Despite the fact that the vast majority of games these days are developed for a cross-platform release, available on a combination of consoles, handheld consoles and for the PC, there is and always has been a fundamental difference between the nature of PC games and console games (or perhaps gamers?). In this feature article I’ll consider five reasons to stick to consoles and five reasons to move over to a PC for the majority of your gaming (unbiased – I personally use both).
Console Gaming Arguments:
5. Re-Sellable Games and Trade-Ins: PC games are getting a little impractical to sell on or buy second hand. With DRM like SecuROM, (now hopefully a thing of the past) a CD key can only be used a certain number of times. Since you are essentially paying for this key, there’s no way of knowing how many times it’s already been used or indeed if it’ll work at all.
4. Home Theater: Consoles are more comfortably to play. There are people who hook up their Xboxes to PC monitors and sit up close in a desk chair, but generally they’re played sat back in a nice sofa, hooked up to a home theatre. With HD and Dolby minimum requirements for 360 and PS3 games, this is how they’re supposed to be played. Sure, PCs can be hooked up to a home theatre, but have you ever tried using a mouse and keyboard away from a desk?
3. Simplicity: This isn’t meant to be insulting towards console players. It’s a fact that playing games on the PC is often more trouble than it’s worth: things like a game not playing nice with an obscure set of drivers to piece of hardware you didn’t know existed tend to frustrate gamers. It’s so much more relaxing to pop-in your disc, switch everything on and play. Rather than having to install your game, set up graphics options and set up firewall exceptions before you can even play.
2. Cost: Current price of an Xbox 360: roughly £150 (or $199.99 in the US) depending on bundle, maybe less. Cost of a PC that can play modern games acceptably: anyone’s guess; probably closer to £500 ($750.00 in the US). One that can play games like Crysis at high-resolutions with all shaders, textures and post-processing on full? Probably closer to £1000. Although people complain about consoles being expensive, which they are, but they really are a cost-effective way of playing games.
1. Stability of Games: You know when you get a console that every game you buy for it will work. (In theory and usually). Imagine a scenario, if you will. You’re looking forward to the release of an unnamed WWII game. You’ve just spend £400 on the new ATI 5970 graphics card. You get the game, you install it. But you can’t play it because of an issue which means it’s incompatible with ATI cards. Ouch. Consoles avoid issues such as these because every one is the same, so you know the game has been optimised for you.
This feature editorial continues on the next page, please click below to reveal our arguments FOR PC Gaming as well as our conclusion as to which is better in the end.
