Editorial: My PC is my Next-Gen Console

You sound as if you don't have a need in owning a PC if you don't plan on gaming. From my perspective; why spend an extra $300 on a console, if you already have a PC in the house?

I have honestly not played any consoles and probably never will. They look clunky in every way to me. I have been gaming on a PC since I built my first one in 1983 and I continue you build them. Opps, now the new games coming out require yadayadayada video specs. I was thinking ahead and purchased 2 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti cards running in SLI mode. When I built this one 5 years ago. Runs Far Cry 3 with no issues with everything set to max.
2-23" monitors.
3.40 gigahertz Intel Core i5-3570K OC to 3.91.
16 GB RAM

I have yet to see graphics on any console look better than what I have on my PC.

There are no absolutes. It really depends on the title and personal taste.

The PC can be a great platform but there are some issues.

Steam is great but there are regions of the world where Internet access is horribly expensive which makes Steam impractical.

PC games can not be sold on or even given away. Developer support is not that great on the PC either - so if your buy a "broken" title you are pretty much stuck with it for at least a couple of months. Most PC owners steal their games so I don't blame the devs for skimping on PC versions of their titles.

PC games do look better but the extra frames and eye candy is just not worth the effort in most cases. Some of the best titles are simply not available on the PC.

Cost is another factor. A gaming PC is not exactly power efficient and will drive up your electricity bill if you like it or not.

Recently I bought the newest non-retina MacBook pro, i7 2.6ghz. Bootcamping Win7 its a gaming beast running Fifa 13, Borderlands 2 and X-Com at 1080p on max settings on my mates 50" HDTV. I plug a 360 Pc gamepad in and I wonder if I will ever use my 360 console again

Woot Woot! Ding ding ding! Another consolite sees the light! Consoles and PC gaming don't have to be mutually exclusive either. I don't understand why people have to think that. I am an avid PC gamer, have been since the mid 1980's (yes I'm old). Part of the fun for me at the time was the tinkering, going with the latest "upgrade", etc. But now that I'm a parent, I can understand the desire to not want to fuss with that not to mention expense.

That being said, I agree 100% that PC gaming has been streamlined in the last 5-6 years, mostly thanks to Steam. And don't belittle yourself over a "gaming laptop", I've been going this route for the last 7 years or more. I also have a desktop, but for 99% of gaming, it runs great on my laptop and higher end hardware should last a solid 3 years of gaming. Even if you just go the desktop route, it is quite inexpensive. I've had the same case for nearly 10 years, and have swapped out components every couple of years to keep things reasonably up to date. My current desktop has Intel Sandy Bridge i5 quad core, 8GB DDR3, GTX 460, so it's not screaming fast, but it manages pretty much every game perfectly fine.

Consoles do have their place, I own an Xbox and Wii, but they get maybe 5% of my play time, everything else is on the PC.

I think both platforms have their pluses and minuses. Consoles definitely are geared more towards ease of use. I also have often wondered if the game makers were in cahoots with the video card makers because you always seam have an out dated video card with each new game release.

Who connects a PC to a TV for gaming in the first place?
And a laptop for gaming is just a giant waste of good money.

A PC gamer should use a proper monitor with a decent resolution thats much better and clearer than a TV.

This was painful to read.

laptops for gaming are not a waste of money. You dont get the price/performance of a desktop but you get mobility and thats what some people need. I survived with doing all my gaming off a liano laptop for months before I got this desktop (which is an older desktop I was given).

As for TVs, the only real issue with hooking a PC up to one is refresh rate I believe, its *****ic to think 1080p monitors have a clearer resolution then 1080p televisions..And many televisions are just as clear color wise as monitors.still not ideal because of possible input lag, but your other points arent really correct.

Oh the common stereotypes.

Haters going to hate... but this is an good article.
I would expect it to gain more favorable comments in the console section as most readers here have a "smarter then you" attitude when it comes to PC gaming, no matter what there actual tech level is.
I recall Nvidia stepped up with their driver support when I hooked my HTPC to my TV last year when the instructions came onscreen with the TV model # and what to do to get the best picture/resolution. It is small things like this that have me recommend their cards to friends building HTPC's for the first time. I hope ATI also has included this by now. It truly is the device that Microsoft and Sony have wanted to sell you as an all-in-one media center device.
BTW... I almost had a moment of youthful bliss when you said " I rediscovered my 3DS". I thought you where going to say " I rediscovered my 3D0"

Consoles persist because people are too stupid/lazy to learn how to buy and maintain a computer. However, as consoles increasingly become shitty, poorly constructed computers, this advantage is disappearing (google "Skyrim Save file" for one of the many examples of architecture and coding fail on consoles). I can see the advantage of a console like the N64 where you pop in a game and BAM it's playable. But the modern console isn't that, it's a shitty computer; complete with outrageous loading times, constant software bugs and hardware failure.

Massively modable deep-content games are absolutely the ONLY GAMES I could give a remote damn about playing. They're also completely unplayable on consoles, and usually not even available (Romance of the Three Kingdoms is an exception, and it's still 50x better on PC).

I need to be able to get new content, scenarios, countries, models, skins, weapons, etc. or I don't give a ****. I need to be able to mod it myself, and get user content, without the mediating hand of shitty architecture and stupid *******s at Sony freaking out because someone might hack their overpriced paperweight.

Fighting games, JapRPGs, shooters, MMOs, etc. put me to sleep. I would literally rather do nothing than play them, and this is exactly what happens whenever my friends start playing console games. I want single player/coop games with intense depth like Hearts of Iron 3, Witcher 2 or Minecraft. Anything else is less interesting than mowing the lawn.

I also don't own a television, because televisions have shitty resolution (a CRT from 10 years ago looks better than your 1000 dollar TV), and anyway, only *****s watch TV.

Also, my computer doesn't browse the internet like a retarded kid on the phone book, it doesn't freeze every ten minutes on Youtube, and it's capable of connecting to the wireless internet at more than 1/10th potential speed.