@BruceCM LOL, yeah. It's a rabbit hole I can't foresee going back down. Heck, now that Streaming is becoming a thing, subscription seems like a cheap way to always have "best specs" without even bothering with hardware for games that don't need twitch action.
@NEStalgia Well, I did say a system as or more powerful than Series X, not one that's identical to it. If anything, that's impossible, given the custom components in the home consoles. A slightly slower SSD is going to make next to no difference. The performance difference between a cheap SATA SSD and what's in in the SeX will be less than the difference between what's in the PS5 vs the SeX.
Honestly, I only accept 60fps and above on PC games. Anything lower looks terrible on PC, and mouse aiming just isn't smooth enough. I rarely max out sliders, and I only mess with settings until I get to the point where my frames aren't dropping under 60. After that... shrugs medium/ultra settings in a lot of modern games is barely distinguishable outside of screenshots anyway. With that said, I think it's usually best to get a reasonably powerful GPU if only to future proof your system. It's why my rig has run circles around the consoles all gen, and, even now when it's pretty weak, it can still run games well.
But if your mindset is: "I'm going to only buy the most expensive components possible, because anything else triggers my OCD," then I can see why you think PC gaming is inordinately expensive.
I was thinking about a Series S, but the RAM limitations might be an issue going forward, and I'm still stuck playing something like Cyberpunk 2077 at the Xbox One S performance targets until it gets patched. And even then, devs can choose to limit the framerate and optimize for whatever they think looks best on the system. PC allows me to put the sliders wherever I like if I want a smoother gaming experience. And that sort of user control will just never be a thing on consoles. Also, both next gen consoles have bulky Xbox controllers (except Sony at least is still putting the analog sticks where they belong), and I can continue to play next-gen games on my PC with the DS4.
The biggest thing, though, is that it would involve transitioning to a new ecosystem. Which is probably the biggest thing keeping people from jumping between platforms, I think: once you buy in on Xbox, Playstation, Steam, etc. there's a sunk cost there, and a competing platform has to offer something really compelling in order to override that default preference.
Yeah, that's becoming a more realistic option for more people, @NEStalgia.... As long as you have reliable good internet access, of course
I think you'll find it's Xbox who puts the analogue sticks in the right places, @Ralizah
@BruceCM Mmmmno. The analog sticks are easy to reach regardless. D-Pads protrude less, so you want them to have priority placement on the controller for ease of access.
Xbox placement is still better than whatever the hell is going on with the Wii U Pro Controller, though.
Fired up Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise for the first time. I may be a little bias since FotNS '86 OVA was the first anime I ever watched. So I have heaps of nostalgia for the series. But...what a game. 'chef's kiss'
If you like the Yakuza series and/or Hakuto no Ken, give Lost Paradise a try.
What I wouldn't give for a Switch port.
Switch Physical Collection - 1,540 games (as of January 28th, 2026)
Switch 2 Physical Collection - 4 games (as of December 8th, 2025)
Placing the right analog stick above the face buttons makes no sense and looks terrible.
Anyway, I'll say this: Xbox controllers have only improved over time. The OG Xbox "Duke" controller is pretty much a bloated tumor with buttons. Possibly the most hideous controller design ever. Xbox 360's controller was functional, but it has a horrendous D-Pad, and, in general, felt terrible in the hands. Xbox One's controller... look, I don't like the button placement, but the controller itself feels very nice.
Yeah, that one looks bad, @Ralizah .... I never had an OG XBox or 360 to really talk about those controllers but their current one is great to use! I haven't had cause to try a Dual-Shock, tbf, so I can't say what that's actually like in that sense, just it doesn't look so good to me & it'd take some adjusting for the analogue sticks, particularly
I was thinking about a Series S, but the RAM limitations might be an issue going forward, and I'm still stuck playing something like Cyberpunk 2077 at the Xbox One S performance targets until it gets patched.
I'm really hoping CD Projekt are thoughtful enough to put an uncapped framerate option into the current gen version of the game, so that the PS5 and SeriesS/X versions get a 60fps from day 1. They might not though. They might just want us to wait for the proper patch.
I think it says everything about PS5 when the conversation in the PS thread is primarily an argument about if PC or XSeX is the best value all around gaming platform.
@Ralizah I agree BOTH companies went absurd with the nvme drives. I've been saying that and keep getting shouted down about how its soooo much faster, blah blah blah. There was no reason for that, especially if what they're upgrading from is a 5200RPM 2.5" laptop spinner. No idea why they did that. But it is what it is, and it's possible the way they've set up the I/O there's a tangible difference (the memory speed is quite a bit faster than PC ram that's commonly used etc.)
I'm torn on fps. Fundamentally I agree 60fps minimum should be the standard....and yet I tend to end up turning up the settings/resolution mode, whatever, because it always looks wrong without it and I end up thinking of what it should like. More OCD I guess. Oblivion on PC years ago, I was not going to play without all my trees. Many other games I pushed resolution....I can't stand aliasing....at all....and I can't stand the smearing of most AA either...so it had to be resolution. I played a lot of games with fps that tanked 15-20fps. That's not to say I don't love smooth 60fps motion, notice it, or prefer it, but when given a choice I always end up chosing res, even if I don't want to on a fundamental level. That's for both PC and consoles. I wish they'd just find a happy medium and stick with it. I thought this gen meant 4k/60 most of the time....so it looks like I'll be mostly playing the backlog that is, and waiting for the next next gen for the new games.
When PC games give me tons of sliders, I spend the first week of play doing A-B comparisons of all the settings.....takes 2 weeks to start playing.
You're right about transitioning, though. My Steam library consists of exactly 3 games. 1 of them is on XBox. The other 2 are so woefully dated I wouldn't play them. I got of out PC right when Steam and digital started gaining traction partially because they did. When I built my last PC, 100% of my games were still DVD-ROM and I had zero intention of ever going digital, or ability to go digital, on dialup at the time, which was a problem on PC as Steam was rising. So I'd be giving up, a PS4 library of exclusives + PS+PC J-games and a 300+ strong XBox library just to force myself into a $1500 box "because it's cheaper." When I chose 2.5 years ago to go XBox or PC and was asking around here, I ended up chosing XBox as "my PC" instead of getting back into PC. looking at how the next 7 years appear to be shaping up, I don't regret that. Otherwise, this year, I'd probably be buying a new $500 video card, which would probably require a new mobo that accepts faster ram, and buying faster RAM, and probably having to upgrade the SSD to keep up with the new consoles.... I don't know how fast 2018's $500 video cards obsoleted next to this year's $500 video cards, but just to keep up with where I expect to be compared to the incoming consoles, that's still coming out to $500 every other year in video cards alone just to keep up in my head. Maybe for 7 years that one would be adequate now depending on mid gen bumps. But that still would have been another "2 years, time for another upgrade" cycle. I would still be behind in money up to this point.
I honestly like the DualShock/Sense analog stick placement. The D-pad being on top of both analogue sticks is better for stuff like menu navigation or fighting game inputs for me personally.
TheFrenchiestFry
Switch Friend Code: SW-4512-3820-2140 | My Nintendo: French Fry
@NEStalgia One thing I've noticed, and I alluded to this in my last post, is that the visual 'range' of PC games has shrunk considerably in the last decade or so. Playing on low vs ultra settings used to make a lot of difference in the games I played, but since high/ultra settings primarily just apply or strengthen more subtle visual effects now, you're often looking at a massive performance gain with a minimum of sacrifice to visual fidelity. If I have to compare settings side-by-side and squint to be able to see the difference, then it's not worth a loss in smoothness.
RTX on vs off can be a LOT more noticeable, though, so I do expect the presence or absence of raytracing effects to be the new thing that demands powerful video cards. I mentioned the RTX 2060, which is technically capable of driving those effects, but it's... it's a better non-raytracing card, to be frank.
As to fps, while 60+ just feels massively better on any platform, it's a lot more important on PC thanks to frametime issues, display issues, and issues, as I said, with mouse response smoothness. 30fps console games are typically optimized to look a lot smoother at that framerate than they would on a PC, and a controller is never going to be as dependent on high frames as mouse movement.
Yeah, in terms of library, I'm exactly the opposite. I own... maybe two or three Xbox games? Nearly all of my 360 games (about 20 of them) are physical. And I have a few physical OGBox games as well. On Steam, I have... looks 200+ games. And that's not counting my games from GOG and other storefronts as well. Online bundles and amazing deals make it easy to develop a truly intimidating library on PC.
This new generation of cards is looking like a pretty massive jump in both performance and value. The RTX 3070, for example, is doing for $500 what the previous gen 2080 Ti was doing for anywhere between $1400 - $1900. The $700 3080 massively laps both. And the new $1499 3090 is basically a mass-market version of a Titan-class card.
That's all way too much power for me, so I'm hoping for a nice $349.99 price point for a 3060. Nvidia will want a cheaper card for 1080p plebs. We don't know what recommended specs will be like on most next-gen games, obviously, but the next-gen exclusive The Medium is only demanding a 1660 Super at 1080p, which will be vastly weaker than even the weakest of Nvidia's new line of cards, so I feel like I'll probably be OK if I just wait a bit to upgrade my GPU.
@TheFrenchiestFry Well, if you're playing fighters with a gamepad, no wonder you have such screwed up ideas of good controllers....
@BruceCM, yeah when I built the last gaming PC, PCIe was still the new replacement for AGP, SSDs didn't really exist (not at human prices anyway), PC games were still sold on DVDs for those of us not into digital (the writing was on the wall though, and I knew my dialup wasn't going to carry the digital future of PC gaming, so consoles wasn't even a choice, it was mandatory.) patches were, like 750mb max, and that was rare and punishing and worth boycotting the game over, the upgrade from Vista to 7 wasn't painless.) And of course PC games were played at a desk with a keyboard & mouse....adding a controller to a PC was kind of an unusual gimmick more than anything.
I've of course built & bought PCs since then, but not for gaming. That's all productivity.
But for all that's changed, most of it has stayed the same.
@Ralizah I should also mention the overhwelming majority of my PC gaming time was with CRT 4:3 monitors. I got my first LCD, as a side machine and played quite a few games on it, but it was backup to the CRT. My first 1080p widescreen LCD I got along with my PS3 a few years before the last gaming PC. So it was maybe 2 years PC gaming on an LCD, and 10-12 on CRT. Yeah, different world Better world if you ask me... CRT was divine. Most of the games with decent settings visually were 30fps or below most of the time. But it was worth it for pretty.
Some of that may be fleshed out now as yousay. Then again we have Spiderman "remaster" that apparently in performance mode looks......basically just like PS4 Spiderman but with some things better, some things worse, but at 60fps. And then we have the graphics mode that adds raytracing at 30fps..... Sounds like PC there. Though I'm still curious if that's endemic of all PS5 or just that game, and how Series X fares in that regard.
Funny thing is that in 2018 I had 0 digital XBox games and a stack of physical PS4 games. And 3 steam games (do my old DVDs still count? )
I debated here and went with X1X instead of a new PC. In that time span I just accumulated all those games mostly on sales. Some are old 360/OG games. And each game of Rare Replay with its own icon I'm counting separately, but still. So that was a 2.5 year accumulation of a back catalog, mostly. At good prices. Still, the idea of switching to PC because "cheaper" then means splitting the library, paying more up front, and getting less convenience.....
And of course the killer atop that - no game sharing. Hard to beat 2 for 1 even at $10 more. But I know I'm exploiting the "loophole" (whether or not it's really a "loophole") on that.
A surprising number, since a fair amount are games I'd played on other platforms but got in sales to have convenient access to replay .... Or are £5-£20 (at full price) games that don't take too long to go through! I'm counting pre-purchases that I obviously can't play yet, too! Then, there are some I got in bundles that were effectively cheaper than just getting the games I definitely wanted
Oh, I remember Vista & XP, @NEStalgia but only on basic laptops, not for gaming
@BruceCM You haven't really been a PC gamer if you weren't doing it in '95 and '98. Back then Windows was still, technically DOS in its core. Imagine the fun with drivers and games back then! Upgrading nVidia drivers was a time where you hold your breath while the screen blacks out and hope it comes back. 30-40% of the time, it didn't. Then you had to spend 2-3 hours registry digging to flush out the partially installed driver and get back to VGA 640x480 8-bit color and start again. They didn't merge NTKernel into the OS until 2000, and then XP which radically improved the driver system, but video drivers were still a total mess. They didn't REALLY fix that until Vista...but then that was still a mess of brokenness. 7 was the first time they actually put it all together properly. I built my last gaming PC when 7 came out. Then basically played 3 hours of games on it and switched to consoles It was a hybrid productivity/gaming PC so most of the hardware was geared toward work (and was waaaay expensive compared to what you'd buy for gaming.)
But yeah, that morass of Windows is why I avoided and laughed at XBox for years. The best sales pitch for XBox I ever got was being a PS3 owner. that thing was so bad I ran screaming to the XBox I rejected for years. If you love 15-20fps games, PS3 had you covered!
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