Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On the other hand, if an Xbox breaks, the manufacturer can charge you 
> arbitrary amounts of money to fix it. If a PC breaks, you can just 
> replace the offending part, available from a bazillion sources. ;-)

  Do you have any actual figures how much it costs to repair an Xbox 360
after the warranty has been expired?

  Anyways, advantages of PC gaming over console gaming:

- Keyboard and mouse. I can't stress this enough. Playing a FPS with a gamepad
is a pain. (And if you want to play a game with a gamepad, you can. It's not
like it's a mutually exclusive thing. In fact, Windows supports Xbox 360
controllers out-of-the-box. Or you could buy a PC-specific gamepad.)

- The keyboard and mouse as controlling devices also allow for game user
interfaces that are very awkard with consoles (such as point&click, and
anything requiring writing text). Level editors and such are also usually
much easier to implement for PCs due to this same reason.

- As time passes, graphics hardware and graphics get better, while consoles
are stagnant. Consoles upgrade only once every 5 years or so (and in fact
the current generation of consoles has lasted unusually long), and very
often are backwards-incompatible (although this isn't really a huge issue
in practice).

- Many gamers appreciate the ability to mod games, and to download and
install such mods. This is just not possible in consoles. (Well, not
unless you want to physically hack your console and get banned from the
console's online server system and stop being able to do anything online
and receive upgrades to anything.)

  Disadvantages of PC gaming:

- Crashes. From all the PC games I own, *at least* 50% have presented
crashes in one form or another. The amount of hardware and software
configurations is virtually endless, and so is the incompatibilities
list that cause crashes and other misbehavior. Also Windows tends to
"rot" over time, even modern versions (although Windows itself has been
less and less the culprit with newer versions, the culprit being usually
third-party drivers and such).

- Games tend to be optimized for top-of-the-line PCs, often making them a
pain to play with older PCs.

- Game availability. Many game houses do not port their games for the PC,
either because of marketing reasons, technical reasons, or just because
it's not profitable enough (because of rampant piracy). There are countless
very great games that are just not available for the PC, period.

  Advantages of consoles:

- Plug&play. Really. You just buy a game, put the disk in, and start
playing. That's it. No configuration, no updating drivers, no crashes.
Just plug and play. (On the current-generation consoles you can install
the entire game disk on the hard drive, making loading times faster, but
at least on the Xbox 360 that's optional. Although usually advantageous.
Nevertheless, it's a very trivial operation to do.)

- Did I mention no crashes? (Ok, that's not 100% true, as some games do
get somehow published with bugs in them. However, the crashes are really,
really rare. I'd say in less than 1% of all games. Probably significantly
less. And even with those games, it's rare for it to happen. After all,
they *have* passed a huge battery of testing.)

- Games are optimized for the console, so they will usually look as good
as the console allows, while having a good framerate. This even if you have
a huge HD TV or LCD monitor.

  Disadvantages of consoles:

- The controller. Well, of course not with all types of games. With many
types of games the controller is just marvelous. However, with other types
of games, especially first-person-shooters, it's a real pain. And there are
no options. (The PS3 has a third-party mouse periferal which might work.
I think it works by simulating the controller, rather than games having
direct support for it. The Xbox 360 has system-level non-support for mice
as a matter of principle. Don't bother hooking one in. It won't work.)

- Aging hardware. PCs advance, consoles don't. A new generation of consoles
will eventually emerge some time in the future, but you'll have to then spend
big buck to buy one, and wait for any good games to appear.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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