If You Had To Choose - Consoles or Computers?

[outdated_gamer]

On consoles, you play games, on computers you make games, so the answer is obvious on my part.

With that said, for Arcade-style games (platformers, fighters, arcade racers, hack n slashers, action adventures, ect), consoles tend to be better-suited, whereas the more computer-oriented genres (strategies, simulators, cRPGs, FPS, point and click adventures, etc) are better on computers. I tend to like both worlds so I can't dismiss consoles, even though I do think they're pretty obsolete if you own a high-specced PC since everything would be better on it, so it's really just the exclusives and lower price that they got going for them.

Since I'm not a kid anymore I prefer the more computer-oriented type of games and the, generally speaking, more mature community of PC gaming (even though we have a fair share of foul-mouthed, cheating kids too), although I still dab in the retro console gaming (very little interest into modern console gaming aka "dumbed down PCs" ).

[Shinobi]

Consoles by a mile wouldn't touch PC Gaming with a 10 inch specially disinfected barge pole, all these boring flight sims and grind fest WOW games,

Do you think PC gamers all sit playing WOW games and flight sims then? I don't like flight sims and have never played a WOW game! I do play Racing games, First Person Shooters, 3rd Person Shooters, RTS, platform games, arcade shooters, puzzle games etc. etc.

Making out that PC gamers all play different stuff to console gamers is a bit silly really.

All the PC gamers I know in my real life do, couple of them we never see any more as they don't leave the house and play WOW all day.. On the other hand a friend has just met his girlfriend on WOW and is now moving to Ireland in a few weeks. My friends whom I meat up and game weekly with none of us are PC gamers one friend does have a old PC running XP hooked up to his Astro City if that counts?

Me I'm happy with my PS4 games like Uncharted 4 have graphic's to rival if not better high end PC's and a PS4 with Uncharted costs less then a high end graphic card but is graphically better/on par with a high end PC..

What I meant to say PC gaming tends to lend itself better to those genre's.. I'm not a PC fan but that's just me if your happy with it more power to you..

[Antiriad2097]

Easy choice. Consoles are only a sideline for me, with only the PS1 ever being my core gaming system as ST games were long dead and I didn't have a grand to waste on a PC. Every other console I've had has been used as a supplementary system to my computers, with computer gaming taking the fore. With the dominance of Windows giving one primary dev platform, that's only got better, since there's no more choosing which computer to buy - if it runs Windows, it'll work.

[Matt_B]

All the PC gamers I know in my real life do, couple of them we never see any more as they don't leave the house and play WOW all day.. On the other hand a friend has just met his girlfriend on WOW and is now moving to Ireland in a few weeks. My group of friends having gaming meets every week and none of us are PC gamers one friend does have a old PC running XP hooked up to his Astro City if that counts?

About ten million people play WoW worldwide out of hundreds of millions of PC gamers so it's not really that common. Those who play it do tend to vanish off the face of the Earth though.

Look here for the most played games on Steam:

http://steamcharts.com/top

Most should be familiar to console gamers.

Me I'm happy with my PS4 games like Uncharted 4 have graphic's to rival if not better high end PC's and a PS4 with Uncharted costs less then a high end graphic card but is graphically better/on par with a high end PC..

Uncharted certainly looks better on the PS4. I'll give you that much.

[Darran@Retro Gamer]

Consoles for me, they invariably have all the games I want to play. I've got my arcade machine for my emulation needs.

[Shinobi]

All the PC gamers I know in my real life do, couple of them we never see any more as they don't leave the house and play WOW all day.. On the other hand a friend has just met his girlfriend on WOW and is now moving to Ireland in a few weeks. My group of friends having gaming meets every week and none of us are PC gamers one friend does have a old PC running XP hooked up to his Astro City if that counts?

About ten million people play WoW worldwide out of hundreds of millions of PC gamers so it's not really that common. Those who play it do tend to vanish off the face of the Earth though.

Look here for the most played games on Steam:


Most should be familiar to console gamers.

Me I'm happy with my PS4 games like Uncharted 4 have graphic's to rival if not better high end PC's and a PS4 with Uncharted costs less then a high end graphic card but is graphically better/on par with a high end PC..

Uncharted certainly looks better on the PS4. I'll give you that much. [/

Thanks Matt I must admit my knowledge of PC gaming I could write on the back of a postage stamp:) Further sinks in when half the games on the list I've not heard off except Dark Souls 3 and GTA.. Regarding games like Dark Souls 3 can only higher end PC's play them and how accessible are they to casual gamers or people with little knowledge of PC's in installing/running at the optimum frame rate etc?

[pantal00ns]

Voted Computer just to even things up...

Not really basically because most of my gaming has been on Computers Speccy, ST, PC back in the Day.

I suppose I was fortunate enough to own a decent spec PC as my work paid for half of it. (Worked at home in the evenings)

My favourite Genre Pre 2000 was RPG's or RTS so PC (and 16 bit computers to a point) had these in abundance. Also online Quake or linked Duke nukem started me on the FPS train. Then came counterstrike, (my most played game by far) ironically I have never played half life!.

Yes I have owned consoles and enjoyed them, the latest console I own is a Xbox 360, maybe turned it on less than 10 times. Not that I think its a bad console, far from it, I can appreciate how its brought a lot to modern gaming. Mostly down to hardly playing anything at all these days apart from the odd bit of tablet gaming.

Now I just look at the piles of Retro Hardware and Games and think, I really should sell/get rid of these. Then I remember how much of a pain in the a*** E-Bay is and then Sigh!

Yours Sincerely

Retired/just tired Gamer

[Matt_B]

Thanks Matt I must admit my knowledge of PC gaming I could write on the back of a postage stamp:) Further sinks in when half the games on the list I've not heard off except Dark Souls 3 and GTA.. Regarding games like Dark Souls 3 can only higher end PC's play them and how accessible are they to casual gamers or people with little knowledge of PC's in installing/running at the optimum frame rate etc?

You wouldn't need a particularly high-end PC just to play it. It'll run on pretty much any desktop with a modern 3GHz+ dual core and a DirectX 11 GPU. A fairly modern mid-range graphics card like the GTX750Ti (about £80 if you shop around) is recommended if you want to get a solid 30fps at 1080p like the PS4 version offers. However, it'll still run at lower resolutions with a few frame rate drops on low-end cards, while you'd need something a fair bit more powerful to run it at 4K and 60fps; my GTX970 could do either of those, for instance, but you'd need something like a Titan X to get both. I wouldn't recommend it on a laptop though, unless it was specifically designed for gaming.

Installing it is easy. Just click on the Steam store to buy it, pay your $60, and twiddle your thumbs while it downloads. Click a few buttons for the installer and you're up and running.

[English Invader]

Not an easy call to make and it depends on the era. In the good old days, consoles had dedicated hardware that made a huge difference in the types of games that could be played; throw in the convenience of ROM cartridges as well as a simple plug and play experience and it's not too difficult for a console to win out against a computer that may have many different models and may not even run all the software you want without expensive upgrades.

That situation changed, though. From the 32-bit era onwards, a game you bought on PC would be more or less identical to the PS1 or Saturn version and consoles started to lose their uniqueness. These days, they're not even consoles, they're multimedia devices that happen to play games.

The PC, on the other hand, started to bloom. Games were sold in collector friendly big boxes with glossy manuals and posters while PS1 and Saturn games came in cheap and cheerful plastic cases. The PC also got a number of lesser known exclusives and games that were more suited to a mouse/keyboard environment while getting ports from both consoles as well and, if you throw in the internet boom and a thriving open source community, emulators started to appear that could run all the 8/16-bit games too.

My opinion: consoles had their day but the PC won the marathon.

[theantmeister]

For me, it comes down to what I could do without: Mario or Civilization.

I really couldn't give up either!

Console and Computer games are at their respective best when they aren't trying to ape each other.

[IronMaidenRule]

I would take my PS4 over a PC at the moment, as it is getting tons more gaming time, so easy to jump between Battlefield 4 online with friends and then into AC Syndicate and other offline games. Even though I would have to miss out on Football Manager, but I am mega burned out on that franchise at the moment.

[mrmessy]

This might have been done before...

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Every other bloody week ain't it!? Anyway, I'll go for consoles - mainly due to the marvellousness of a softmodded original Xbox and all the emulator-based gaming goodness it has offered me in the last 11 years...

[PostieDoc]

Surprisingly even vote as I have always thought of this forum as being console-centric.

I've gone for computers as I have progressed from Plus/4, Speccy, Amiga to PC.
I have spent a lot of time with Xbox 360/ Xbox One over the last few years though.

[necronom]

Surprisingly even vote as I have always thought of this forum as being console-centric.

Yep, most threads seem to be about consoles, like what console games have you bought, what's your favourite console, etc., but we did have a thread where there was a lot of love for the Amiga not long ago.

Easily computers for me. VCS, Vic-20, Played on a friend's ZX81 (got my own a few years ago), C64, Played on a friend's Spectrum (got my own several years ago), Amiga 500, Amiga 1200 used until about 2001, then got a PC, then finally got each Playstation. So I currently have 10 computers and 5 consoles.

I was never going to get a console that didn't use joysticks, so I only have the VCS and Playstations, as most others had hideous buttons, which is as bad as using keys.

[merman]

Abstaining.

I've spent so much time on both I don't consider myself in favour of one over the other - they both offer something different for me.