I Bought a PS3. Don’t Tell My 14-Year-Old PC Fanboy Self.

Yesterday I got one of those (non-)shiny new PS3 Slim things. This is a very special occasion for me; it is the first video game console I’ve ever owned.

I’ve played games on consoles before, of course, but only because my friends always had them. Like any child of the 90s who had a life, I grew up on games, but not “video games.” Video games were on consoles (or, as they were called before I discovered proper English, “systems”). I played computer games. And I was a snob about that.

Mario and Sonic were not my childhood heroes because I didn’t have a Super Nintendo or Genesis like all the cool kids. And you know what, that’s fine. Putt-Putt can kick both their asses. As can Fatty Bear. Speaking of which, why the hell did Fatty Bear only get one game? I wanted to play more Fatty Bear games! Sorry, I’m going off on a tangent. Anyway, I was a PC gamer from the beginning, and Humongous Entertainment was the best thing ever conceived by humanity back then. Sure, I was interested in consoles. In fact, I wanted a Nintendo 64 so badly, and so did my brother, but my parents wouldn’t let one in the house, even if we raised money to pay for it. Why? Because it would somehow make us waste more time playing games than if we just had the option to play on the computer. Yeah, it didn’t make sense, but the concept of “logic” had been censored from our impressionable minds, so we couldn’t dispute it.

Eventually, I grew comfortable with my lack of console ownership. You know why? Because consoles suck! PC games have such better graphics! And the games are better too because the mouse and keyboard are the best controls ever! Can you upgrade a console’s video card? No! Consoles suck. Incidentally, I developed that mindset around the same time I started reading PC Gamer.

That’s how I was for most of my pre-teenage and early adolescent life. I got into heated arguments with my console-playing friends about how inferior their toys were, and they responded with equally immature rants about how I was wrong and stupid and had no friends and picked my nose and ate it. But I was undaunted. My hatred of all things console was so great that I angrily tore up a Best Buy circular because it informed me that there was an Xbox version of Dragon’s Lair 3D. How could they put such an iconic DOS franchise on a console? No, I wasn’t aware that it was originally an arcade game.

So if I could go back in time and tell my 14-year-old self that one day I would grow tired of dealing with bad performance at the lowest graphics settings on my 3-year-old computer and purchase a console…well, I wouldn’t, because I don’t think I would survive the encounter.

Now, this isn’t my declaration of the death of PC gaming; I’ll still be playing PC games for sure. It’s just that some games inherently play better on a console. Or, in other cases, some games inherently play worse on my computer than on a console. Also Brütal Legend isn’t coming to the PC.

Actually, it’s entirely about Brütal Legend, but while I have a console, I might as well consider the other nice things about it.

In closing, this is kind of shocking when I think about how I was as a younger, more naïve person. I screamed about how terrible consoles were to everyone who’d come near me just five years ago. But you know what else I got angry about? When people downloaded music. Because it was stealing.

My how maturity changes people.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• Quick! Tell Everyone!