• The 360’s 54% hardware failure rate is frightening.
• Most of the games I might want will be on both systems and the 360 exclusives aren’t anything to write home about (Halo, Fable, Gears of War, Forza, et al).
• Xbox Live is full of racist teenagers.
• The PS2’s life cycle was at least ten years and some crazy developers may still be making games for it. Apparently the PS3 was designed with such a long-term plan in mind.

While this seems like a fairly solid decision, it does leave me with one rather large issue. Mainly that I do not have a television and thus do not have any kind of HDMI input. In other words, I’d have to hook the PS3 up to my computer monitor.

Therefore, I’d need to get one of those HDMI-to-DVI cables, which is fine and all, but in the process I’d lose audio as DVI has no such connections. I can then switch the PS3 to output audio over RCA cables, but my quandary is going from that to my 5.1 surround sound system that’s currently used on my computer. I think I’d need adapters to change RCA to “mini-jacks” but I’m not sure yet.

Crappy sound is no way to play video games; I refuse to do it. However, at the moment I am clueless as to how I would get this to work. Ideally I’d like to be able to hit some switch to change the audio source from PC to PS3 — just like I can switch input sources on my monitor — but I don’t yet know of such a device. Granted, my research is incredibly preliminary at this point and this post is mostly just a brain dump.

There’s another issue in that I’m not completely abandoning PC gaming. I want to play Modern Warfare 2 on the PC, and I’m waiting patiently for Supreme Commander 2, StarCraft 2, and Diablo 3 (no one has original ideas anymore). There may be a couple others but those are what’s coming to mind at the moment.

I also want to run Windows 7 rather desperately after eight years of XP. I’m left with a choice in how I approach the PC gaming side — do I upgrade at all?

I built my current system (Intel E6850, 2 gigs memory, 8800 GT) in December 2007 mostly in order to play UT3. That game was bound to be so fucking pro — I just knew it! — and I needed a decent rig to run it properly. Sadly, UT3 proved to be a giant turd with almost no community support — within six months there were more mappers than players — so my cunning plan didn’t go too smoothly.

Luckily, CoD4 was there to pick up the slack. Aside from CoD4, though, I really haven’t put too much time into PC games at all, so I’m left wondering if upgrading is really something I need to be doing. I will most definitely pop in another two gigs of memory but beyond that I don’t think upgrading is worthwhile. My system’s not even two years old at this point and is still considered decent. It can run Crysis on high settings without much issue — though playing Crysis is a stupid idea all around.

What I’ll most likely do is get the system running four gigs of memory, overclock the CPU a bit as it runs rather cool, and buy a new hard drive for a clean Windows 7 install. Then, if at some point down the road I feel like upgrading properly, I will. At this point, though, I can’t really justify it.

That’s cool, I guess, because it’s apparently the first ever to manage this, but it should come as no surprise how they pulled it off — the PC uses nothing but the best of the latest retail hardware. The cost?

Over $8,000. No, seriously. Might as well get yourself a Real Doll if you think buying a computer like that is a worthwhile investment.

But NVIDIA, not to be outdone, is now offering what they call a personal supercomputer for a mere $10,000. With 960 parallel-processing CPU cores, they claim it’s up to 250x faster than a normal PC. Of course, given that no software has native support for that kind of bollocks, presumably you’d need to rewrite Crysis and its engine from scratch.

But I suppose getting more than 60 FPS in a crappy game is worth it to tell Falcon Northwest to shove it.