In terms of backwards compatibility for PC, things are getting worse. Any game that has to "phone home" for license verification will stop working as soon as the company pulls their license servers. Then, you might have to hack a game you paid for in order to play it.

Furthermore, with the switch to 64-bit, Windows has decided to stop supporting 16-bit installers. So all those games that came out around the Win 3.1/95 transition will no longer work for you (I can install most of them on my XP box and the move them over to my Vista x64 box since the games themselves are 32-bit, they just use 16-bit installers). You can actually get DOS games up and running much more easily than you can Win 3.1/95 due to DOSBOX being so amazing.

It's not that I'm an idiot who does not understand computers/OSes/etc., it's just that games are not designed to be played 30 years after their release. It's hard enough to write a game that works on today's hardware.

Are you familiar with the term, "diminishing returns?"

Also, you do know that people use their TV to... watch TV, right?

Boo TV!!! In the land of stream, instant entertainment is king!

Most streams are low-quality, grainy, and/or artifact-laden. There's nothing wrong with that if you don't want to pay for something better, but it's no substitute for "real" TV.

exactly MOST are, some aren't though. there are alot of commercial stream sites now with liscenses from the companies themselves to stream their shows. Honestly the only crappy quality streams I find are of theatre releases.

I just lost my motherboard, video card and power supply. The non-stop flow of hardware issues sucks. I hate PCs with a passion, too bad that it's my favorite gaming platform.

That is False, the 2 Halo games on the PC exposed them for the piles of crap they were and suckedmore than the Xbox versions since no one wanted to touch them with a 10 foot pole much less play online. Then I guess the PC version was still better than the original.

@forevercloud

Does it matter if both consoles have a kbd and mouse support? There are very little games who support those, and you can't use either comfortably on a couch, you need a solid surface at chest level for them to be sitting on so you can actually use them right without damage to your arms and your 1337 skillz....

A $50 HDTV PCI card is a subsititute for "real" TV, and I use it all the time.

It's the easiest way to record shows and have Tivo functions like rewinding shows and fast forwarding through commercials.

I have a second computer monitor so I can watch TV on one and browse the web on the other.

I even hooked up some USB speakers and put them next to that monitor so I have isolated sound while watching TV and watching a Youtube vid, for example.

Yes, and this is partly true for consoles as well.

Sure they can emulate, but 360 can't play all Xbox games (can it play any? I forget), and PS3 can't play a lot of PS2 games, and that's only a few years ago! They can all emulate older 2D games well enough...but it's not a perfect system for consoles either.

Not enough people really care about 30 year old games for this to change.

The 360 can play some Xbox games. I don't remember how many, but when the 360 came out, they would increase the compatible Xbox games list with updates.

The launch 20gig and 60gig PS3's (NTSC at least) have full (or nearly full) PS1 and PS2 backward compatibility. Later, they had the 80gig PS3 which could play most PS2 games due to the removal of the PS2 CPU though I don't believe PS1 emulation was affected. Now, they've removed all PS2 backward compatibility with the 40gig and new 80gig (40gig PS3 with a bigger HDD) though PS1 backwards compatibility shouldn't have been affected. Lastly, I don't know if that 160gig PS3 has PS2 compatibility or not. This is just hardware compability though.