the absolute precision of a mouse/keyboard combo so it evens out.

Apart from all that given the advent of HDDs on consoles i've also noted a dropoff in technical quality of console games. Companies know that many, if not most new-gen consoles are hooked up to the internet and have harddrives so it's no biggie to patch games anymore.. something unheard of in previous years.

When a console game was released it was that.. end of line. It had to work smoothly and without a glitch and therefore was tested and eveloped to death which was one of the huge advantages consoles had over PCs where it took weeks sometimes to have all the bugs out on any given game before it was playable.

This has changed and it may never go away since companies want a return of investment as soon as possible even going so far to release a 95% finished game and trickle in the last 5% over the few weeks after release.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

I've had consoles all my life, but was always a 1 per generation person, with a PC for the bulk of my gaming. Had NES, SNES, Dreamcast, then I went with Gamecube and Xbox then finally this generation I said screw it to upgrading my PC so often and stuck with Console gaming for the most part. Though since I bought all three I probably haven't saved all that much money by not upgrading the PC.

 

[The Evil Dead]

Microsoft's exclusives (Halo and Gears of War) do nothing for me lately, so I am happy primarily using my PC these days and whenever a game comes out that is console only (Red Dead Redemption, Uncharted, Heavy Rain, God of War, etc.) I'll pick it up for my PS3.

I should say that an element of it is that I simply like having a digital catalog on Steam, with no discs or cases taking up space.

 

[Kelthaz]

I prefer PC games, but that's merely due to that the fact the current generation of consoles (and portables) leaves me rather underwhelmed. If a console was released that was actually worth playing I would jump at the opportunity to get back into modern console gaming.

 

[bigdaddy]

Consoles

Better controls.
You know it will work.
No installing hardware or software.
Can play with 3 friends in room and then play online.
Same games, plus more exclusives.

 

[Immolatus]

one of the thing I hate about PC gameing is every time I upgrade my rig my older PC games have a hard time running on the new system. Now I know their are ways to get your system to play older games but I find they are hassle. with console games all I have to do is plug in the old system to the tv and I'm good to go.

 

[zarkon]

Consoles.

Too many PC games these days have annoying DRM.

I miss the golden age of the nineties when everything you needed to play the game was in the box, and copy protection was carried out by stuff like lame-o(a big step forward from stuff like Lenslok, and far preferable to mandatory internet connections).

 

[ninza02]

My best game system is PS3. I am already played game on this console.

 

[Sean Aaron]

I don't really see it as a two-way argument any more. I could easy see shifting to a tablet for my primary gaming needs - no real need to have the machine hooked up to a tv and mouse-directed game genres seem to work better with a touch pad (outside of FPS, but you can have those, thanks).

 

[SPCTRE]

What is the best system for gaming PC or Consoles ?

 

[CaptJimboJones]

I use both. My main gaming machine is my Xbox 360, but I still play PC games as well, since some genres just don't translate very well to consoles (MMOs, RTS games, etc).

For me, the big advantage to the console is the simple pop-in-the-disk-and-play factor. PC gaming, for me at least, still involves an annoying amount of time tweaking settings, downloading patches, updating drivers, etc., to get the game to run well.