I’m not going to lie, I’m a console gamer through and through. I grew up with a controller in my hands, and I just don’t connect to PC games as much. I know that plenty of people like to game with a mouse and keyboard, so I’ll let you know right now that the second half of this post is not for you.
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Part one: XBMC
XBMC is a media center program that started out on the original Xbox, and has since grown to become a great media center program that would look absolutely gorgeous on your expensive new TV. It works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and if you really want to get your hands dirty I expect you could still install it on your old Xbox, Wii, or PS3. At least, if it doesn’t work on PS3 yet, it probably will in a few months.
Plenty of people are building cheap PCs to handle all of their entertainment, putting XBMC on it, then hiding it somewhere in their home theatre. So if that sounds good to you, go check it out - it works perfectly well independent of what this post is really about.
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Part two: XBMC as a console
Since it primarily runs on a PC, you may not feel like you’re gaining much by using XBMC as a “game console”. Isn’t that what USB gamepads are for? The answer to that is yes, and if you’ve ever used an emulator or played a PC game with a gamepad, the only thing you’d gain by doing this is a larger screen - since in theory you’d be using XBMC on a TV bigger than your monitor. If you’ve got a laptop you could just plug it into your TV, and win forever!
But I still thought this was really neat because it would take all the trouble I’ve had with PC gaming - either using keyboard+mouse (meh) or setting up a gamepad every time I want to play (meh) - and give me that console experience I love. Basically, XBMC just acts as a sexy launcher for your PC games and for any other game you can play with an emulator. OF COURSE these would be perfectly legal backups of games you own, or games that are hard to purchase these days, etc. etc. You can have everything from arcade games to PS2 games on your PC if you’ve got the hardware for it, so by extension you can have all of those integrated in your XBMC box.
Honestly, I’ll probably set this up at my dad’s one of these days. We just moved the home theatre into the basement, so we can sit around the fireplace and watch movies and play games and etc., and my brother’s PC is pretty close to the TV. Or I could just use my laptop. Either way, it’ll be cool. And we’ll go from watching some awful movie he got in the mail (Netflix will send out DVDs and it saves bandwidth) to playing a NES game and it’ll be great.