Dear Future Gamer

Aaaargh!!! I've just read Alexander Moller's letter (FG35) and he's made me resort to three exclamation marks. If Terry Pratchett is right then he has driven me madder than a mad mongoose on extra mad madness drugs. What is he talking about? If the Future Gamer Chat Forum is anything to go by, the interest in consoles by PC owners is stratospherically high at the moment. Everyone who uses the Forum is, by definition, a PC user, so how does he explain this? I've owned a PC and a PlayStation for well over four years now and I regularly play both. I don't have an N64 but I wouldn't expect a multiformat magazine to stop printing reviews and news simply because I don't. The man is clearly mad, and if his sole aim was to generate controversy, he has succeeded.

I've always thought that Future Gamer were largely biased towards the PC actually, which just goes to show how much your position can warp your perspective. Consoles dragged everything forwards in terms of home gaming, most people played their first decent arcade home conversions on consoles and the vast majority of PCs owned at present are still woefully inadequate at playing games of the standard Mr Moller refers to. Yes, most top end new PCs are great, but hands up how many Future Gamer readers still have a clunky old Pentium 200 with no bells and whistles (that just happens to have a modem) and play most of their games on an N64 or a PlayStation? Modern 3D PC gaming is an expensive luxury that few of us can afford.

I won't go on about the consoles vs PC battle too much as it's all been said before, but for Alexander Moller to assert that all PC owners sneer at consoles is elitist and simplistic to the extreme. It also smacks of outrageous snobbery and an assumption that all PC owners must, by definition, be narrow minded fools who share his own views.

Finally, I don't hold this view because I have a rubbish PC and no option. I have a very good PC and play many games on it, but I still play games on my PlayStation, and even on my old SNES. Yes, some games play best on the PC - I had a look at Quake 2 on the N64 the other day and laughed as it was so unplayable without a mouse. However, some games play best on consoles (Tekken 3 on the PC anyone?) so on the whole we have a balance.

Future Gamer encompass the games scene as a whole exceptionally well and it's hardly your fault that all the hot news at the moment is about consoles. Maybe you should censor the news so we all live in a PC utopia. Now there's a thought. If Alexander Moller can't handle the fact that other people do things in a different way to him then let him unsubscribe. I won't miss him. Sorry, what was his name again?

Michael Foster

FG: Thanks for that, Michael. We do indeed imagine that the vast majority of our readers own a PC and at least one other console. Even if they don't, we know that the majority are interested to read about the latest console releases. We do aim to balance the magazine, but one week (and I've said this all before) the balance will tip in favour of one machine, the next week it'll favour another.