Warp wrote:
>   Ok, this is a bit hard to confess, but I sold myself out, so to speak,
> kind of. I went and bought an Xbox 360.

Hahahaha! :-D

> From all the
> Windows games I own, *at least* half of them present random crashing, hangups
> or other malfunction

I've heard a number of people say this. (E.g., there are certain people 
where every time we have a CSS match, they have to restart their PC a 
dozen times before CSS will launch without crashing.) I find this rather 
baffling. I have *never* seen CSS crash, even once.

About the only remotely similar thing I've seen it do is when my 
graphics card started dying... man, that was, uh, "special". Do you know 
what happens if you take a level map make up of X thousand polygons, 
take every 5th vertex and set either the X, Y or Z coordinate to zero? 
After a while it quickly becomes impossible to see where the hell you're 
going!

> my PC is becoming so old that it struggles running the
> more recent games at even decent framerates with decent quality settings.

I suppose that could be the problem.

When I first played AvP, it was rock solid. When I tried to play it on 
my current PC, it refused to play. At all. Wouldn't go past the menu 
screen. Just would not run. Claimed I had insufficient video RAM. (The 
box claims you need a minimum of 2 MB, and I only have 896 MB...)

The Settlers IV used to run fine (but for the occasional crash), but 
since I upgraded to a dual-core CPU, it utterly refuses to run at all. 
Won't even start up.

I could continue. Basically old games seem to not like being run on new 
hardware. (Now if I could just get hold of a Windows XP license code, I 
could use Virtual Box to solve this problem!)

> it's just a relief that you can simply put the disc
> in and play without having to worry at all about crashes, graphics settings,
> latest drivers and whether your PC will be able to run it at all.

That's the advantage of a static hardware platform, of course. It makes 
testing 20,000x easier. The disadvantage is... a static hardware 
platform. ;-) If you want more processing power, you must buy an entire 
new console. (Assuming one is even available in the first place!)

> Microsoft
> has also made a quite good work at demanding game developers to minimize
> loading times

No, I think you'll find that that's "market forces". As in, console 
gamers just won't pay money for a game that makes you sit and wait for 
it to load, so developers invest significant time and energy into making 
it fast. If they didn't, it wouldn't sell.

> (I don't really understand how they succeed in this, and why they
> don't use the same technique in the Windows ports of the games, when they
> exist.)

That makes two of us.

>   Of course there are drawbacks too. For one, games deliberately have no
> support for mouse and keyboard.

And this is the main reason why I will never, ever buy a console.

I have only ever owned one console, and I only got that so I could play 
Sonic the Hedgehog. And no, I didn't pay retail price for it either...

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