Forget consoles. I'm selling out to BillG.

Cracked out Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the first time in what turned out to be nearly a year. My Logitech Dual Action USB pad has made the game quite a bit easier from when I tried to play with the keyboard, or even my old Gravis GamePad Pro. I still can't stand the way the camera shifts while driving in close quarters, and find myself often slapping the shoulder buttons to look backwards, releasing immediately, so that I have a straight-on view from the front again. Pretty sure there's an easier way, but not sure what it is.

Playing also pretty much solidified [claims of solidification subject to quick change] my desire to forgo the whole smear of next generation consoles for a video card upgrade in my PC. Right now I'm using Radeon Xpress integrated video, which is actually surprisingly good. WoW runs great, better than my iBook at least (wow, eh?), Doom 3 "runs", and I can nearly play GTA without major incident. Yet there are times where I wish I could see more detail in WoW, really play Doom, and not have GTA slow down to a crawl at random times puttering around town (much less when there's action).

As let's face it -- many of today's "must-have" games, from GTA to Madden to MMORPGs to the newest first-person shooters (I'd like to pick up a version of Half-Life episodes right now) are either WinPC compatible or WinPC exclusives. I know Matt cringes when he hears of Windows gaming, but even before the big "Gaming on Windows" initiative, I believe I'm back to drinking the Kool-Aid. For less than the price of a PS3, you can have one pretty good gaming rig, and it does, especially for us would-be coders, quite a bit more than an Atari+DVD player. In some sense, it seems to boil down to if I'd rather play Resident Evil or Half-Life, especially since I already have everything but the video card sitting right next to me now.

My only fear is a forced Vista upgrade in the not too distant future. That'd be painful. The Pax Microsoftiana brought on by stagnant developments in both OS- and IE/browser- lands have given us smooth and cost-free access to the latest in PC gaming tech (DirectX, etc) for nearly seven years.

--ruffin at 12:12

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