2010 PC estimate (mine/newegg.com) (recommendations?)

You're right, Gears of War was built around the cover system (and, presumably, GoW2 as well). So not all games use all forms of innovation, and sometimes the best innovation doesn't take because gamers are uncomfortable with it, or other reasons. Look at Deus Ex (2000), they built an RPG on the first Unreal engine. Brilliant game, attained a cult following, but was never really "big" despite mostly glowing reviews. It also had a system where if bad guys couldn't *see* you, they couldn't see you, and that was that. Metal Gear Solid did this as well, but in most shooters, every bad guy knows exactly where you are. This is sloppy programming, but I guess it makes a game harder.

Pretty sure every CD-based console (from Sega CD onward) could play music CDs and every DVD-based console could play DVDs. The advantage of the 360 is that it has a real solid platform aside from the games. There's the arcade, the multimedia marketplace, and the media player. And achievements. PS3 has most of the same stuff.

As for piracy, no console has ever supported piracy on its own. You can't pirate with just an Xbox -- you need a PC as well. With a PC, you can pirate stuff onto it. Weak, but that's the distinction. Also, modding an Xbox 360 is highly risky. They've banned over 600,000 pirates from LIVE, but it goes beyond that. They can trip a killswitch and brick your Xbox 360 if they want to. Since news of that feature leaked, I don't think they will actually do it, but they reserve the ability. "Oh, they'll be sued," people love to say, but the thing is, to claim they did that, you'd be going on record admitting to piracy. They're out $200 for an Arcade model at the least (hard drive won't be broken), but at the same time they'll get you for piracy, which will cost you a lot more than it would have to just shut your mouth and shell out the $200 yourself.

(Replying to this one since the other thread was getting rather long.)

Uninformed people and halfwit journalists
Yeah, you're right about this. I forget most people are more gullible than your average tech forum member (us).

PSP bricking
Not untrue at all. Well, it could be argued that any system modification is "doing things wrong". Is it 'wrong' to alter the firmware? Morally, perhaps, but it's debatable. Like emulators. I have heard -- and as it's secondhand, I don't really vouch for it -- that even if you're careful, you can brick a PSP by trying to modify it. Not sure if that's intentional or not on Sony's part, but it's par for the course for them.

DS and Wii
Yep, both Nintendo consoles are busted wide open. For the DS Phat and DS Lite, you can get a microSD-to-Nitro adapter, looks like a Nitro cartridge but has a microSD slot in the back. Very slick. Up to 2GB (no SDHC support) and you can run most games. I miss my DS Lite.

PC games and controllers
Well, I'll be the first to advocate WASD+Mouselook for shooters. I struggle with Gears of War -- it's OK, it's doable, but give me a keyboard and mouse, and I'll clean house. The one that was absolutely stupid was the N64 controller. Oh, I hated that thing. Told my brother the same thing when he said he could smoke me at Goldeneye. Yeah -- give me a keyboard and mouse setup and you're goin' down, boy! Over on GameFAQs, we came to the conclusion that the gamepad handicaps everyone equally. Meh.

Any Xbox 360 controller can be used on the PC thus far with an adapter from Microsoft. Even the guitars and drum sets. In fact, the wired Guitar Hero 3 X-Plorer controller (the white X-shaped one) is recognized by Windows directly for what it is. The tilt sensor counts as an axis, the strum bar is up and down (redundant of the D-pad -- yes, you can strum with the D-pad in GH3, lol). The fret buttons are regular buttons. Rock Band uses a USB mic, so at least you can have the two guitarists and a vocalist without the Microsoft adapter. (The Rock Band 1 drum set is USB as well, but I've never tried connecting it to a PC. That would be interesting, though.)

Age differences and consoles vs. PCs
How old are you, anyway, jamvaru?

I'm 30 years old, and started with console gaming with the Atari 2600, then the NES and the Super NES. I switched to PC gaming for the Commodore-Amiga 1000, then DOS/Windows 95 onward. I stayed with PC gaming until the PC I built in 2005 (AMD64 3200+ 2.01GHz single core, 2GB RAM, 256MB GeForce 6600) wasn't good enough to play games anymore... which was... the next year. I actually went to Nintendo DS at that point, it wasn't until a year later we got the 360 for my wife. RB/GH has always been her gig, I'm OK at it, and I love the hell out of the concept, but I'm just not great at it like she and her brother are. Meh. I like to sing, and occasionally play bass. Then I discovered Oblivion, which my computer can't even handle at 640x480, let alone 720p, which is what I got on the 360.

Despite the fact that a lot of kids make Xbox Live look bad, the Xbox 360 really transcends age.

To be a successful PC gamer, you have to have money. A lot of money. And either not a lot of bills, or just that much money. But even if I were a trust fund baby or a credit card kid, while I might have a nice PC with three flat-panel monitors (probably a Falcon Northwest PC), I'd still game with both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 (Blu-ray plus a couple nice exclusives) on a big HDTV.

PC gaming is mostly a joke now. To have to buy hundreds of dollars in new hardware annually, to have to deal with spyware-infested DRM that just slows the computer down (Google Starforce, I think it's called, to see all the problems it causes). Then you have client-side anti-cheat software, stuff like Punkbuster, which causes even more problems. Xbox (and presumably PlayStation) DRM is so transparent, if you're playing legally, you never even see it. And the anti-cheat is server side, as I understand it.

And I can play Mario Kart on my PC. The original one, anyway. DS games can be played on the PC -- some of 'em, anyway -- but not Wii. N64 games are hit and miss. All the Game Boy games can be played on a PC. Don't think you can play Gamecube games either. But while Mario Kart was a hit, there are good games similar to it. The PC had Death Rally years ago (with Duke Nukem in a cameo role, LOL) and that was good for the same reasons. While World of Warcraft has its fans, I think the only real unique, real exclusive-to-one-side series is Rock Band. There's really nothing like it. Frets on Fire tries to do the same thing, for single-player (we even have it as a PortableApp on this site) but it falls so short. The best the PC can do to meet Rock Band is the iTunes Music Store on one side, and Audiosurf on the other. As awesome as the latter is, the two just don't add up to the experience of RB.