[Lenny]

Being a console gamer, I'm going to say console. Specifically the PS3 (I didn't fork out £425 at launch because I dislike it, now did I?).

I think that games are more accessible on consoles - if you buy a console game, then you can take it home, pop it in, and play it. No faffing about having to install it (though most PS3 games do offer the option of an install to the PS3 hard drive, which will speed up load times), and the controls are pretty intuitive, as most games will follow the same button map. Compare this with a PC... you've got to have the right hardware to start with. Brilliant quote from Commonmind (near enough the same wording without having to go and check), with Crysis as the example - "Even God can't play Crysis on Very High settings!". I'm not shelling out £425 every six months so I can upgrade my PC to stay on top of the latest games. Also, aside from WASD (up, left, down, right - movement), very few games will follow the same control system - some may use space to reload, whilst others use space to jump, or crouch, or pause the game, or change weapon, or open the inventory, or fire weapon... and so on. With consoles, the same buttons are used for actions in most games - how many hundreds of games use X/A to jump, or R2/RT to accelerate in a racing game?

If I buy a PS3 game, then it's going to work on my PS3, whether it's a launch unit, or whether, eight years down the line, I buy a game bundled with a PS3. The hardware never changes (well, odd improvements such as 45nm processors to make it more efficient heat-wise etc - the core components stay the same, though), and the games are designed and developed with that in mind. The developers know what they can play with, so they build the game engines to make the use of the resources of the console (this is the same with every console known to man... well... no, that can be saved for later). With a PC, and I'll use Crysis as an example again, developers either go all out in development and build something that even God can't play and sacrifice their install base, or they sacrifice quality for a bigger install base - you've got to remember that it takes sales of hundreds of thousands of copies of the game before the developer breaks even and starts to make a profit (games these days cost millions of pounds/dollars to make - some of the top games have bigger budgets than Hollywood films!!), so they need to target a wide audience to recoup their losses.

Just to explain what happened with Crysis - it started out as DX10 only, requiring Vista, and ended up, at release, supporting DX9 and Windows XP, simply because the install base of Vista (and hence DX10), was pitifully small, and the number of people with hardware even close to the original recommended specs could be counted on one hand.

With a console game, developers don't need to worry about install base so much (obviously the number of owners of the console - for example, 12 million PS3 owners, or 18 million 360 owners - means that there are that number of people who can play the game with no worries, and thousands of people will buy a console each week), and so can work on the game knowing that their only limitation is the skill of their programmers, and how well they can make use of the power of the console.