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oh come on mate, just the pc case and the psu is half the price of a PS3...and you know it pretty well that it is in human nature that eventually you'll want more. A better gfx card, more ram or something.
But the difference is a decent case and PSU can last several generations. My PSU has a 5 year warranty, for instance, and an expected lifetime of thirty years (God knows how they tested that...). My monitors also transcend upgrades happily; and they're cheaper (and better for gaming) than TVs. Ironically, thanks to the consoles, the current spread of game-able hardware is vast, meaning very old hardware can still run modern games to some extent. I personally upgrade every four years, but I use my PC for all sorts of things besides gaming.
That was (almost) the price of a ps3 when it was released back in 2006. You've build your gaming PC back in 2006 with just 600 and you can play, lets say Crysis with everything maxed out?.....i really do not think so.
Current hardware still cannot run Crysis "maxed-out" (so, 3x 2560x1600 or more) at 60Hz without resorting to multi-processor solutions. My current build can run it at 720p comfortably (> 60Hz), though, and that was a generation or two behind in 2008. That's more than can be said about the
consoles, which actually use the newer, optimised CryEngine 3. (Note that Crysis Warhead brought performance improvements to the PC and still used CryEngine 2.)
...
-Who wants a console that will consume 600-1000watts to play a game?
Your average current mainstream computer, still capable of whipping the arse off a PS3, would probably consume more energy than a slim (which requires half the power of a fat) in games, excluding speakers and monitor / TV in both cases - at idle they'd be comparable, however. PCs are pushing the boundaries of energy efficiency in terms of "performance per Watt" far more than the consoles are, simply because the upgrades come faster, and far more PCs are sold than consoles for a wider range of tasks, e.g. server farms etc.
- Have in mind that kids also use consoles, they also must be simple in use.
My first computer was a ZX-Spectrum; it used a command-line interface; I was eight. How hard is it to type a few words to run a game, let alone click on something? Simplicity isn't the issue, compatibility is. More and more games are buggy on release because of random incompatibilities. Interestingly, consoles are suffering bugs more now, too, and some of the varied joys of PC games such as updates, DLC, day one patches, bugs / features inconsistent across hardware, installation requirements, limited hard-drive space (hence data-management) etc. Contrast this to a lack of flexibility in both hardware and software as compared with a PC, including mods, multi-tasking etc. and it seems the consoles are inheriting a limited selection of the advantages, as well as some of the disadvantages of PCs, blurring the line somewhat.
IMO The consoles for what they are made for, are close enough to the point that keeps everyone happy, gamers of any age + parents that just want to buy a simple thing for their children to play with + console makers + game developers.
Yeah, consoles are great for what they can do. So are PCs.
On topic: it's clearly never going to happen. I'm apprehensive about this C.A.R.S. thing, too; SMS have only disappointed me recently, and these "kick start" type things are also a bit hit-and-miss. I might stick my oar in none-the-less, just to see what happens.
@
axl54 why should we take some arbitrarily and inconsistently derived supposed metric of "goodness of game" to be anything more than opinion? Metacritic's scoring is not "fact" anymore than IGN's is. Don't even get me started on the typical 7-9 scale used by most outlets, and the outright fallacy of even assigning a number score to a game, something that is all about individual experience! When I visit Metacritic, I focus on the words, not the numbers, and I practically ignore the "professional" reviews...
.....greedy #@%
). They already contain harddrives, play music and movies, etc.
