Q: Why do video games have to be on consoles? Sure back then they couldn't put it on a computer, but now that they can, why not? I always thought gaming on the computer was cheaper and more convenient. Just an all-in-one pack. Graphic cards might cost money, but in the end it's a better price. There are also more keys to put all your controls on. Also, no cables or cords or anything like that. The only console that I actually think has games that aren't compatible with a computer is the Wii. The only reason for that, is I think computer monitors are too small to play something like Mario Kart on, but I'm sure they could make a big monitor for those games. People already made a steering wheel for the computer. Any thoughts?
A: Go make about 3 or 4 thousand dollars and you too can join the club of people who think video games are better on PC's are are willing to spend any sum to prove it. Right now there is a collection of about 5 first person shooters that are exclusive to PC, and that use Direct X 10 to actually do things that neither Direct X 9 nor the RSX can do. In fact I can only think of two of them right now, Crysis and Counter Strike, and one of the top 5 is being ported to ps3 soon. PC's around the year 2000 benefitted from the fact that the console generation was aging badly, and that all console games were still in standard 480i or 480p at best, and that console games had taken a while to get off the ground with online play. That was then, this is now. Now the only hardware advantage pc's have is the high-8000-series Nvidia video cards, and some of the 9000 series. The PS3 runs on the Cell Broadband Engine which for running 3D games is better than any quad-core pc you'll find. The Cell also has the ability to act as a graphics co-processor. The PS3's Nvidia RSX chip was unequalled in PC's before the GeForce 8000's were released, and runs at about the level of a GeForce 8500. With the Cell's ability to co-process graphics, nobody can really be sure just how good the ps3's graphics can get. PS3 has one more serious advantage in running 3d games: memory bandwidth. The ps3 has only 256mb of system RAM, but it is XDDRAM which runs at a blistering 3.2 gHz to match the Cell's clock rate. This is not the kind of thing you see in pc's because even gaming pc's are made for multi-tasking, installing Windows Vista, etc. etc. first, and games second. You don't need a lot of RAM to run a 3d game engine, it's irrelevant. The engine takes one frame, displays it, crunches the data to get the next frame, then forgets the first frame, displays the second frame, and so on. No need for memory, it's speed that matters. The xbox360, though much cheaper and lower-tech than the ps3, is still a triple-core machine with a respectable ATI graphics chip. It can only handle Direct X 9, yet the vast majority of pc games including shooters are still ported to the xbox. As earlier my point about not very many games actually doing anything with DX10. There is two kinds of games that I think pc's are better for, and they're in fact the two genres that pc still dominates: Role-playing games and real-time strategy. These are the kind of games that do need multi-tasking, and often they do need system RAM, and are often easier to play with a keyboard than without. I think shooters are going to be dead in the water on pc for the next 2 or 3 years, simply because the ps3 is so good it will be able to keep up with Direct X 10 PC games for a good long while. Especially because of blu-ray making possible 50gb games on one disc. The vast majority of shooters are now sold for consoles. Some pc shooter fans insist that keyboard and mouse is a superior control system, but really it's just what they're used to since fps started on pc's. Key-and-mouse is a shrinking minority. When Unreal Tournament 3 was released, they offered a key-and-mouse controller for ps3, which nobody bought. The market has moved to 2 thumbsticks. btw consoles didn't always dominate pc's early on. In the early years of Pong, and the Atari 2600, there just weren't enough PC's existing to make pc games commercially viable. But the Commodore 64, the "IBM compatible" and the other "home computers" changed all that. Between Atari 2600 and NES just about every console was a failure because of Commodore 64 and IBM. Travis that ain't so about games being on computers first. I was there, I know... the first games were in the '70's, when nobody owned a computer. Computers were still big giant mainframes run by scientists in labs, and they weren't interested in games.