If you're a gamer, you know about fanboys and fangirls. These people arent' simply fans of games, as their names imply. No, the mentality of fangamers is that the only consoles and companies that are good are the ones that they play and are loyal to. Their consoles of choice are their gods, and anyone who disagrees with them aren't gamers at all, because apparently, opinions aren't allowed to exist. The mentality of fangamers ruins the experience for the rest of us, and is the one true thing I can think of in the entire gaming world that I truly hate.

I'm not going to go off on what horrible things should be done to fanplayers, since everyone has their own opinions about that. The point of this blog is to try to make everyone realize that every single platform this generation --- Wii, PS3, 360 and PC --- all have both their ups and downs:

*Nintendo's console, the Wii, gives us more depth than any other console we've ever gotten, thanks to the motion controls. It has the most potential out of any of the platforms. The problem? When companies see the Wii (Nintendo is guilty of this themselves), they see a minigame paradise. Instead of having epic, innovative games on the Wii, we have stuff like Carnival Games. We've gotten quite a few good games for the system, but there are more shovelware games than really good games.

*Sony's console, the PlayStation 3, is the most powerful console we've gotten. It has a superior form of media, the Blu-ray disc, and a universally-accepted hard drive format that allows for much more space and data storage than any of its competitors. The downsides? The PS3 had a terrible launch compared to the Wii and 360. Almost all of its early games were watered-down 360 ports, and it took a very long time for it to pick up steam. Because of that, the PS3 will probably always be behind the 360 in terms of sales, even if only a little bit. Not only that, but there are still some things that need to be added in order to make the online experience comparable to Xbox LIVE (i.e., multiple headsets, multiple PSN IDs at a time, etc.).

*Microsoft's console, the Xbox 360, was released before the others, making it the instant favorite among gamers. It has the largest library of quite a different variety of games, and in my opinion, the most comfortable traditional controller ever created (aside from the d-pad). However, the downside to this console is possibly the most famous of them all --- The sub-par hardware. Every day more and more people are losing their 360s because of the hardware problems the units contain. Microsoft did a good thing by extending the warranty to 3 years for certain problems that may arise, but that's no excuse for the problem not yet being fixed, or even existing at all in the first place, for that matter.

*PC gaming has been the talk of the town recently. PCs will always be more powerful than any gaming console, and they will always be able to do more. However, good games have been pretty rare on this platform recently. That's the major downside --- Gaming consoles are made specifically for games, and PCs for pretty much everything, so games come to consoles much more often than the PC. Generally, from what I've seen, if games are ported to the PC from consoles, they don't hold up as well (Resident Evil 4, anyone?). However, if you have a powerful enough setup, you'll probably get even more fulfillment in the gaming world than if you're just a console gamer.

So there you have it. Every platform has its ups and downs, and absolutely none of them suck, nor do any of them rock harder than the competition. Fanboys and fangirls will undoubtedly read this and try to disprove me, but I don't care. You know and I know that what I've said is true, and I said all of it without attacking or demeaning anyone or any opinions. Why can't we all be like this?

Despite this month's Monthly Musings theme being about hate, the point that you should take away from this blog is quite the contrary --- Don't hate platforms and companies just because they aren't your favorite. Just appreciate different forms of playing games for what they are. Remember, if you spend all your time hating on stuff, that just means the rest of us are having more fun than you are.