Console Gaming

Console gaming gets so much shit because it used to be the best way to play games at home. Its fall from grace accentuates the criticism it gets. Go back to 1986 and show me the best 2D platformer on the PC and compare it to Super Mario Bros. on the NES. Video game consoles used to absolutely shit on PCs. Take the best arcade game on the PC from 1989 and compare it to Nam '75 on the Neogeo. I think a lot of the criticism comes from people like me who are disappointed by consoles' failure to keep up. They are dedicated video game machines. They SHOULD be better than a general purpose computer at playing games, but they're not. The console industry blew it, basically.

Console gaming used to have flat out advantages over PC gaming: games were truly plug and play and performed without hiccups. Today, console games have all the same problems as PC games: games ship buggy and need patches, games are unstable, games have tearing or v-sync lag because they don't use truly novel, dedicated hardware (they're just stripped down PCs now). Notice how none of the old consoles ever had tearing, v-sync issues, or massive input lag? It's because they didn't work like PCs. They actually had dedicated hardware that was built from the ground up to play games.

Right now, consoles are basically the worst of both worlds: you have all the buggy and unstable crap that requires internet patches and the locked-down walled garden software where you can't just run the software you want to. To top it off, the performance is crap. It's garbage now.