AeroRant #238 PC Snobs

By Richard Windsor | August 26, 2008

I have been a gamer for a long time, ever since the day my dad surprised me with an NES I have long been in love with the glorious home console. Over the years I have owned almost every single console to see daylight, except for the Saturn, it sucked. During those years of console gaming I have also enjoyed playing many games on the PC, it offered experiences that you just could not get on the consoles of the time, but today things have changed and it seems that there is a small group of die hard PC fans who think that PC’s are still the end all be all of gaming, which is fine if you believe that and keep your mouth shut about it, but we all know that the fanboys have long lost control of their tongues.

This console hate seemed to really hit a boiling point with these snobs once console FPS’s started becoming more and more popular. The FPS was one of the few genres that one really needed a PC to enjoy, but now consoles get almost every major shooting game, and that I think irked some of the PC hardcore enough that they became seriously crazy and dedicated to a cause that just does not make sense. This rationality that a PC FPS is better then a console one is something that I just don’t get. Sure the graphics will usually be better and you get a bit more precision with a keyboard and mouse, but you also spend all of your time hunkered over a screen getting carpel tunnel syndrome while your legs and arms fall asleep. I have played many a round of Counter-Strike until my arm turned black, but at some point I realized that I could have just as much fun playing Halo or Call Of Duty, and I could keep all the feeling in my extremities.

I’m not saying that PC gaming is bad, I plan to spend many hours on Spore soon, but a certain group of people seem to think different is bad for some reason. These people are missing a lot of fun that can be had if you just put down the mouse and pick up a controller. PC gaming has suffered a bit recently and maybe it is because it has tried to think of itself as more of an elite gaming platform, but in the end it’s just video games and the last time I checked they were about fun, and I really don’t have more fun playing on either platform.

I bring this issue to light because I have some PC playing friends who refuse to buy consoles, which is fine if you have a solid reason, but their reason is that console games are no good and don’t offer any kind of real gaming satisfaction. This makes my head explode because almost all the games that they play are also available on consoles and vice versa. All this arguing stems from who had the better input device or who can anti-alias better, to me it’s just a bunch of people with nothing better to do then complain about things they can’t control….oh wait, that’s what I am doing…..I’ll shut up now, just play what you want on what you want and shut the hell up!