So, my PC has pretty much hit the end of the upgrade road (2GHz Athlon, 1GB RAM, 6800LE). It still works well enough for all my non-gaming tasks, but it’s even starting to chug running WoW, and I wouldn’t dare try any of the new titles on it. I’m looking at doing a full upgrade (MB, power supply, video card, 2GB RAM, probably even a new hard drive). I’m looking at $600-800, most likely - maybe more if I splurge on the video card.
I just realized that for that kind of money, I could hook myself up with 360 + Hard Drive + Wireless Controllers + some games, and I’m really tempted to do that instead. The games I’m most looking forward to in the next year (Bioshock, HL2 Ep 2/Portal) are coming out for the 360 anyway.
It’d be a little scary, as this’d be the first time in like a decade that I wouldn’t have a PC capable of playing the latest games (although I’m not a total console newb - I owned a PS2, Dreamcast, and Xbox). So you folks that have jumped off the PC-upgrade-carousel and become full-time console gamers - any regrets? Conversely, is there a compelling reason to spend the money on the PC upgrade instead?
So you folks that have jumped off the PC-upgrade-carousel and become full-time console gamers - any regrets?
I occasionally look over on NCIX and price out a new system for gaming. I spend quite a bit of time researching parts and getting the best bang/buck rating I can. Earlier this year I came very, very close to pulling the trigger on a new system. I eventually realised I couldn’t actually afford it which is why I never bought it. Then I took a look at the upcoming releases for PC gaming and nothing at all interested me so I scrapped the whole idea anyway.
Get the console. It will get you the greatest number of new games you couldn’t otherwise play.
Then in two or three years when the console starts to get played out, get a PC for super cheap and enjoy the rich harvest of games that were piling up on the bargain shelves while your PC was in obsolete limbo land.
Maximizing the pool of games-you-want-to-play (assuming you DO want to play both console and PC games) requires balanced investment in both kinds of hardware, always tilting towards the hardware that will let you tap the largest pool of previously-inaccessible-to-you games.
I’m just the other way around, can’t get really interested in what consoles have to offer, so I need a computer with some grunt to run simulators, MMOGs, and FPS/RTS games with a sane control scheme.
So even if I have ended up with a video card that costs more than the oh so expensive PS3, I regret more buying a PS2 that has been gathering dust ever since.
It seems to me that the PC’s strength right now is in indie or niche games. These often don’t need so much horsepower; maybe this is your chance to give them a shot for a year?
I’ve got a three-year old laptop which I’m not planning to upgrade soon. I just picked up AGEOD’s American Civil War for it, which should keep me busy for a while.
I thought of getting a 360. But then I visited my frien and heard the small jet taking of under his TV.
And a week later he told me that his Gears of War-disc didn’t work no more. He had been playing it a lot for a week or two, the disc not leaving the console at all during that time.
After that I decided against the 360…
I should clarify that I’m still interested in the 360. But the scratching and the noise have put me off buying it for now.
My bride and I have been Mac users for almost a decade, with two, tame Windows boxes at hand to play games on. This past year, with Vista looming, our machines’ performance degrading, and yet another cycle of buggy PC games causing cursing and frustration, we wiped the Windows drives, gave the boxes away to a local youth group, and picked up an Xbox 360.
Between the pair of Nintendo DS systems we already owned, and the 360, we feel like all our gaming needs are being met: strategy, RPG, action, sports. It’s been six months, and so far, no regrets.
I’m loving it to tell you the truth. I do feel a twinge now and then when I see a screenshot for something like Crysis but I figure it will eventually show up on a console anyway. I’ve had more fun this last year gaming than in the last five on my pc. Dead Rising, Viva Pinata, Crackdown, GoW & Saints Row have been some of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I’ve had in years. I’ll need to build a new pc eventually but I’m just not too worried about it anymore.
I’m getting married next year and I’m a cheap-ass late adopter in general, so I’m doing everything I can to stave off the agonizing desire to splurge on a sparkly new PC or Xbox 360. I currently have an Xbox 1 and a PC I got from work that was constructed four years ago by a German dermatologist. Lately I’ve just been going down the list of older PC and Xbox games on Metacritic and picking up the highly ranked ones cheap on ebay. Catching up with Half-Life 2 and Crimson Skies and Gothic 2 and other quality games I missed the first time around has helped stave off the new-game lust. (But reading qt3 does not help at all.)
So you’re going to spend $600 to $800 on the upgrade or you can spend exactly that amount on a 360. The 360 requires a two-year warranty. That’s $60. For two players, you’ll need another controller. That’s $50. I imagine you’re buying at least the Premium so we’re already at $510 and you haven’t gotten a game yet. Add another $50 a year for Xbox Live if you want to play games online. Provided you play the 360 as long as you would an upgraded PC (3 years?) that’s $150 to the purchase price spread out over three years at $50 each year. We’re now at $660 before games.
If you decide you’d rather have the Elite, then add another $80 to the above prices.
It’s similar money to upgrade that it costs to buy the console. The real question is what games you want to play. If you like playing games with a mouse and keyboard, you won’t want to sit there with the controller in your hands. If you like to tinker with your games at all or play around with any mods, that’s gone too. Well, some mod type stuff you might be able to get, but it’ll cost you money, every single time.
The biggest thing is still the failure rate of the 360. It’s just not any better today than it was last year at this time or six months ago or three months ago. The system doesn’t last. It can do any number of things when it breaks. Tom Chick has been through six of them at least. With the PC, you are at least assured that it will last… probably just as long as the one you currently have.
Finally, consider that a well-equipped PC today can last a lot longer than PCs ever have before. If you get a video card capable of running DX10, you probably won’t need to upgrade at all for another three to five years to play the latest games, IMO. I’m on year three with my Athlon 3500+ w/2GB RAM and GeForce6800GT. I get great performance in nearly every game at my LCD’s native resolution (1280x1024). I still don’t really see the need to upgrade and may go another full year before doing anything to that machine at all.
The bottom line question is what games do you want to play? Bioshock and Half-Life 2 Ep.2 will be very different experiences on the console and they will NOT be moddable on there. I will buy Bioshock for the PC. Also, I’ve seen Crysis in person. You will want to play that game if you’re a first person shooter fan… and you won’t get that game on a console.
Coincidentally I was thinking of posting something along these lines. My 360 has pretty much killed PC gaming for me at this point. My old PC just doesn’t cut it these days, but when I price out what a quality new rig would cost, and then look at the upcoming PC exclusive lineup, I just shrug off the whole thing. There just isn’t a lot on the PC to get me motivated anymore. I’ve lost interest in the RTS genre and really haven’t enjoyed one of those in a long time. The FPS genre is more than adequately serviced on the 360, and though I still like mouse/keyboard better, the 360 controller certainly aint bad either. And the living room certainly trumps the office in other ways too, couch, HDTV, surround sound etc.
I bought an Xbox 360 Premium and a few necessities yesterday (PS2 adapter, dance pad, extra controller, etc), I think I’m already running up $700 and I only have bought DDR Universe. So it really isn’t cheaper in any sense to go either route. I also priced an upgrade to go to 8800GTS SLI to be at $700 as well (new motherboard, psu, and an extra 8800gts).
I suggest getting the Xbox 360 if there’s games you want to play (Gears of War? Saints Row?), but it seems to me like half of the most popular ones (Rainbow Six Vegas, Oblivion) are available on the PC, and those I’d rather play on a nvidia 8800GT* rig than no a Xbox 360 which is guaranteed to underperform or not have the same modding capability.
Call me mad, because that I am, but I am doing both.
The 360 was bought in January, and only failed once. Yay! No extra cost!
It was a Premium, discounted by about 15%. I’ve got…a few games. They’ve
all been half price or so, on average, except Viva Piñata got dangerously close
to full price (Crackdown was cheap new).
I’m planning a big upgrade to enter the world of dual core+GeForce 8xxx gaming,
and have everything except the CPU cooler planned out in detail. We’ll see
about actual money. Another fortune, bigger than the cost of the 360 so far.
So the subscriptions…that minor fee for the 360 totally drowns among my
MMO subscription (there’s always one going, it seems!) and a game rental
service (currently Metaboli - 150+ games on tap, but for Europeans).
Figure out what games you want, before you say “EVERYTHING!” and go
completely bonkers with purchases, like me.
I have been neglecting the old PC lately because of the 360 and other things
to do (DS needs love, too), but there are some big titles I simply must play.
The current system is dying, though, so it’s really time to replace it.
Yeah, I’ve got far too much spare time (short workdays).
Yeah, I’ve got far too much spare time (short workdays).
It seems like I have less and less time to play games though, what with school and jobs in the school year, and now full time jobs in the summer… I’ll be glad when my finals are over and I can sit down and play a few games that I’ve been missing out on.
I’m actually trying to build a killer gaming rig slowly (and I’m even getting a 3 monitor setup when Matrox releases their TripleHead2Go Digital Edition sometime before infinity), because I want to enjoy my gaming as much as possible when I do play it.
Which reminds me, bigdruid, if you are into RTS games as well as FPSes, you pretty much should definitely get the PC upgrade since that’s where its at (C&C3 on the Xbox 360 ? Nooo thanks).
I was an avowed PC gamer for years. I had a PS2, but played it rarely; it was mostly for the kids. Since getting an Xbox 360, the only game I’ve played on the PC is LoTRO. Granted, my PC is a getting a bit long in the tooth (Athlon 64 3800, 1GB RAM, x800 video card), but everytime I look into an upgrade, I think “wow, I could buy 10 Xbox games for that much” and I just can’t do it.
The PC now is used as my media server (sending video/music wireless to my Xbox!), my LoTRO gateway, and my wife’s Facebook Enabler. I just don’t see spending the money on an upgrade anytime soon… unless of course, that big bag o’ money ™ falls out of the sky.
I’m completely burned out on RTS games, which leaves FPS as the only PC genre I really care about. And I’m playing FPS games on the 360 now. I bought FEAR for PC and ended up playing it on the 360 as a rental. I’m pretty sure that any forthcoming release I’m interested in will be on the 360, Quake Wars, UT3, DNF…
Now that I’ve made peace with the joystick, I might as well play on my sofa on my 60" HD set rather than a 19" monitor.
And that’s kind of what’s holding me back. I love me some console shooters (the wife and I had a blast playing through both Halo 1&2 coop) but they are definitely a different beast than the PC shooters I’ve played. I’m not a huge mod fan, but I do play some (like Minerva)
Call me mad, because that I am, but I am doing both.
Believe me, I’ve thought of this, but money’s a little tight now that I’ve got a kid in the house. But I’ve got a birthday coming up… hmmm…
So is there any relief in sight for the 360 reliability problems?
