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PC Gamers Too Good For Consoles Gamers?
thsoundman sends in a blog post from Rahul Sood, CTO of HP's gaming business, who claims there was once a project in development at Microsoft to let Xbox users compete against PC users playing the same game. According to Sood, the project was killed because the console players kept getting destroyed by their PC counterparts. He wrote, "Those of us who have been in the gaming business for over a decade know the real deal. You simply don't get the same level of detail or control as you do with a PC over a console. It's a real shame that Microsoft killed this — because had they kept it alive it might have actually increased the desire of game developers and gamers alike to continue developing and playing rich experiences on the PC, which would trickle down to the console as it has in the past."
Lots of fun tournaments on LAN parties i organized painted a completely different picture. While PC gamers rule everything in the FPS domain, they completely fail to adapt quickly to an unrelated genre, while console gamers are quite fast in switching from something like geometry wars over to puzzle quest.
Console gamers have a completely different mindset than PC gamers in my experience of what is fast-approaching 2 decades of being a hardcore PC gamer (mainly FPS). I have friends from when I was in highschool who are PC FPS players - they drink and get high and screw around and then run around in COD or Halo hucking grenades, running around in the open, teabagging each other despite having no cover while doing it - hardcore PC gamers by contrast compose essays on strategies on individual maps, relative strengths of various guns, we have forums where we watch other people play and criticize their mistakes so they can improve, and we can improve by seeing what others do wrong.
The best analogy I can give is, go to your local family-friendly Paintball field and gather up a platoon of local youngsters. Now go to the local army base and gather a platoon of special forces. Now make them fight each other - my money is on the Special Forces - the kids might score a kill or two just by being so random and bad that the SF guys let their guard down because they never expected the enemy to run full-tilt across a meadow at them like a rabid dog - but that kind of retardation only works once or twice before they adapt and it never works again.
Console players - in any genre - are retards, one and all.