Simon_Knight
Shared on Mon, 06/18/2007 - 07:14I had been a pc gamer for about 13 years. I just loved the pc platform. The main reason was that since games weren't limited to a few buttons they were so much more complex. Games like Wing Commander had been tried on consoles but were mere shadows because the controls didn't allow for the right gameplay. Plus the graphics on the PCs were a giant leap above anything you could get on a console. The fact that consoles were limited to the grainy TV resolution was a major hinderance for them. That pretty much changed for me last November.
A month prior I had gotten a copy of Dead Rising for my brother's 360. I didn't like the idea of buying a game for his console, much less actually playing it on a TV but I LOVE ZOMBIE MOVIES! I have all of Romero's movies The Night and Dawn remakes, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later. So Dead Rising was a game I just had to play. Well, I start it up and lo and behold I can't read a damn bit of the text that's at the bottom of the screen. I look though the options trying to find a way to raise the text size but there is nothing. I then go to the capcom website and find that everyone with an regular TV is having the problem. Now, at this point in time I didn't know what the hell HDTV was. I thought it was just some kind of gimick to make money off of people for a slightly better pricture and just hadn't paid any attention to it. I read that it was because the game was just designed around running on a HDTV due to their higher resolutions. I thought great. So becuase I'm not getting suckered into buying a high priced tv to play one game. I have a game that is all but unplayable. I fumed for a little while. Then I decided to try the VGA cable for the 360. I was unsure about the purchase as I thought it would look bad on a PC monitor so I ended up waiting on it and had to decide if I wanted to get that or the S-Video cable to play it through my PCTV since I could zoom in if needed.
Jumping back to November, my vacation was coming up. A full 12 days off of doing whatever the hell I wanted to do, and I had decided that I was going to spend that time playing Dead Rising finally. I went ahead and got the VGA cable as that seemed to be the best choice due to the audio plugs being seperated from the video cable further down, which allowed me to hook it to the audio in on my sound card easier. So after my brother goes to work and I can have his 360 to myself for a little while I hook it all up. I drag out my old 19" monitor since I would need to have my PC on for the sound and start it up. I was dumb founded to find that I could run the 360 at a resolution as high as 1280x1024. I just had never conceived of that being possible.
About two months ago i was planning on doing a major upgrade of my pc. I had figured it would cost about $1200 for it all. That was a new mobo, new cpu, new ram, new case and powersupply, new sata hard drive, the whole nine yards. The only thing i was keeping from my old pc was the sound card and the peripherals. Everything else was going. I had saved up $600, with the money i was getting from selling my pc that made it $900. I only needed 300 more dollars to be able to get the upgrade. That was when i realized something. All of the new games were going to need vista. I just hadn't thought about it untill then. That meant that I would now have to save up yet another month to be able to ge the pc. I was then watching the 19min video of Bioshock for like the hundredth time or something wondering if I would be able to get everything in time for it. Money was going into my car about as fast as I could save it it seemed and was a little bummed. Then something clicked. All of the pc games that were coming out I had no interest in. I didn't care about crysis. Everyone seemed to go "ga ga" over Far Cry but I found it utterly boring and I am not expecting anything more from Crytek. But all the pc games I did want to get were also coming to the 360. Bioshock, Shadowrun, UT3, and Gears of War was on it right now. i never cared about "jaggies" or the fuzzyiness from not having aa and af turned on, and it slowly dawned on me that that was the only reason now for having a pc over a console. Consoles had evolved to the point where their games were as the good as pc games were at a fraction the cost. We're talking $1450 compared to $480. That was when i decided to give up on pc gaming. Two weeks later i bought myself an xbox elite, something I had said I would never do and haven't looked back.
A month prior I had gotten a copy of Dead Rising for my brother's 360. I didn't like the idea of buying a game for his console, much less actually playing it on a TV but I LOVE ZOMBIE MOVIES! I have all of Romero's movies The Night and Dawn remakes, Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later. So Dead Rising was a game I just had to play. Well, I start it up and lo and behold I can't read a damn bit of the text that's at the bottom of the screen. I look though the options trying to find a way to raise the text size but there is nothing. I then go to the capcom website and find that everyone with an regular TV is having the problem. Now, at this point in time I didn't know what the hell HDTV was. I thought it was just some kind of gimick to make money off of people for a slightly better pricture and just hadn't paid any attention to it. I read that it was because the game was just designed around running on a HDTV due to their higher resolutions. I thought great. So becuase I'm not getting suckered into buying a high priced tv to play one game. I have a game that is all but unplayable. I fumed for a little while. Then I decided to try the VGA cable for the 360. I was unsure about the purchase as I thought it would look bad on a PC monitor so I ended up waiting on it and had to decide if I wanted to get that or the S-Video cable to play it through my PCTV since I could zoom in if needed.
Jumping back to November, my vacation was coming up. A full 12 days off of doing whatever the hell I wanted to do, and I had decided that I was going to spend that time playing Dead Rising finally. I went ahead and got the VGA cable as that seemed to be the best choice due to the audio plugs being seperated from the video cable further down, which allowed me to hook it to the audio in on my sound card easier. So after my brother goes to work and I can have his 360 to myself for a little while I hook it all up. I drag out my old 19" monitor since I would need to have my PC on for the sound and start it up. I was dumb founded to find that I could run the 360 at a resolution as high as 1280x1024. I just had never conceived of that being possible.
About two months ago i was planning on doing a major upgrade of my pc. I had figured it would cost about $1200 for it all. That was a new mobo, new cpu, new ram, new case and powersupply, new sata hard drive, the whole nine yards. The only thing i was keeping from my old pc was the sound card and the peripherals. Everything else was going. I had saved up $600, with the money i was getting from selling my pc that made it $900. I only needed 300 more dollars to be able to get the upgrade. That was when i realized something. All of the new games were going to need vista. I just hadn't thought about it untill then. That meant that I would now have to save up yet another month to be able to ge the pc. I was then watching the 19min video of Bioshock for like the hundredth time or something wondering if I would be able to get everything in time for it. Money was going into my car about as fast as I could save it it seemed and was a little bummed. Then something clicked. All of the pc games that were coming out I had no interest in. I didn't care about crysis. Everyone seemed to go "ga ga" over Far Cry but I found it utterly boring and I am not expecting anything more from Crytek. But all the pc games I did want to get were also coming to the 360. Bioshock, Shadowrun, UT3, and Gears of War was on it right now. i never cared about "jaggies" or the fuzzyiness from not having aa and af turned on, and it slowly dawned on me that that was the only reason now for having a pc over a console. Consoles had evolved to the point where their games were as the good as pc games were at a fraction the cost. We're talking $1450 compared to $480. That was when i decided to give up on pc gaming. Two weeks later i bought myself an xbox elite, something I had said I would never do and haven't looked back.
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Comments
Submitted by Bellemorte on Mon, 06/18/2007 - 07:33
Submitted by ImMrPete on Tue, 12/23/2008 - 09:47