One of our regular listeners and consistent message-writers is Steven Jones. We’ve recruited him to occasionally post articles and musings on our site and as an introduction I’m putting up this entry he made at the beginning of June on his blog Stex Toys. It’s about moving back to consoles after PC-only gaming for many years. We get a kick out of reading his work and we’re fairly certain our audience will too. You can expect more from him in the future.

-Alex

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It’s been fast. It been packed. And perhaps most importantly of all it’s changed me forever. Bold words but a little over six months ago, when XBOX ownership fell upon me by pure chance really, I didn’t expect to find myself where I am today.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always been a PC gamer. That platform of a never ending release cycle, that would laugh at the idea of ten years and consider ten months a ‘constraint’, constantly straining at the edges of what can be done, pushing the limits that actually make console gaming possible. Now that said I’ve owned a Nintendo device since the N64, but I could justify that for the top notch first party releases that were never going to come to a PC.. at least not without the dubious world of emulation.

My view was that anything the XBOX could do could surely be done just as well on a PC. After all the XBOX was just a PC in a box, sure it was cutting edge when released, but by this time the technology has seriously moved on. PCs do exist that can actually run Crysis, just. Anything else would be easy. I was even put off more by the games which found their way from the console to the PC, I found them poor relations and badly implemented. Hindsight now shows me that this was lacklustre ports, even the acclaimed Bioshock turns me off in it’s PC incarnation.

What I hadn’t been prepared for, what you can’t actually get a feel for until you are actually in there is how joined up the whole experience is. Sure I use X-Fire and Steam on the PC which can link me up to other players who are playing the same games as me, but it’s an option addition, a nice to have that a large number of PC gamers just don’t bother with. On XBOX this is a part of the whole thing. Linking up with other players is about more than just the odd bit of multiplayer. It’s a competitive, cooperative, social, true community, bring people together not just to play, but to interact. It’s something you can really feel a part of, and which makes you better for it. Or rather it can, whether this environment turns you into a more complete gamer or just some arsehole who gets a kick off beating up, virtually as it might be, other gamers is down to your own mental makeup.

And so it is I find myself six months later with a game collection two thirds of my Wii game collection, which has had years to establish that lead, with plans to expand it further well bedded in. The system which I planned purely to play a couple of multiplayer games on with the couple of friends and family members has become just that only several times over. It’s opened my gaming world to new friends and communities that have come as a very welcome addition, no doubt helped on by the explosion in use of Twitter during the same period. The XBOX has become my go to system for gaming, and for creating some new shared experiences with my fiancée and friends which really is what life is all about. The PC has become far more of the versatile communication tool that it always has been, and will be for a long time to come. Sure I still play my RTS games there, for the mouse has yet to be bested for the intricacies of those game mechanics and I have a large enough PC game collection to keep me going back from time to time. However even some of these games, the likes of Bioshock and Mass Effect I’m contemplating selling and re-buying for that games console I avoided for so long.

I’ll still always be a PC gamer of course, it’s the platform that still delivers some of the most interesting and diverse gameplay styles anywhere, although I will admit some of the iPhone/Touch games coming along are a challenge to this. However even with the opportunities offered by XBLA, PSN and WiiWare there is no easier way than making something for PC, and just placing it out there on the internet. You can control your own distribution, maximise your return. Of course what you don’t get is the visibility to the market, there are just too many ways for people to find new things on the internet which is where the power of the consoles enclosed marketplaces can be a boon.

I realise that this whole post reeks of the evangelical spiel of the newly converted, however for me, right now, it’s how I feel. It’s why I’ve left it six months before I made a real stand about it, assuming any honeymoon period will have passed, my excitement and interest in this years E3 pretty much confirmed that I had moved into a new era though. Who knows where I’ll be in another six months, maybe by then there will be a BluRay based system joining the fold, that’s when I’ll know things will never be the same again!