Most of the time, the Wingdamage offices are filled with sunshine, lollipops. But today I stand in defiance of that harmony. I read spambot‘s article and I find myself at the opposite end of the spectrum. Like the Pink and Orange hungry hungry hippos, we are staring at each other across a chasm of differences.

The PC will never replace the console for me. As much as I enjoy services like Steam, GOG, and Gametap the PC is always my second choice for gaming.

When I was a kid my family had a Commodore 64 and about a thousand pirated games. They came on the kind of floppy disks that were actually floppy.  To play them you had to remember the run command for each game, but for the most part the games were played with a joystick rather than the keyboard. We didn’t even have a real monitor for it; it was hooked up to an old television with actual dials to change channels.

As the rest of the world’s computers all received upgrade after upgrade or were replaced, my parents stuck with the C64. They were convinced that the only thing a computer was good for was word processing, and since the Commodore did word processing there was no need to buy a new computer. I was writing reports and hanging out with the Little Computer People for far longer than I care to admit.

For my gaming, I had to turn to the consoles for sustenance or play pirated Atari games. I would hear people talk about the amazing games they were playing on their PC’s but I was happy with my Super NES and my PS1.

When my parents did finally relent and buy a new computer it was just about time for me to head off to college, and I was a die hard console gamer. Now that I have my own PC (with a computer monitor and everything!) I still find myself unable to really get into PC gaming.

Part of the problem is I am not a technology geek in general, and I am certainly not a computer guy. I can make the thing run (kind of) and I can check my emails and twitter, but I am not the type of guy drooling over the spec sheet for the newest graphics card. This might be the almost 2 decades I spent with the Commodore 64.

I have always been of the opinion that half the fun for PC gaming is customizing your hardware to run the latest and greatest. Since I don’t even know what the difference is between a PCI Express and an IRQ, I miss out on all the fun of lording my geek knowledge over others.

I cannot stand it when my brand new game doesn’t run because I don’t have a driver for it, or they haven’t patched it so it will work with my graphics card. I work full time, write for three blogs, I am working on my third movie script and am in the process of setting up a marketing business. I also have giant stacks of comics to read. I don’t have a lot of time, so when I sit down to play a game, I want it to fire up and play. I don’t want to worry about it crashing after 20 minutes. I just want it to work. I don’t want to waste hours of my time fiddling with settings to get the game to work.

Even when games do work perfectly I can’t seem to get behind the mouse and keyboard. I realize that hardcore PC guys are scoffing in derision and I agree that for certain games the standard controller doesn’t give you nearly the flexibility or options that you get with the keyboard. However, I grew up with the joystick and then the game-pad. I just never feel perfectly comfortable with the keyboard. I find myself over analyzing and thinking about what button I am hitting instead of just playing the game. This causes me to feel slightly disconnected from the game I’m playing. Games are at their best when you forget you have a controller in your hand and you are just reacting to what is going on onscreen. With a mouse and keyboard I can never achieve this level of immersion.

As I have said before in my exciting and sexy article on split screen gaming, I prefer couch co-op to LAN or online. I like having the person I am playing with right there next to me. You can’t really have that experience with the PC. My wife can look over my shoulder while I play but she can’t really join in unless she goes to another computer.

So while Jonah drifts away from his console to his PC I will be over here with my shelves full of games.

Tags: C64, Commodore 64, gametap, gog, good old games, PC, Steam

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.