The eternal question when it comes to video games is, "Consoles or PCs?" There are groups of people that are extremely dedicated to both, with valid positives and negatives on each side. It is a question that will likely never be answered with complete satisfaction.
I have been pondering this question as of late. You see, my current PC is very old - it will be five years old in a few months. Believe it or not, it can still play some new games, although not very many. Those it can play it only barely meets the minimum requirements for. Many games, it can't even play at all. Such is the way of things.
While we do have a Wii, I don't really play that much anymore. 2008 was not a very good year for the Wii for someone looking for "normal" (i.e. non-casual or non-mini) games. 2009 does seem to be shaping up to be better in this department, but the Wii will never be an equal to the Xbox 360 or PS3 due to the large gap in hardware capabilities between them.
While it would be nice to say that I should just get a new PC and a new console (or even both an Xbox and PS3!), I do not really have the funds to do that - not to mention the incredible amount of time it would take to justify owning so many systems. That just isn't going to work out.
Instead, I started thinking about the pros and cons of owning each. That is always a good way to decide things like this.
On the PC side, one positive for me is that I've been heavily into PC gaming for a quite some time now - probably well over 15 years by now. While that doesn't mean I can, or I will, play any/all of my old games, I do have that library to fall back on, if need be. This is also ignoring all of the cool PC only games that will be out in the next few years - Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Half-Life Episode 3, the unannounced (but inevitable) Portal 2, and Star Wars: The Old Republic (assuming that I want to tempt fate and try the MMO thing again). I'm sure there are others as well that I'm not thinking of right now.
Many games that are released for the Xbox 360 and/or PS3 are ported to the PC, too. Granted, they generally arrive a few months later, and some are shady ports and possibly with invasive DRM, but I can always avoid those games. The DRM part does seem to be getting better, though - especially after the reaction gamers had to Spore's horrible DRM.
Steam is just plain awesome, and only on the PC. While it is similar to Xbox live (which costs $50/year to play online), it is really an incredible platform. While it does have DRM built-in, it is so out of the way that it may as well not have DRM, as far as I am concerned.
Finally, the other thing to consider about the PC is that it does more than play games. I'm a Windows programmer by day, and it would help me to stay abreast of the latest technologies by writing side projects at home. This would be a good way for me to learn WPF better, for example. A console definitely can't do that.
On the console side of things, the main advantage is convenience. No dealing with driver upgrades, instability (due to the large number of potential hardware configurations), long and arduous installs...not to mention frequent hardware upgrades (I really should have upgraded my PC years ago if I had wanted to stay current). Plus, there is the price - I would be likely to pay $300-400 for a really nice Xbox or PS3. That's not bad at all, given the quality of games available for each system.
Of course, I would be starting from nothing on a new console, since I don't have any games for it. That would be quite an initial cost to justify going that route.
And really, most of the positives of going the console route (for me, at least) are things outside of the console itself. My desk is currently shared between my PC and my Macbook. If I didn't need the PC anymore, then I could have a better setup for my Macbook - use my PC monitor as a second display (while the built in 13" inch display is nice, an additional 17" display is even nicer), plug in a real keyboard and mouse, etc. That's not really a positive for the console itself, but more a side affect of going that way.
As I said earlier, to play Xbox games online it costs $50/year. While that's not too bad, at the same time it is more than I need to play PC games online (ignoring MMOs, at least). That's just another cost to gaming on a console, really.
When I started writing this, I thought it would be much more balanced between the two sides, but for me at least it seems like the PC side really wins out. That's not to say that this is the right answer for everyone, of course, but it seems like the right thing to do for me.
Of course, now the question is, "What do I get?" That is likely an entirely different post, for another time.
