What is your gaming platform of choice and why.

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You're not recognizing the difference between random failures and trends. The RRoD on Xbox 360 was definitely a trend. This is just a random failure. No company is going to release a product and sell 1 million plus and have them all be 100%.

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I guess no one should buy PS4s due to their failure rate. But seriously, these kinds of issues aren't really issues at all as every single product of every type of category from video game consoles to TVs to microwave ovens etc etc will have them.

It's not that I'm a fan of Microsoft. I'll eventually own a PS4 as well and depending on the games, it may even end up being my system of choice. What I am a fan of is logic and reason, truth and accuracy. When people make baseless, false claims and statements, I'll usually correct them. For example, if you had been making up false stuff about the PS4 and promoting Xbox, I would have corrected you in the same manner.

Seeing as how most of my recent games are for PS3, i'm gonna go with that.

I've got consoles and a gaming PC and I can see pros and cons to both.

The best thing about the PC is the simplest and cheapest - the keyboard/mouse input system. It's just so good for so many genres of games (RTS and FPS especially). There is a downside to PCs though in my opinion: you do need to keep upgrading and this can be pretty damned expensive. I know that some people will now say that you don't need to do this and that you can buy a super gaming PC for £500, but...

...it may just be me but I feel as if I'm running a game with the graphics options turned down then I'm not really playing it as it was intended. If I go to a PC gaming website there will be loads of people posting about how they have three Titans in SLI and an overlocked 64-core CPU cooled by liquid nitrogen and powered by its own nuclear reactor. I then end up spending lots of money upgrading my PC. I know I won't always be able to do that so I feel by following PC gaming that at any time I could the thrown off the horse and I won't be able to keep up. The upgrade problem is nowhere near as bad as it was in the 1990s (when I started PC gaming) before the days of scalable graphics options and dedicated gaming graphics cards but it is still there. PC ports aren't optimsed very well because they're not the most profitable format (I guess). My current PC has twin 680 GTX cards and a third generation quad core i7 processor but games like FarCry3 don't run as well as you might hope (and it doesn't look that good).

There is something to be said for having a console where you are playing on something with standard specs which the developers have optimsed performance for and where you know everyone else is having the same experience.

That said I can't think of one single console that you could own that would have enough good games to keep me happy. You'd want several consoles. Then you're up into PC money.

There's no easy answer.

I just bought a Ps4 and within a year I will probably be done with playing the ps3 on a regular basis.

I'll probably get a PS4 eventually too but it's going to be really far down the road. I just bought a new PC gaming rig earlier in January which will keep me occupied for years to come.

My reason for getting a PS4 is for pretty much one reason only: to play the Sony exclusive games. The xbox exclusive games I don't care for enough to get a console over it. Don't get me wrong, I love Halo 2 and Reach, but I was really disappointed in Halo 4 and since its release I haven't really been playing Halo all that much anymore.. Actually not at all.

Sony however has developer Quantic Dreams' games, Uncharted games and Project Sirens games. If those games were released on PC, I probably wouldn't get a PS4 though.


But then again, I probably would still anyway.

3DS and retro (mostly earlier Gameboys + NES).

Indeed it's true, you cant really get a high end, wont-need-upgrading-for-a-long-time PC for a low price like that. You want one of those, you gotta be willing to dish out a hideous wad of cash. I did that, and it's going to be AWHILE before I have to do anything at all to it. You can get a DECENT one for a price like that, but it is indeed not going to be able to run everything hyper well.

That being said, I have to wonder about Far Cry there. While my own PC is very recent and extremely expensive, I'm using a 660 GTX card and yet pretty much NOTHING slows this thing down. I dont even bother thinking much about graphics settings when I get something new.... just max absolutely everything right away, and go from there. While I do play alot of indie games, I still have a good bunch of uber-graphics sorts of games, and it really handles them perfectly.

I have to wonder if the PC version of Far Cry simply isnt truly optimized well.... that's not exactly an uncommon thing to happen with PC games of any sort. Minecraft for example, is the one exception to the "my PC never slows down" rule, as that game can chug and cough and choke on ANY machine; it's just not well optimized whatsoever, great though it may be.

That being said, I never see why it's super-necessary to always have everything running at absolute perfection. I only did it with mine simply because I could, as in my case it doesnt really dent my funds. But if I did have more average amounts of spending money, I'd have just settled for something a bit in the middle. The games still play just the same, and most will still look pretty nice, really. And of course many games, particularly indie titles, can run perfectly on damn near anything.

PC.

My computer came out at the near end of the original XBox's run, lasted the entirety of XBox360's run, and now is in the XBoxOne's run.

It has had one hard drive failure (ball bearings wore out) and I replaced the video card twice (simple upgrade, a computer game I wanted wouldn't support my original card) and that's about it.

I can play almost anything on it, and aside from exclusive-to-that-console games, I could play almost anything if I wanted.


Plus there is Steam and the modding communities, which makes me love PC gaming even more.

Well said, good sir, well said.
I couldn't have summed it up better myself.

PC MASTER RACE!

Oh let me add this:
Some games on every platform can have glitches and bugs. With PC often there's a work-around you can do to fix it.
For example in SKYRIM, there's a quest that if it bugs-out, you can't progress at all. When this happened to me I simply searched the quest online, found out that someone had figured out a way to alter the game-code to make it work, and voila! I was playing again within minutes.
If I had the game on a console I would have been stuck.

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Ok... I have Wii, PS3, PC and will buy a PS4 and I really don't know why PC gamers always want to make a fuss about people who likes consoles. PC has its pros and its cons, and that's why I also own other gaming systems. Here are some things you have to deal with if you are a PC gamer.

1) Crashes: PC games crash a lot more than console games. Sometimes you can't even start the dang thing until after you've been surfing the internet for a while testing solutions. If you are lucky and it is a common failure, there will be quick and easy fix. But if not,it might be hours, reboots and reinstalls before you get your game to run if at all. With consoles, the worst case scenario is a very long update install. Then you'll have your game. Since most glicthes and bugs are easy to reproduce since the games are all running on the same hardware, patches come out faster as well.

2) Optimization: Not all PC games are optimized for all different GPUs out there. A friend had downloaded a game that ran kind of slow on his high end PC, but when he tried it on a netbook, it ran seamlessly. As it turns out, the game was optimized for intel chipsets and a slow embedded graphics card managed to run it better than a newer, faster one.

3) Keyboards: Keyboards aren't better than gaming controllers. They are made and optimized to type, not to game. If you have CTS, you'll know gaming on a keyboard makes it worse. Anyone who was play a shooter has at least once got killed because of the "send wwwwwwww through chat" problem. Although mouse is better for aiming and RTS games, I prefer a game controller for fighting, racing, platform, hack and slash, etc... And yeah I know you can buy a controller for a PC, but you have to spend a while twaking it until it feels right while most of the console games have a pretty decent setting.

4) Games: There are lots of games that will never come on PC, and some of them I don't wanna miss.

So...

PC has a lot of advantages, but also has its drawbacks.

In the end, a good gamer cares more about the games rather than platforms.

For me, it has to be the PS4. Just because I am a die hard Playstation fan and the games performed better in comparison to the xbone. I do play PC and hoping to get a better one this xmas due to the fact that my Laptop fails to keep a steady frame rate on TF2 (even on low graphics and low resolution).

Sometimes I play the occasional Nintendo games i.e. SSBM on GameCube just for nostalgia purposes and why not.

My favourite console would have to be PS2.

It was backwards compatible, so I could still play all my PS1 games without having to hook up both systems to my TV.

It had room for a hard drive, so I just pulled an old one out of my PC and popped it into the PS2.

I was then able to copy my PS2 game disks to that hard drive and load them from there to play, which dramatically sped up the load times, and I didn't have to use disks anymore.

I also was able to put a Super Nintendo emulator on the PS2 memory card, so I could play all my favourite SNES games on the PS2.

It was such a versatile machine.

I think what I miss most is the backwards compatibility. It's such a shame that Sony decided to remove it from the PS3 and 4.

To address your points:

1. It doesnt happen even CLOSE to as often as you think. Pretty much the ONLY game that crashes on my machine ever is Minecraft, and that's because it's about as well-optimized as a brick in sludge. And I have *alot* of games on here. I'm an impulse buyer with no practical spending limit, so I'll buy anything that looks even vaguely amusing. As a rule? Nothing crashes, be it a triple-A game or a small indie title. The ONLY exceptions usually are if I'm beta or alpha testing something.... and really, with those, you EXPECT crashes, because games in beta, and particularly in alpha, arent even done yet. Alot of times, crashes are on the user's end, not that of the game, and can be fixed by doing things such as installing new drivers, or shutting down interfering programs. To me, it's a benefit: If a console game crashes.... I can do *NOTHING* about it. If a console game has a glitch, same thing. Glitches in PC games can often be beaten by mods, which is usually how I deal with them. In all fairness, some of this depends on how much you know about computers in general, but.... yeah, this aspect is WAY exaggerated from what it actually is.

2. This one really depends on the developer. That being said, it's always seemed pretty rare to me, again with Minecraft being the exception sometimes. Unless I optimize it via mods, which I do sometimes. Actually, I cant think of a time when this has happened to me within the last few years. I've always just stuck with Nvidia's cards, and they've yet to at all let me down.

3. Ahhhh, this one is the real kicker. See, the thing about that arguement is: It doesnt matter, on PC. I dont have carpal-tunnel myself, but I have something very similar, which causes my entire arm/shoulder to flare up and hurt like bloody hell for hours (or days) every now and then. So I have to be careful about using the mouse too much. Minecraft being one of my absolute favorite games, this limitation was.... trouble. Not to mention all the other games I like that a mouse is best for. But I found ways of making a controller (a 360 *or* a PS3 controller, I use the PS3 one) work with *anything*. And I really do mean ANYTHING. I actually got so used to playing PC Minecraft with a controller (which controls both keyboard and mouse inputs) that I make a lot of mistakes and miss ranged shots and whatnot if I try to play it with the mouse and keyboard. And of course there's tons of different games that I really just haaaaaaate trying to use a keyboard/mouse for. Like platformers, which I have many of. Ugh. Controller only for those, thanks. On top of that, since I use this method, I have an extreme amount of customization over the controls. When you're dealing with games simply supporting controllers by themselves, you have to deal with any control-option limitations that the devs may have left in there.... some games hardly let you change up the controls at all (like Pinball FX, arrrgh). But the method I use undoes all of that, no matter what. I can control any game the way *I* want to do it. Doesnt matter what game it is. I can use the keyboard/mouse, OR I can use any controller at all. This sort of extreme level of options is something you dont get on a console.

The problem with that one though is that alot of people just instantly assume otherwise. They think that a game has to support a controller to use one, when that's simply not true. I think that's the only real problem with PC gaming that I've seen is that there's a bit more of a learning curve.... sort of. Too many people arent familiar with their OS, or the sheer number of possible things that can be done with a PC. And teaching them is hard.

4. Ya got it backwards, actually. Oh sure, there's some console games that dont hit PC..... but there's VERY VERY DRAMATICALLY MORE that hit PC but never hit console. And by "dramatically" I mean "a downright stupid amount". I have 190 games on Steam alone (which only comprises probably about 30% of the stuff on this machine, maybe less). About 8 of those have hit consoles. The rest? Never will. Some entire genres dont hit consoles, or simply do so badly on them that they may as well not do so, such as RTS or the mobas, or MMOs. The number gets even more absurd if you also count things like roms of any type. I have over 6000 of those on this machine alone. Roms arent quite the same though, so I dont usually count them. My big problem with the consoles is that there's an extreme lack of variety on them.... developers have a much harder time on there, as you need a publisher big enough to do it, there's all sorts of manufacturing costs, and much of the time the devs cant be too creative, because in the console market, "creative" = "major risk". Not so on PC. ANYONE can make a game on there, and you DONT need a publisher to do it. This is what led to things like Minecraft existing at all. Alot of my favorite games simply never would have been possible on console, simply because of the way business needs to be handled on there. And yes, I'm considering PSN and XBLA when I say all of this. I'm familiar with both.



Now, all of this is not to say that I dont HAVE consoles. Sort of. I keep the PS3 around for fighting games, which are the genre I'm best at, and I keep a Japanese 360 around for my collection of import shmups. And I have ALOT of old consoles; I aint been too fond at all of the recent ones (and dont plan to even buy this next set) but everything before now, I tend to have. Heck, there's an ancient Atari 7800 sitting right next to this keyboard that gets alot of use. Or stuff like the Saturn. I dont have a Dreamcast though, the last one went insane and died. I dont have a PS2 because I loathe the accursed things.


My point overall though is that there's ALOT of misconceptions about PC gaming as a whole. Oh, it has it's obnoxious points.... the cost of building a good machine, and also (for some people) the trouble of learning to use one in the first place.... but that's about it. There's just too many other advantages. I used to be purely a console gamer myself, but.... when the variety started heavily faltering, I gave this a go.... and have never looked back.

Best gaming-related decision I've ever made, period.

It seems like a lot of people don't get to enjoy PC gaming because they think they need hundreds if not thousands of dollars to buy a good one.

I bought a 2nd PC not too long ago for $120.00 off of Kijiji. It was used and was missing a video card.

Luckily I had an old BFG video card laying around.

I have this PC hooked up to my TV for watching YouTube, Netflix and 1080p Blu-Rays mainly, but it can play games as recent as Diablo 3 without losing framerates.

So the point is, don't lose hope if you want to find/build a cheap PC gaming rig.
If you're ok with 3-year-old technology, there are great deals to be had.

Heck, the PS4 is a brand new next-gen console, and is using technology that's over a year old in PC terms.
(Just for perspective)

X360.

Why?

Because I can't afford a PS4 yet.