My Preciousssssss... PC Gaming

On this lovely Friday and during my lunch between reports this morning and reports this afternoon, I thought I would write a little article on why I am, at my core, a PC gamer. Some of the reasons may surprise you and while I don't consider myself a "fan boy" (I recently hit 20,000 points on my XBOX profile, thank you, thank you), I'm still in love with PC gaming.

Control
Since the days of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Marathon (for the MAC), I have been a big fan of the FPS genre. Dues Ex 1 & 2, Doom 3, Half-Life 1 & 2, Unreal, and the list goes on and on. What keeps me on the PC is the controls. Nothing feels so right to me as the mouse in the right hand and WASD in the left. I remembering mastering (I say that lightly) the controls for Syphon Filter on the PSONE and pulling off headshots like nothing. Since I started on the consoles with SNES in high school and PSONE in early college, I'm not quite sure what pulled me into PC gaming but I definitely know the fine-tuning of aiming with the mouse and the plethora of controls and commands on the keyboard have kept me focused on PC gaming, primarily due to FPS games as well as the smattering of RTS titles I play. This is in no way bashing the 360 or PS3 controllers (I'll leave the Wii out of this article entirely since it's a whole other argument) but I'm sticking with what I know and what I'm good. Last week, I went 57 and 17 (or something close to that) in a round of Bad Company 2. I was just rolling through noobs left and right on Port Valdez and unfortunately my team couldn't destroy that last A objective. I know for a fact that I could never pull something like that off with the 360 controller unless I really wanted to shift my whole focus and put months of practice into it. I'm lucky to pull off an even K/D ratio if I ever dare to step online in a 360 FPS title.

Pride
Before you jump all over this one, this isn't pride in being part of the "elite" or as many of my clanmates would refer to themselves as "hardcore" while considering all console gamers as casual. This is pride in owning a part of my machine, of having sunk blood, sweat, and tears into putting it together. Ok, that's way overdramatic but I did put my machine together and took several hours, with some serious assistance from my friend, Delrey. Errr, ok, he did most of the work but whatever. I still learned a lot and can change out RAM, graphics cards, hardrives, DVD drives, and maybe a power supply or a processor myself. There is a pride in knowing I've learned a lot, expanded my knowledge, and given another build or two, I might be able to do one myself, from mountaing the motherboard to updating the bios and installing Windows and running my first game. Now that would rock. So it's not so much pride in being a PC gamer but pride in knowing that I put it together from spare parts bought off of Newegg. It can definitely be at time sink but hey, that's what a hobby is for!

Troubleshooting & Crashes
This was definitely an argument for gaming on a console before this current generation. I can't remember if my PS2 ever crashed at all. And to this day, I can swear that I will have more crashes on my PC than my 360. But give it a generation or two and the console will be just as finicky as a PC, if not more so. My PC won't RROD on me, that's for sure. Yeah, I've had problems but then I can figure it out myself and fix it. I was recently having some serious issues until I figured out my 1TB harddrive as taking a crap on me. Thank God I had two so I just installed Windows 7 on my 320GB and was good to go. This is in no way bragging about the PC but again, I felt pride in figuring the problem out and learned something along the way. When my first 360 RRODd, I could do nothing but go into the store and replace it. I just feel like I have many more troubleshooting options with my PC. Harddrive fails. Ok, I have a backup and if I didn't, I could just order one, pop in, and I'm up and running again. GPU going out. No biggie. It was time for an upgrade anyways. With a console, these options are extremely limited and you have to replace the whole console.

Mods
I've never been into mods very much buuuuut... this is a huge way that one single game can be expanded well past its life by the vast and diverse PC gaming community that will create it's own content for a game. Just the mods available for WoW are so awesome and really expand the gaming experience and make it much more enjoyable. I've played some Battlefield 2 mods that were set it Vietnam or even one where you were pirates versus skeletons, turning the game into a whole new one. Those were fun times.

Etc.
One can argue that the best graphics will always be seen on the PC, which I believe is true, if you have the latest and greatest technology. But the way technology advances, you can't keep up unless you are rich. I'm more about the gameplay. You can give me dated graphics from 2001 and if the gameplay is awesome, I'll get into the game...

And last, there are definitely some PC only titles, like Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, that will keep me gaming on the PC even if they add a mouse and keyboard to a console.

The Other Side of the Coin...
On the other side, I still enjoy the smoothness of the console experience. They are way cheaper so if you need to replace one and you aren't covered by a plan of some kind, it's only a couple hundred. Whereas if my motherboard were to go out, they probably don't even sell one like it anymore so I would have to upgrade virtually everything in my PC if that were to happen (at least it's an EVGA...).

Some games just play better with the controller so if you are a little lazy like me and don't want to hook up a 360 controller to your PC, you just get the game for the console. From Mass Effect to Red Dead to any of the numerous Lego titles; I prefer to play those on the console.

And definitely the lack of upgrades is nice. As long as it doesn't give you the RROD, you can shell out a couple hundred and use it for years and years whereas your PC you have to upgrade quite frequently in comparison if you want to keep up with the latest games. I mean, I upgrades my GPU and my processor and still can only play Bad Company 2 on medium settings on my PC. I actually keep it on low settings to get a higher frame rate, thus allowing me to own more prevalently.

In the end, they are all just mediums for accomplishing the same goal, which is to play a game and have fun. I am not a hardcore fan of any one system and don't see why people swear on their lives that the 360 pwns the PS3 or the PS3 pwns the 360 or "PCs are for fags" or the other crap you'll read on any number of forums or message boards.

So keep gaming and keep having fun, even if you still own the original pong with the dial controls...