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Ok kids. I'm over 40 years old. Unlike 99.99999999999% of you, I grew up with a full arcade in my house. What the fuck is that? A full-size slate billiard table, a regulation ping-pong table, two pinball machines, six upright arcade cabinets, and a foosball table. I was played Pong on an original Pong console when they were new and popular. I've gamed on just about every home console available in the 1980's. I grew up on text adventure games that were hand programmed, even programming some myself. The majority of my gaming pre-teens was done on a Commodore 64. If there was a game available on the C64, I likely played it. In my late teens, that became PC gaming. My first PC purchase, as a teenager, was for Space Quest. I was buying PCs and upgrading computers to play games long before the majority of you were sperm in your daddy's testicle.

The cost of PC Gaming far out strips the vale of console gaming. You may be able to mitigate the costs, you may be able to offset some of those costs, you can deny it, and you can justify it all you want. It doesn't change the fact AT ALL that dollar for dollar, quid for quid, ruble for ruble, the best value you can get in gaming is via a console. Even if you include the cost of Xbox LIVE to play games on an Xbox 360.

Unless having a powerful computer is a necessity of your education, career, or business, there is no reasonable justification for frequently upgrading your PC or buying new computers in and effort to play games. It's fiscally less responsible than buying a new car every three years.

Less games, add up the value of all the PC hardware you purchased for gaming over the past 12 years, and then the value of your console hardware. Compare.

The more gaming you do on consoles, the lower your PC computing needs are (for the average person), therefore the lower your costs in general. The more PC gaming you do, the higher those costs and the more frequently you spend it.

Bottom-line, if you want more bang for your buck, there is no better value for gaming than the console.