In these times there's a great war between the Xbox360, Nintendo Wii, and the soon-to-be-released Playstation3. However, most people disregard the most obvious games machine there is - the PC. Why is this? Apparently consoles are better, or not.
Consoles these days are all about the megahertz and gigabits. All the companies are worrying about visuals and having the fastest system and more processing power. Those few slight increases in number of pixels on screen and number of colours acheiveable.
This is why consoles will fail.
These consoles are good for nothing but having friends round to play on 1 system, like a racing game or football game. FPS? Sure, they have FPS games...but they're all released for PC too, and PC is better for the genre because of being able to aim with mouse instead of jumbling 3 analog sticks around and then hitting a buttom with your little finger to fire, then having to stop aiming for 5minutes to change weapon and BANG! Oops, you're dead. If only you had a mouse, instant pointing to where you want to shoot, the button is in a convenient place under your finger while you aim, the secondary fire is there too, ooh and look, a little weapon scroller in the middle of the two fire buttons.
The exception to this of course is the Nintendo Wii. They're not tried to go for pretty, lifelike graphics (and who wants them - games are about imagination), the Wii concentrates on pure, raw gameplay. It's the next step towards virtual reality with what i like to call game immersion. Your movement, whether its the bowling motion, swordfighting, punching or even waving, controls the game, you are immersed. This adds a whole new level to the gameplay, and makes it a little more of a social machine too, as you can even use those games to get a good workout done. This is something even the PC hasn't managed yet.
This sort of idea is something that more console manufacturers need to catch on to, after all, even if you release a console with hardware thats not released to the public in any other way, give it a year and the hardware will be old and outdatedd, no matter how pretty you make it computers can be upgraded to get prettier, and consoles are pushing it there to keep up.