PC gaming will always be relevant. It's where almost everyone cuts their teeth when learning to program and, with slight augmentations, it's a rather immutable platform.

I've been very impressed with the indie developments and there are plenty of wonderful titles that capture the spirit of games from back in the day. Titles like Aquaria, Bob Came In Pieces, Lunnye Devitsy, Noitu Love 2: Devolution, Osmos, Leave Home, Eschalon: Book I, Eschalon: Book II, Braid, SlamIt Pinball, Astro Tripper, Smiley's Shooty Adventure, Fren-ze and Machinarium.

And Mark.. you've probably already encountered this game.. if not, please check out Genetos. It's a great freeware shmup by Tatsuya Koyama. He made it as a tribute to the genre. It covers all game play styles from fixed screen shooters to scrolling and even danmaku (bullet hell) stages. It's was a multi-year project that produced a shooter with quite a bit of spit and polish.

-Gandalf42

Like Bill and quite a few others I did away with PC gaming because of the lackluster experience I had when playing the games on my PC. I often had troubles with framerate, responsiveness and basically choppy gameplay/video/sound when my PC had the proper specs (not the minimum specs) to run it. I ended up upgrading my machines to twice the power of their predecessors on a regular basis. I was in the perpetual upgrading roller-coaster for years when I was in college. I would sell my old system - all specced out and would buy/build s new one partially funded by selling the old. Which by most people's standards was still pretty decent do do a thesis on and have a go at a decent game.

Despite my hardware turnover and selling off and partially financing my new systems with the old it did cost a lot of money to keep up. I wanted a good solid gaming experience and often ended up being frustrated with incompatibilities, driver, memory problems. The advent of DirectX and Windows98 as a games platform did help a lot but still it felt like being in a money sucking rat-race.

So I moved to consoles, Playstation 1 and later on the PS2 and the Dreamcast, xbox and also the current gen consoles. Even buying them all and looking for good deals on current games was less expensive than trying to keep up with the PC ratrace. And the game experience was more solid. You got what you expected without some unexpected 'issue'. That is to some degree because region lock-outs and the dreaded PAL 50Hz unoptimized games on 16 bit and 32 bit consoles could cater for an inferior experience to those playing the same game in NTSC 60Hz areas. Some of these issues were resolved when consoles offered the 60Hz options in games resulting in an identical experience for all regardless of country or area. Still region lock-outs remain for many consoles.

But PC gaming remains very interesting. RTS and FPS are very nice with mouse and keyboard and about a year ago I got myself a nicely specced system that was able to play a lot of nice current PC games. It was fun while it lastes as now it is as it has been before: to old to keep up - ah well.... I am happy to have my current gen consoles and almost all that that went before....

Well, as was mentioned, OnLive is a streaming service to allow play of even the highest of high end PC games on even very modest PCs, with no concerns for compatibility or configurations or anything. Unfortunately, it's at a fixed (lower) resolution and with no ability to use mods or do much customization, which is in fact what PC's are meant for. It also depends a lot on the performance of your Internet connection. So, really, it remains to be seen if consolizing the PC experience is really where it's at. In theory, you should be able to play high end PC games on ANY capable device (console, phone, etc.) with OnLive (and I'm sure we'll see some sort of implementation beyond PC/Mac if the service lasts), but it's difficult for me (and a lot of analysts for that matter) to really grasp if this is a good thing or a bad thing (essentially watering down the high end PC experience to any decent computer). It's one thing to stream something non-interactive like a movie or TV show or even music, but a gameplay experience is an arguably different animal. It can be checked out here: http://www.onlive.com/#1

Good Points! It does seem that we get our multimedia "streamed" to our homes (Netflix, etc.). Why not games? I do miss the days of the 'goodies" and the in-depth manuals that was included in a game, think Infocom. That may be ok with some people, and not for others. I always read the instructions! :)

With the economy the way it is, it may be a long time before we see any next gen. consoles. Maybe this will benfit the PC game market? Anyhow, time will tell!

Perhaps the arrival of the "digital distribution" age might be a major factor in the reemergence of the PC as a gaming platform. Although from a gaming curmudgeon standpoint, it might be a sign of the end of the "boxed game" era, probably 75 percent of gamers don't really care, and may even prefer the lack of a physical box, manual, "goodies/feelies," or whatever. They just want to play the game.

Digital distribution of games via a controlled platform, such as the popular "Steam," might actually bring back a lot of developers who have abandoned the PC. It lowers the distribution costs (no physical media or retail distribution fiascos to cut into costs), largely curtails piracy (possibly; I have no idea how easy/hard it is to hack a "Steam" game), and largely provides an easier server-based platform for multiplayer games.

Then we have services like "OnLive," which apparently (I haven't tried it yet) allows gamers to play games via Internet while largely avoiding the massive hardware requirements that the most modern games seem to demand.

Are there downsides? Yes, of course. No physical media, so when the service goes down, you're out of luck. The game is lost forever. There's also the argument that such services invade your privacy, cataloging your hardware, software, and usage. But, they can see if you're pirating their software, which is a plus from the game developers' standpoint.

I suspect that most modern gamers don't care, and prize the experience of playing the game above all else. The "iPhone" and "XBox Live" gaming successes seem to bear this out. Out with the old (our way), and in with the new. We could argue about the "feelies" or whatever, but in other media, such as CD Music and Movies, you don't get much "value-add" when you purchase the media anyway, so it may not matter much to the consumer. After all, most of the games I've bought have little else in the game box besides the CD and instruction manual, so what is really lost, overall?

My argument here is that digital distribution, while not exactly a great thing, makes PC gaming much more attractive from a game developer's standpoint, and may stoke the rebirth of PC gaming. While you might not get physical boxes and "feelies," you might actually be getting more games to play!

I think digital distribution may be a much larger game-changer than many might suspect now. Imagine if, instead of paying a flat monthly cable bill just so you could watch a few favorite TV shows, you actually pay a flat fee for a subscription to "Lost" or "Star Trek: The Next Generation after the Next Generation" or whatever. You just subscribe, and pay for, the shows you like! Heck, that might actually allow for lower-rent, outside-the-system shows to make money! I think something like this is coming in the future.

As for me, I still occasionally buy physical games, but the easy attraction of "Steam" and "GoG" games are hard to resist, and I've purchased several on both platforms. I'm not a "collector;" I just want to play a game.

I think the consoles will still remain the dev platforms of choice for the simple reason that it's much more practical to design to the considerations of consoles and port to PC than it is to design with a PC in mind and port to consoles (i.e., going from mouse/monitor to controller/TV is less practical). There's also far less piracy, which, real or imagined, is a real concern for PC devs even in the age of restrictive portals like Steam and what-not. As for the power thing, other than a handful of games that might leverage the couple of percent of PC gamers who have a physics-enhanced add-on, I still don't see how there really can be anything more than a negligible power gap between the 360, PS3 and PC given the infinite number of configurations of the latter that need to be tuned to. I think primary dev will remain driven by games that work well on PC, like the aforementioned Civ 5 and Starcraft II, and games that work well on console, which is most everything else.

FYI, there's an interesting article in Game Developer Magazine about the issue of aging consoles and how the cutting edge designers and developers have gone back to PCs as their platform of choice. I expect we'll start to see some games coming out for consoles in the next few years that look much better on PCs than consoles, and my guess is the piss poor economy will delay the next gen of consoles for quite some time.

That is very similar to my own motivations for dedicating far more time to console gaming than PC gaming. The cost of entry to both keep the latest and greatest games playable and playable at reasonable quality levels, just became too much to keep up with. Of course, compatibility and stability issues were never pleasant to deal with either even when you had a good rig. With consoles, the same console you buy on launch day will play the last game ever produced for the system. There's something to be said for that. Once consoles became the lead platform for the latest mainstream games, another tick box was checked off in their favor.

With that said, I'm trying to get my first game centric computer in many years, maybe even within the next month (probably a fire-breathing gaming laptop from Sager), so I agree that there's some renewed interest on the PC side. For me, that's games like Civ V and Starcraft II. With that said, I'll still likely devote most of my game time to the Xbox 360 and PS3, but it's nice to another high end option in there.

I might be unique in feeling or experincing this. In the 1990's I felt that once you bought a PC the processor and/or the graphics card was outdated so quickly that you couldn't keep up with the current games. You always seemed to need more ram, better graphics card, and processor. I really got discouraged (and broke) and quit playing games on the PC. When I got back into gaming I went into the consoles like the PS2, PS3, and XBOX 360. I figured that the hardware didn't go out-dated so quickly and the graphics were on par with the computer games. Now, I feel that most PC games are superior and I missed out on alot of good games. If I'm not the only one experienced this, it might be one contributing factor that moved people from PC gaming to the consoles???