the simple answer to gaming is this:
if you find it fun then great but telling people what to think is never going to work
and it just causes arguments
there is no future in running around telling people gaming on a calculator just as good as a xbox and expect people to agree they wasted £150+ on hardware when clearly a £40 calculator is all you need to be as powerful as a game-boy and have a nice gaming experience based on the game's mechanics
if you want to game on a calculator
( and you can, plenty of scientific calculators can be reprogrammed ... )
if you wish your brain to be blown, click here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_gaming
it really wouldn't effect me, in fact i'd be quite impressed.
essentially
what we learn here is to never play the price / performance war card because pebbles in sand pwns anything
( the simplest thing always wins because it's free. )
people love insane redundancy ( do you need 120 fps when playing command and conquer... not really but people love to think they are going to react one septillionth of a nanosecond faster and get their units out of range, but in reality.. they won't )
people love unexpected details
but then, seriously do you need a physics engine built into your game code for realistic modelling of how the buttons on your ui should click down and how they'd deform under your finger? no.
would it be a nice touch? yes.
that is what you get when you spend more money, insane things that don't really add allot to your game-play
but do in their own way add some fun and feel 'premium'
also the graphics issue,
and this is the one people always comment on..
yes you can build a pc that can display higher definition images than current gen consoles
it would be extremely difficult to match the price, due to how console sales work
it makes very little difference, because unless it's a pc exclusive game in the first place and therefore moot as to graphical 'difference' because a console wont run it without custom firmware anyway
all your likely to get is some shiny post processing, massively overkill aa and af for minutely sharper images with a tiny bit more atmospheric effect and if your very lucky some volumetric fog or improved physics or sun-shafts that EAT processing power the witcher 2 in your example has to be turned down to medium to run smoothly on anything but a high end over-clocked rig with at-least 3 terraflop's of processing ( 3 xbox 360's worth, fyi )
but few company's even bother, and just make straight ports so there is almost no difference but frame-rate, and sometimes even that is capped
now, you can 'force' on graphical effects on a pc with varying results.. generally there is a reason it isn't just included in the game files to begin with and alot of the time it's because the effect reacts badly with the game and causes massive slowdown or you end up with strange graphical artifacts, black-screens ect if you don't know what you're doing
it's really tough and go as to whether you can call this an advantage or not.. but if you care that much you can min max your game so.. yah, maby.
at the end of the day it's a people problem, and people need to learn to respect other peoples decisions, ideas, thoughts and feelings
someone may have completely legitimate reasons for doing something that is less efficient, or more or less expensive or time consuming than you, it also matters when they bought something, how much effort they are prepared to put into that something before it isn't fun for them anymore
and what gimmicks they like, do you want 3d-vision? do you want motion controls? how about compatibility with 6 different control input methods for several game types?
it's such a complicated issue that you cant really justify saying there's a winner anywhere just on features, it comes down to personal preference
this isn't just a console war it's a huge social problem, it's because people are people
