King of Gaming - Part 1
OPINION
[b]One machine to rule them all?[/b] The war between the personal computer and the dedicated game console as king of the gaming world has been going on for well over a decade. There are various pros and cons connected to both platforms that are interes
The desktop personal computer is the best tool around if you are a serious game player. Notice I didn't say computer game player. You see, the console, although technically a kind of computer, really isn't a computer. The console is a wannabe computer that can only do one thing and that is play games. The fight is over which is the best platform, which machine is the King of Gaming. As a platform, the PC is a much more powerful machine than any console out there. Any serious gamer knows this. The video picture is of much better quality, simply because the screen or monitor is superior to the TV that you hook a console up to. Computer monitors have resolutions up to and often beyond 1600x1200 pixels and the dotpitch on a good screen can be as low as .21 dpi and in rare cases even better. No TV today can match this. The game console on the other hand uses decades old technology known as a TV set. Come on guys, a TV set as a monitor to view your game! TV's are yesterdecade's technology that use composite RGB video technology. Even the newest LCD and Plasma screens don't match up to a decent PC screen. PC's have put that technology to rest 20 years ago when the Commodore 64 went belly up! If you add in the dedicated video card that the gaming PC has, you end up with a combination that is unbeatable.
Advancing technology and system upgrades
As technology keeps advancing, the video card in a PC can be replaced with a card that has more power and features. This graphics processing power makes it possible to have advanced 3D graphics and many more life like graphic details. The consoles continue to use the good ol' TV set. This leads us to our next topic and that is system upgradeability. The dedicated game console simply can't be upgraded, end of story. When technology advances for the game console, you are required to throw away your old console and games and buy everything new. Sure the next generation of game console does have more features and has better technology. Worse, if you think about it, many of the technology that a console uses are stolen and modified PC parts. That means that the moment your shiny new console becomes available, PC technology has already moved on and beaten it twofold. A desktop personal computer can have any of its components upgraded. These upgrades include increasing system memory, faster processor (CPU), more storage space and many more other parts. What can you upgrade on your game console? I guess you can replace your TV with a bigger TV. What you get is simply a bigger grainier, blockier picture on a bigger screen. This brings us to our next reason why PCs are the King of Gaming.
Games, Games, Games...
That's right, games are the name of the game here. There is much more variety in PC games. Certain types of games are more comfortable to play on a PC period. The consoles seem to do ok with action games and sports games, but trying to play a First Person Shooter, a hardcore RPG or a tactical/strategy game, and the PC will win each time on usability. Did you ever see a general waging war from his lazy chair? No, to concentrate you need a desk and to act quickly you need a mouse. As a result, game consoles seem to try to stay away from those genres. Consoles are for playing mindless action games where all you need are quick reflexes.
You have very limited game save options on a console, where as a PC has unlimited game save space. In addition to this, console games seem to be dumbed down versions of PC games. I'm in no way saying that you have to be dumb to play a console game, what I mean is that with the different options that are on the PC version, sometimes things have to be removed or left out of the console version to make it playable on such a limited system. The cost of games for each system seems to be about the same when they are first released. However it seems like it takes forever for a game console game title to come down in price. PC games on the other hand, get relegated to the bargain bin at a greatly reduced price relatively fast. Sometimes you can buy three or four good games for the same price as what it would cost to buy just one game console title.
What else can be done with the system when not playing games?
As far as the dedicated game consoles go, there isn't anything you can do with them except play games. Some of them do allow you to watch DVDs, but who wants to do that when you have a television entertainment center in the house that undoubtedly has its own DVD player. Desktop personal computers have literally dozens, if not hundreds of other uses. Some of these are writing and saving letters, surfing the Internet, doing your taxes, running a business, playing online games with millions of other people and editing pictures you took with your digital camera. We could go on forever about the various other uses a PC has, but will stop here to allow our special guest writer Mr. Web Head to have his say.
Closing argument
As a closing note, I'd like to say that you can always set the console on the fireplace mantle or some other place in the house and stand back and look at it when you aren't playing a game. They certainly do look pretty with their nice shiny and colorful paint jobs. Very pretty indeed, so there you have it folks, this article has actually uncovered one other, and quite possibly the best use for a game console...