I've been playing games for a decent amount of time, I can't share the memories with others that have played a commodore or an atari 2600, no, my gaming roots started with a NES that I got from my neighbor. Eventually I upgraded and got me a SNES and from that point on I was hooked. Video games have become a major part of my life, not so much in terms of aspirations or goals or anything like that but rather one of my favorite down time activities.

Eventually during the early beginnings of middle school i came across a game known as Half-Life and at that point things changed. I found myself playing my playstation and n64 less and less and playing PC games more and more, with the popularity if the internet slowly picking up I found myself being on a PC more and moreoften(aol era). Of course half life ran choppy for me, I had a P3 processor with no dedicated graphics chip and 256mb of RAM, quite frankly it was a horrid machine and the only game that it truly ran well was Starcraft. So I set out to find out how I can make my PC gaming experience better.

Nowadays PC games aren't necessarily scarce but are lacking compared to consoles, we get ports yes but sometimes those ports just don't work ( yes gears of war we're talking about you ). Steam has an abundance of games yes but a lot of them are a bit dated and plenty of them are made by indie developers (which i have no problem with). When it comes to big name titles we get one every now and then and when we do have one it's usually a sequel or expansion. But nonetheless I find myself still preferring to play games on the PC.

The purpose of this isn't realy to say that the PC is the superior machine in each and every way compared to the console but rather why I still enjoy PC gaming despite the fact that it seems like developers aren't really looking to make games for PCs. When I decided to try and bulk up my system to play half life at maximum graphical settings I found myself completely lost, here I was a young boy with no idea what the hell I was looking at, but I was entranced. I set out determined to learn everything I needed to know to improve my PC and from there my love for PC gaming became what it is today.

For me half of the fun of playing on the PC is building one. The customization insanity that ensues when building a new rig is what keeps me going on this particular platform. Being able to select thecolored fans and lights I want, to the case and motherboard and everything are all things that I find to be one of the best parts of playing on the PC. That isn't to say that I build a new computer every 6 months but there are always upgrades to be made, tweaks to be done, and benchmarks to top. But just picking up the parts and putting it together isn't all that goes into building one, if it was then I'd have more fun with Legos. No, thebest part of it allcomes when I turn on the PC and watch the lights turn on, the fans rev up and the BIOS screen gets posted. From there we begin working on getting everything in working order and begin the wonderful process of overclocking.

Overclocking is tedious, frustrating, and takes quite a while to get the best results but when it works it is glorious. The whole process of increasing voltages and fsb's and core clock speeds and all the minor tweaks just to be sure that it remains stable and that it'll stay on through the night. The truth is that when it comes to customized PC Gaming there is no one PC that is the same. I game on my PC because well when I look at a machine that I built myself there's a sense of pride that goes with it, a feeling that I don't get when with my xbox 360 or my ps3.

PC gaming might not be where it was years ago but the technology behind it is ever evolving at an amazing pace, hell a couple of months ago we saw the release of nvidia's 400 series and just recently they released another beefed up card in the 580 and AMD is slated to respond with their 6900 series cards pretty soon as well.

Consoles will always be a part of my gaming, and thats an absolute certainty, it's where I started gaming to begin with, but PC gaming offers something completely different that the consoles cannot, the option to truly make them my own, down to even the software.

And it is for that reason that I game on the PC