Week of Hate: PC gaming arrogance

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PC Gamer's Greg Vederman helps us explore the dark heart of PC fans

If there's one thing we've been confronted with time and time again - it's that PC gamers are arrogant. This is a truism. Just ask the Editor-in-Chief of our sister magazine, PC Gamer: Greg Vederman. "We're not arrogant. No, we're simply comfortable and confident in the knowledge that our gaming platform is superior to anything else on the market, and that PC gamers tend to be a better, happier, handsomer lot than console gamers." We hope he's kidding.

Seriously, you must have heard the argument before: consoles are toys to the hardcore PC gamers, who consider their vaunted, multi-thousand dollar gaming rigs to be the only serious way to play. Of course, these machines are more capable than consoles - but the price difference is massive. The most expensive graphics cards on the market cost about the same amount of money as an entire PlayStation 3. The ease of use of consoles is often derided, rather than praised, by PC gamers of a particularly die-hard stripe: this is just more evidence that the boxes are simplistic toys.

According to the Vede, "... the real reason we're so confident and SEEM arrogant (though we aren't) is because we know that, in the long run, our games will always look better, always control better, and always have more robust community options than anything in the console world." A seemingly logical statement, but one that underscores the major issue with the PC arrogance question: it only makes sense if you're content to play first person shooters and realtime strategy games... and nothing much else (oh yeah, MMORPGs. In our opinion, console gamers should be happy that this exquisite form of torture is all but absent from our universe.)

What about fighting games? What about adventure games? Virtua Fighter 5 or God of War II - two of the best console games so far this year - what does the PC have to answer those? And could you control them "better" on the PC? Nope. And what about Japanese-developed games? Try Korean MMOs for your sole fix of Asian gaming. Shudder.