A Rudimentary Poll: PC or Consoles and your gaming background

[Roswell47]

The only console I've owned is a Playstation. When I was about 6-7 years old I was introduced to video games (I played SkiFree when I was like 3 but that really doesn't count ) by a friend who owned a N64. Played a lot of Majora's Mask, Mario 64, Pokémon Stadium and especially Goldeneye.

That trend of playing console games at friends has continued since then. SNES, PS2, Gamecube, Gameboy, Wii and 360, all only played at friends places. I got my own Playstation on my 8th birthday. The only mentionable game I owned for the Playstation was Worms World Party (and perhaps Street Sk8er? That seems like a cult classic) I got a computer of my own from my fathers job. My first case of piracy happened shortly after. Burning NHL 99, Worms and HoMM 3 off friend's CDs. HoMM was really where my PC gamer life started.

It's all gone downhill from there. When I was 11 years old I bought Half-Life Platinum Collection which included Counter Strike. That game introduced me to competitive gaming that have continued with Enemy Territory, CoD series, Day of Defeat, Quake series, WC3, DoTA, TF2 and most recently SC2.

[Xeneth]

Have the type of games you play changed?

MY GOD YES... and not for the better... But this story has a happy ending, thankfully.

So, I was enamored with scrolling shooters like R-Type and 1943 as a kid in the arcade, but was too scared to play them for abstract childish financial reasons as you'll recall...

Well, 1942 and other shmups I played on the NES wouldn't begin to approach the speed or amazing visuals of the arcade for a few years, so in the meantime I became a platformer aficionado! I devoured platformers, HARD ones when I was a child. After creaming Mega Man 1 and 2 in rentals, I lined up the third game as a sweet christmas gift and recall being disappointed at how easy it was... Hah! Mega man 9 and 10 are eating me alive in the present day! What happened?!

I'll tell you what happened, or rather Chris Remo did. The industry has sort of found it's bread and butter. Much as I loved Mario 64, it and other games like Grand Theft Auto 3 and Gears of War have sort of plotted a course that as consumers we've more or less followed.

"I used to play Mechwarrior and Unreal Tournament against others online, now I'm scared to go back to TF2?"

"I reveled in the first three Final Fantasies, (That made it to the states) when was the last time I enjoyed a JRPG?"

...And so on... these were the questions I was asking myself around the end of 2009 as I played yet another single player scripted FPS, cover based shooter, or open world missionfest. I started to realize that I missed a lot of the variety I used to experience in game types. The excuses were piling up-

"My reflexes aren't as fast as they used to be, I can't handle hard platformers any more"

"I'm not good enough at competitive games to have a chance of beating other gamers online"

Well, as a new years resolution I shut the hell up and am enjoying one of my most fulfilling years as a gamer to date. Spelunky showed me that I still have mad platforming chops, League of Legends showed me that I can still kick ass sometimes if I practice and keep a cool head, and Dragon Quest IX is currently showing me that I didn't abandon JRPGs, THEY ABANDONED ME. (Seriously, if you're put off by the pretentious self important presentation, the cutscenes being the point of the game, and the insertion of a billion minigames and dating sims and time sink design flotsam in modern JRPGs... try DQ. Apparently the series has been in 1989 stasis waiting for us this whole time.) I've returned to adventure games, discovering that there's life after Riven, and all sorts of other gaming experiments that I'm probably forgetting at the moment because I've been so much more active.

I'm glad this thread is encouraging us to look back and trace the patterns of play we've followed. I plan to keep branching out and trying both new genres and old ones I haven't touched in years. My only worry at this point is that resolution 2011 will be something to do with finishing my OWN projects... Oh crap...

[mkenyon]

"My reflexes aren't as fast as they used to be, I can't handle hard platformers any more"

"I'm not good enough at competitive games to have a chance of beating other gamers online"

I'm really sensitive to this thinking as well. Having had a good run at TF, Tribes, Quake III, Warsow, etc.. it seems that there hasn't been a really good competitive shooter since CS:Source/CoD. Everything is so neutered (BF, TF2) or completely wacky (MW kill streak rewards). There isn't a lot out there to practice real FPS art while being fresh. Your choices are being raped in Quake Live or CS:Source. Not having something like that to constantly play seems like it has flipped some switch in my brain.

[Irishjohn]

I played Atari 2600 with my uncles though I barely remember it. Most of the first twelve years of my life were spent bouncing around between Amstrad, Commodore and PC games until I got an NES.

I played mostly PC games for my teens but got to a point where I wasn't able to play anything even remotely up to date, so I gradually got back into consoles.

These days I'm playing more PC stuff again though I'm committed to laptops for various (mostly work) reasons. So kind of all over the place.

I like ADVENTURE GAMES and FPS games (because they sometimes have great stories) and all other types of things.

Survey complete!

[Gabbo]

Looking back, it started with a Commadore64 that my mom and dad used for work when I must have been 4. I only recall a Top Gun game for the C64, that my dad and I would boot up what seems like daily to dogfight with each other. Man was that sky pink!

Next, a 386 and 486 my parents used for work, that I being 5-6 years old could play around on when they weren't working on it. My cousin... ahem, copied a few of his games for me and wrote instructions on how to install them. I played the shit out of Wolfenstein 3D, Top Gear, Commander Keen and a couple others for the lifespan of the 3 and 486. I honestly don't think I played any other PC games for years despite always gawking at the display boxes for them when I'd go to the mall. I recall XCOM TFTD's underwater arm and UFO Defense's ship vividly sitting on shelves but having only passing interest in ever actually playing the games themselves.

I never owned a console at the time, but had friends and relatives who did, mainly NES. Mario 1-3, Rolling Thunder, Blades of Steel were the usual culprits (No accounting for tastes at that age I guess). I ended up getting a SNES the Christmas it launched. Parents told me it was Genesis or SNES. No regrets at all over that choice (Canadian Tire always had a Genesis hooked up, so I played a lot of NHL and Sonic 2 there when I'd be in town anyway). The time I put into Super Mario World, Ken Griffey and NHL 96 justified it. I didn't own a lot of games at the time. Rentals and 1 game for birthday/xmas would do it. Mostly sports and platformers/various licensed games on the SNES. probably didn't finish a lot of titles back then either, but I didn't care. it was fun just to play in the 16 bit worlds when I wasn't running around outside.

After that, it was an AMD K6 and a lot of Quake and Doom (Wooo Voodoo Banshee!) my brothers and I would play for a few years with a lot of Star Wars licensed games thrown in for good measure (I was so into that it was ridiculous) That is until a friend showed me HalfLife in a copy of PCGamer. The double whammy of receiving Unreal and Halflife 5 months apart solidified me as a PC gamer for good at that point, even if most of my mutliplayer gaming was done on my brothers' N64 (I played Goldeneye like every other 7th and 8th grader I knew at the time). Half-life deathmatch and Age of Empires introduced me to blistering speeds of online gaming over 56k dialup in grade 8 (The Zone is still unsurpassed for lobby design IMO). 1998 was a good year for me and online multiplayer.

I personally haven't owned a console since that SNES, but my brothers owned each successive Nintendo hardware until this generation so I got console gaming in with them on the N64 and Cube. It's been PC gaming on rigs I've built myself basically from High school on (of which 2 were still 'family computers', as I didn't pay for the parts). I plan on getting a Wii at some point, if I can justify it to myself.

I think that growing up in a rural area with terrible internet and two brothers who would I could multiplayer with locally on consoles is the reason I don't generally care for a lot of online multiplayer games even now and would rather dive into a single player game with an interesting world and cast of characters.

Edited July 30, 2010 by Gabbo

[lobotomy42]

Now, just like everyone else (it seems), I seem to have funneled down to mainly playing first- and third-person action games of various types, because that's what the industry and the audience have decided is the rough category of games that is worth pursuing. They can include action and action/adventure and RPG or whatever, but the point is, you're controlling primarily one person from a fairly up-close perspective and working through a pretty clear narrative, with mechanics that largely consist of killing dudes.

It seems that that is the kind of game that is both easily marketed and described, and easily developed for a broad number of platforms, which means it gets all the support.

Thanks to that evolution, in my mind I can't help but see those games as the "default" form of video game, and then all the rest of the genres as the "other" types, even though I didn't used to make that distinction at all.

I can't speak to your personal experience, but I disagree pretty starkly with your description of the state of the industry and the "funneling" effect. A couple of points:

1) Development and distribution barriers - especially at the hobbyiest level - have dropped dramatically, meaning that the number of games available to players in any given year, for any given genre is probably higher now than it was ten years ago. An example: Adventure game fans love to complain about the "death" of the genre, but as far as I can tell, the number of adventure game releases per year has been increasing over time, not decreasing. The *change* has been that the industry has also been producing these high-budget third-person action adventure Hollywood style games, and these get the most marketing. But I don't honestly perceive a significant decrease in production of "other" genres. Adventure games are just one example, but you could pick any number of other "niche" genres and find the same thing.

2) I don't think the industry is "funneling" people towards the generic genre you describe. Top selling video games in 2009 (according CNBC) included:

10) Street Fighter IV

9) Halo Wars

4) Mario Kart Wii

3) Pokemon

2) Wii Play

1) Wii Fit

So, six of the top ten and four of the top five are NOT that. And these games are all drawn from the "major" platforms. There's no telling what this list would look like if Facebook, iPhone and internet games (Farmville, et al) were included.

3) Anecdotally, while many of the RPGs I've played this year could loosely be described as "third-person action adventure where you kill dudes," I've also been playing lots of adventure games (which wasn't a possibility ten years ago) and miscellaneous rhythm, platforming, strategy and other sundry genres. I'm pretty sure my answer to the question of playing habits would be "I play a heck of a lot more genres now than I used to." Maybe I'm not representative of the typical gamer, but I do have lots of friends that don't read gaming blogs who have played things like Braid, Sam and Max, Boom Blox, etc. I don't think these types of games would have reached them as easily few years ago.

However, I hear what you're saying. The funneling that I can see happening is in the press, and on gamer-oriented websites. For whatever reason, this "community" has grown more closed-off over time, covering fewer and fewer genres outside of its chosen few (which, as you say, tend to be variants of the 3rd-person action-adventure bad-ass narrative mold.) Even as the gaming industry and number of gamers has exploded around them, this coverage has grown narrower and narrower and is increasingly unrepresentative of both the variety of games available and the playing habits of casual actual gamers.

[Chris]

2) I don't think the industry is "funneling" people towards the generic genre you describe. Top selling video games in 2009 (according CNBC) included:

10) Street Fighter IV

9) Halo Wars

4) Mario Kart Wii

3) Pokemon

2) Wii Play

1) Wii Fit

You're right in some respects, but that isn't what I mean. Stuff like Wii Fit and Wii Play isn't really representative of anything. Fine, there's a successful fitness game--there are also successful fitness DVDs, but that has pretty much zero bearing on what's going on creatively in the world of film or television. And Halo Wars being on there isn't reflective of anything other than a game releasing with "Halo" in the title.

Looking at outliers--in this case, the very few top most profitable titles--is not generally useful, in my opinion. Mario Kart Wii is super successful, but does that point to a vibrant market for kart racers? The Sims is super successful, but are there many (or any) other critically and commercially successful life simulators in that vein?

I'm talking about broad relevance here. I really can't see anybody arguing that adventure games are particularly relevant these days, and I don't mean to offend Jake and co. at Telltale, but adventure games simply aren't a vibrant, meaningful part of the game industry right now. Maybe there are some people, including you, who play more of them now than ever, but I'd be extraordinarily surprised if that were borne out on a larger scale.

Same goes for strategy games, management games, certain types of RPGs, pretty much any kind of simulation, and so on. Certainly, digital distribution has done wonders for those genres among people who are willing to be receptive to them and to actively search them out, but there is no large apparatus set up to extend the reach of those games beyond that group of people (again, unless you're an extreme outlier like Blizzard with StarCraft II).

That didn't use to be the case, at least on PC; I can't speak for consoles historically.

[syntheticgerbil]

Here's the Roberta Williams troll response:

Back when I got started, which sounds like ancient history, back then the demographics of people who were into computer games, was totally different, in my opinion, then they are today. Back then, computers were more expensive, which made them more exclusive to people who were maybe at a certain income level, or education level. So the people that played computer games 15 years ago were that type of person. They probably didn't watch television as much, and the instant gratification era hadn't quite grown the way it has lately. I think in the last 5 or 6 years, the demographics have really changed, now this is my opinion, because computers are less expensive so more people can afford them. More "average" people now feel they should own one. There's also the influence of the game consoles as well. So most of these people have gotten used to shoot-em' up kind of games on the consoles. Now they want to get that kind of experience on their computers.

Damn average poor idiots.

Anyway, my feeling is not that having a higher income meant you were above average intelligence so therefore you probably owned a computer and played adventures games growing up (adventures are for geniuses!), but that because computers and technology that went with became cheaper to produce and higher in demand, more people could afford to own a PC, not just our ruling adventure game elite.

I believe long before people even high income people owned PCs, it was more common for the regular person to want to play a disposable Atari or arcade game and not have to invest 20 hours or more of your time in trial and error sequences as adventures, RTS, and RPGs would require. I want to think we all feel like that sometime. Like I'd rather just fuck around in Minesweeper for 20 minutes than get back to my quest for another 5 hours tonight.

So the games with more "instant gratification" were cheaper to produce as they usually involved some sort of repetition that could be used over and over for a longer game, thus lending itself to small satisfying doses, like shooters, action games, and puzzle games of various sorts. These usually ended up maybe a few bucks cheaper on the market as well.

Many people don't have the time to invest in some major learning curve or some game with ridiculous quests, but they still enjoy a game every now and then, so they buy the stuff that caters to them. It's not that these instant gratification suddenly appeared, but that as the market audience expanded to those who were not normally game hobbyists, demand increased and publishers and developers of course would rather sell more games with lower production costs than spend time on a variety of titles that still make a profit but maybe a more modest amount.

That's at least my take on it.

[Chris]

That Roberta Williams quote is insulting and absurd to the extreme. Jesus.

I think what's more likely is that, in general, the PC gaming audience simply used to be older. I can't count myself as part of that, because I was young at the time, but I was definitely thrown into a world of gaming that, although I didn't realize it at the time, was absolutely marketed to people older than I was.

On the action game side, particularly post-Doom, a lot of PC games were marketed at teens/twentysomethings with garishly bloody and violent advertising, and lots of other genres like simulation and strategy were marketed towards audiences older than that--if you read PC game magazines from back in the 90s, which is where I got all my gaming info at the time, you get the sense that a lot of the guys writing were 30- and 40-something bearded dudes with families who were writing for that same kind of person.

Both of those groups are older than the groups Nintendo and Sega were marketing to at the time. This isn't "lol consoles are for babies" argument, it's just a straightforward demographic observation that I think is empirically borne out.

What's happened now, I think, is that the average console gamer demographic age has risen (largely as that generation has grown up) and the average PC gamer demographic age has fallen (surely to some extent because the older-targeted genres have been marginalized) to the point that they are basically both the exact same twenty-something male consumer. I'm talking here about fairly "hardcore" games, I'm not talking about Facebook or Wii Fit or whatever because I think we all know that, regardless of age, that isn't the kind of game we're discussing.

For all the talk about how games are reaching a more diverse audience, I don't know if that's really the case. In terms of the entire category of things that can feasibly be called "video games," I'm sure it's the case, but in terms of relatively in-depth, gamey-game experiences, I wonder. I want to stress that I don't actually know, I'm just idly wondering. But it does seem to me that the "core" game market has really been distilled down to a particular kind of person and a particular tone of game.

[lobotomy42]

I'm talking about broad relevance here. I really can't see anybody arguing that adventure games are particularly relevant these days, and I don't mean to offend Jake and co. at Telltale, but adventure games simply aren't a vibrant, meaningful part of the game industry right now.

Not to *totally* derail this thread...

I guess my point is that this is only true if you define "Video game industry" to mean a very-specific-and-narrowly-defined slice of the actual industry. (A self-defined segment by the people that work within it and the press that covers it.) It doesn't seem to be true of games being developed by *any* outlets beyond the handful of hundred-million-dollar studios at the very top.

If you're talking about what is affecting people creatively, it seems that the newest and freshest games are coming from the indie scene, which is fairly vibrant right now, having found outlets on XBLA, Steam, handheld devices, iPhone, facebook etc.

If you're talking about sales/popularity, then I would point to FarmVille, Wii Sports, Rock Band, etc.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if you're cherry-picking which games count as "real" games (i.e., the ones covered heavily by enthusiast press,) then of course you can make the argument that they're all trending towards a certain style, but that doesn't strike me as "broad relevance."

[Chris]

Not to *totally* derail this thread...

I guess my point is that this is only true if you define "Video game industry" to mean a very-specific-and-narrowly-defined slice of the actual industry. (A self-defined segment by the people that work within it and the press that covers it.) It doesn't seem to be true of games being developed by *any* outlets beyond the handful of hundred-million-dollar studios at the very top.

If you're talking about what is affecting people creatively, it seems that the newest and freshest games are coming from the indie scene, which is fairly vibrant right now, having found outlets on XBLA, Steam, handheld devices, iPhone, facebook etc.

If you're talking about sales/popularity, then I would point to FarmVille, Wii Sports, Rock Band, etc.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if you're cherry-picking which games count as "real" games (i.e., the ones covered heavily by enthusiast press,) then of course you can make the argument that they're all trending towards a certain style, but that doesn't strike me as "broad relevance."

What "fresh" games are coming from Facebook, out of curiosity?

And I'm not cherry picking games, I'm talking about a broad group of games that provide relatively in-depth experiences that gamers can really get into. That can include indie games, portable games, console games, PC games, online games, whatever, but it doesn't include Wii Fit because that game exists for an entirely different purpose.

Let's say someone wanted to have a discussion about the trends in fictional film or television today, and after the conversation has progressed a little bit it becomes quite clear that the kind of thing they're interested in discussing falls within the broad scope of dramas, comedies, and so on--generally speaking, things you can call "fiction." Would you start heckling them for not talking about exercise shows and The View and news programs and reality shows and Judge Judy and infomercials and so on? No, because that's clearly an entirely separate creative and/or functional category to what they're actually interested in.

If someone wanted to talk about what's going on in literature today, would you insist they also include in the discussion cookbooks and picture books for children and exercise guides and whatever else?

Those things might all be "entertainment" within the context of the broadest view of their medium, and they all have their value and place, but they aren't all the same thing.

Just because something can be committed to video doesn't mean it's part of the same type of entertainment as everything else that can be committed to video. And just because something can be broadly construed as a "video game" in some respect doesn't mean it can be usefully compared.

We don't really have a good term for what I'm talking about in games, but don't we basically have a functional intuitive understanding of what I mean?

[lobotomy42]

We don't really have a good term for what I'm talking about in games, but don't we basically have a functional intuitive understanding of what I mean?

Okay, fine, strike Wii Fit - it's still hard for me to see how Street Fighter IV, Halo Wars and Mario Kart are not in the category you're speaking of.

I'm not heckling, I just genuinely disagree. Your thesis seemed to be that the industry was funneling all games into this model of 3rd-person-action-adventure, and I don't see it. I agree that there are a lot of 3rd-person-action-adventure games now, but I'm not convinced that it has had a significant impact on other genres. Some genres (puzzle, adventure, strategy) have moved a bit more into indie/niche audiences, but they seem to be thriving there rather than hurting. And others, like rhythm, have actually moved from niche to mainstream. The only major genre decline I can think of is 3D platformers, but even those seem to have stuck around with Mario Galaxy and Prince of Persia.

Do we know of potential games/genres that were eliminated in favor of more action-adventure-shooters? (E.g., Did Dragon Age once have a turn-based combat system?) Is there any genre of game which has had fewer or, in your opinion, qualitatively worse releases recently than in the past?

[Xeneth]

I was feeling some "narrowing" in my play habits last year, so I agreed with Chris that industry attention seems to be trending toward a certain melding of action with RPG elements where the main conflicts are direct and violent, but I think this thread really is more "perspective based" than either of you are making it out to be.

The question was "Have the type of games you play changed", so some of the reasoning behind WHY you feel they've changed is bound to come up. Whether or not the industry at large is trending this or that way isn't really the subject. The subject is how have industry trends affected our play habits from each of our unique positions.

I made a deliberate attempt to shift my perspective on these matters of genre, with the most recent change being my not getting/playing Starcraft 2 (VERY weird for someone whose first RTS was SC). My viewing angle of which genres are "important" right now and which aren't has changed recently enough that I can see both of your perspectives... they're just different. Chris gets exposed to a lot of game related stuff through work that isn't voluntary, it's his job, so it makes sense that he'd have a certain (perhaps slightly jaded) angle on what developers are focusing on right now. I sort of feel like adventure games are having a mini-renaissance right now too, but that probably has more to do with me personally paying more attention to Telltale's products these days. If Gamasutra sent Remo to interview every developer at Telltale and that were his only task for a month, he might come away feeling like adventure games are a bigger deal this year than if he'd been making the rounds at Epic.

[Chris]

Okay, fine, strike Wii Fit - it's still hard for me to see how Street Fighter IV, Halo Wars and Mario Kart are not in the category you're speaking of.

I'm not heckling, I just genuinely disagree. Your thesis seemed to be that the industry was funneling all games into this model of 3rd-person-action-adventure, and I don't see it. I agree that there are a lot of 3rd-person-action-adventure games now, but I'm not convinced that it has had a significant impact on other genres. Some genres (puzzle, adventure, strategy) have moved a bit more into indie/niche audiences, but they seem to be thriving there rather than hurting. And others, like rhythm, have actually moved from niche to mainstream. The only major genre decline I can think of is 3D platformers, but even those seem to have stuck around with Mario Galaxy and Prince of Persia.

Do we know of potential games/genres that were eliminated in favor of more action-adventure-shooters? (E.g., Did Dragon Age once have a turn-based combat system?) Is there any genre of game which has had fewer or, in your opinion, qualitatively worse releases recently than in the past?

If you think the adventure genre and the kart racer (??) genre are somehow "thriving," I just absolutely cannot agree. The adventure genre seems extremely stagnant to me, even within the context of a more niche audience, and I don't see how one game (Mario Kart) means anything for an entire genre. Personally I don't even really care if the kart racer genre does well, I'm just saying that bringing up one specific game to me doesn't demonstrate a trend at all.

[elmuerte]

Speaking of adventure games. It looks like the adventure\action genre more or less died. Or a least, I haven't seen any for years. It's pretty much all action with a tiny bit of adventure, or RPGs.

[toblix]

Speaking of adventure games. It looks like the adventure\action genre more or less died. Or a least, I haven't seen any for years. It's pretty much all action with a tiny bit of adventure, or RPGs.

Well, there's TellTale, who have been spouting high-grade adventure for last years.

[elmuerte]

Well, there's TellTale, who have been spouting high-grade adventure for last years.

Yes, but they are plain ol' adventure games. Not adventure/action games like, Dark Earth, Little Big Adventure, Bioforge, King's Quest: Mask of Eternity, Omikron, Outcast

[toblix]

Sorry, misread your post. Yeah, you may be right.

[mkenyon]

I don't think anyone will disagree that in most instances developing games has tried to reach a broader and broader audience. Back in the days of PC, NES, and Genesis, you had pretty much 3 sets of distinct games. Rarely would you see cross-platform development. Even in what I consider the heyday of PC gaming (1997-2000ish), most platforms had a ton of exclusives. On top of that, you had development costs that were pretty low compared to what they are today. It was okay to sell a game and have low gross revenue, as long as there was a profit of some sort.

Publishers today have seemingly more or less abandoned this sort of thought. What you get is AAA release after AAA release where they put all their chips on a few select titles. In order to achieve maximum gross revenue, you've got to appeal to a very broad audience across as many platforms as possible.

I'll put this into more tangible examples. In Q4 1998, you have Tribes released. This is an online-only FPS with an extremely high learning curve due to the nature of jetpack combat and the fast pace. This was a very risky venture at a time when dial-up reigned supreme. The only sales figure I could find said that Tribes 1 + 2 sold around 1 million copies, though I'd imagine 2 was the bulk of that. It makes a profit, and a pretty small community continued to support it. Gross revenue wasn't extremely high for either title, but there was buzz, excitement, and great publisher support for this.

Today, you have games like MW2 and BFBC2 where millions were thrown into development, and both EA and ActBlizz were trying to gross (hopefully) hundreds of millions in sales. I think both of these games represent what Tribes did back in '98/'99, which is a competitive online shooter. However, there's nothing dangerous about MW2 or BFBC2, nor inventive. They're clearly designed to reach out to every last person they can both by being released across every platform (sans Wii, but Wii is an outlier for everything) and by being as accessible and gratifying as possible. To their credit, it says a lot about a game that sells me, my 15 year old cousin, dudebros in frats, and my 50 year old uncle a copy. Something like that didn't exist back then.

Developing and publishing that AAA game ends up with a very broad yet specific type of design. It's the proverbial DudeBro:MSIFUSIGTS/SY2 (a moment of genius on GAF). That's where the money is, that's where the publishers will get the talent, and where the hype will develop from the gaming enthusiast press. The flock (being me and you) will follow, as that's where the community goes.

[twmac]

I'll stick to playing Frontlines: Fuel of War thank you very much.

[Kolzig]

My start came briefly with my brother's Commodore Vic 20 when I was about five years old, but soon started to really flourish when my brother got a Commodore 128. After that came Commodore Amiga which I loved very much, actually I kept the Amiga much more closer to my heart than C64/128. Amiga was personal for me as that I kind of inherited from my brother who quit gaming completely during the Amiga years even though he had programmed stuff himself in his youth, he also has never returned to gaming as he just isn't interested anymore. I remember showing him once briefly Hidden&Dangerous around about 10 years ago? He said, "can games do all that these days?" He couldn't basically believe his eyes.

After the Amiga started dying everywhere except in the demo scene, I sold it and I bought an old overpriced 486DX 33Mhz computer with 8MB ram from my dad's friend with my own money that I got from the Amiga sale, it was pretty sweet as I got a ton of money from the Amiga from some Eastern Finland guy that came all the way hundreds of kilometers to buy the beloved Amiga away from me. That was the deal, my dad and mom said I have to sell the old one to buy other one and I did it all with my money.

That brought me to PC gaming that I had otherwise only seen at one friend's place every week while playing Jones in the Fast Lane, Gold of the Americas, Theme Park, Syndicate, Little Big Adventure and various EA NHL titles from the first NHL Hockey all the way to NHL96. Also many other titles were gone through during this period.

The second PC I got as present from my dad for unknown reasons, it was overpriced and already not supernew model, but it cost like a new one because it was a Compaq. That computer was the one where I could buy a few years later a Voodoo first generation 3D card some years that brought a whole new way to play games back then.

It was pretty much PC after this as I have now my basically 5th PC.

PC introduced me to the best age of LucasArts, Sierra and Revolution adventure games. Also Indycar Racing 2 from Papyrus gets a special mention here. Worked perfectly on my first PC.

1) 486DX 33mhz

2) Pentium 200Mhz from Compaq

3) AMD Athlon something that I don't even remember anymore

4) AMD Athlon64 +3500

5) The current dual core rig.

Somewhere around the time I got my first PC I also got as a present Sega Megadrive II which I had wanted for a few years already, but as my family isn't superrich I had to be patient to get what I wanted. Megadrive was a much loved gaming machine even though I didn't have many games, the console games cost around 100€ per game at that time if you were to translate marks to euros straight even though the value is not the same now as it was then. I think all my games were used games, because we used to have a shop in town that exchanged games. That died when Playstation, Saturn and N64 came. Somehow the market just wasn't the same as it was during SNES/Megadrive period.

I played Sonic 2 so much and I was so happy about my parents for getting me that console. I was pretty much 100% Sega supporter back then. I didn't like Nintendo at all. I didn't get Saturn or Dreamcast however until I got my own money and hunted both machines from auctions for cheap price alongside with the horrible 32X. I wanted to have big Sega collection. After Sega's disappearance from the hardware market, I turned my attention slowly towards Nintendo, the company that I never liked when I was a kid.

Then became the Nintendo age with the first portable console for me: GBA, DS and my current DS lite. Finally 1,5 years ago the first non-Sega home console Wii came to my possession.

These days my gaming is most likely 70/30 for Wii against the PC with the occasional DS gaming thrown in somewhere. Next year I would expect 3DS to conquer shares from one of the other platforms. The reason why my PC gaming is so low is because my wife is pretty much hogging the PC for herself for studies and stuff these days so I'm focusing more on Wii.

I love PC gaming, there's no question about that. If I will someday come to my senses, I will quit my boring accountant job and take job at some company where I can tweak and build computers, like a repair shop or something. That's where I would be happy.

Interesting remark is that I still have that Vic 20 in my closet, it has travelled with me for around 24 years and hopefully it is still working. I haven't used it in ages.

Edited August 13, 2010 by Kolzig

[Kolzig]

I've got to add that I found yesterday an old invoice receipt for the computer I bought after army in 2002.

I was shocked to discover that it cost over 1800 euros. What the hell was I thinking? Well computers cost a lot at that time, but still...

[elmuerte]

I've got to add that I found yesterday an old invoice receipt for the computer I bought after army in 2002.

I was shocked to discover that it cost over 1800 euros. What the hell was I thinking? Well computers cost a lot at that time, but still...

The machine I bought in Q3 1999 was about 2500 euros.

The machine I bought in Q2 2004 was about 1500

And the machine I bought in Q1 2008 was 1700 (it was a Dell; with extended next-day service).

All were full machines including monitors, and all on the low end of high-end systems. So, I wasted about 1.25 euros a day on workstations. (I'm excluding laptops and server obviously). I estimate that I wasted almost twice that on games.

[Kolzig]

These days I just upgrade parts on my current machine. I don't think I'll buy a complete set of parts to assemble anymore. So maybe I do still invest a lot of money on the computer, but at least it doesn't feel that much when it's just 100-200 euros per piece. Also the prices in general are way lower now than they were eight years ago.

For example I paid for 2x256 DDR memory almost 300 euros back then.

I do remember that my first new PC cost 2000 euros back in the day, that was the one I got as a gift and didn't invest myself anything in it, except for a 3dFX card.

[GreatPenguala]

I grew up with a NES, and then when i was 5 or 6 my mom aquired a computer from the local school district for cheap. I played some adventure type games(cant remember any names sadly.) Around 2000 i got a Super Nintendo and have since generally stuck to consoles. Two years ago i decided to build my own PC and i have been messing around with PC games since. I prefer MMO's if only for the ability to talk to other people while playing the games. I mainly play my xbox 360 but will go back to my PC for a few months. Usually when i a new FPS for 360 comes out ill go back to that for a few months till i get bored.

To sum it all up, i basically will get a new release title for Xbox, and i generally play MMO's on my PC.