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My birthday is coming up, and I’m going to have a few hundred dollars to blow on something, so I figure I’ll blow it on video games since I’ve been out of the loop for about a year now. I can’t believe that I don’t even have a console or any games for my computer, being the huge geek that I purport to be!

Thus my birthday begs the age-old gamer question: to PC or to console?

In my research for the ultimate gaming experience I learned an interesting fact: Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo lose money on each video game console they sell. The console gaming market relies solely on its software for profits because a portion of every game you buy goes to the console maker.

Despite the need to spend more on each game, I like the console game market because it puts out a lot of excellent games.

PC gaming is completely different – hardware makers have to make money on their hardware and game makers make money on their games. I learned that the latest king of the graphics cards is the recently released Nvidia GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, with ATI’s Radeon 9700 Pro just a smidgen behind in performance. Either of these cards will set me back $400. Four-hundred freaking dollars? For that price I could buy a console, two games and some extra controllers!

Luckily, computer games are less expensive than console games and the selection is much larger, although the quality of the average game is much lower because there isn’t as much of a monetary barrier to make a PC game. So I’m still on the fence at this point.

Clearly, PCs have immensely greater potential graphically and their games cost less, but in many cases there’s a sacrifice in quality. And it appears that the superior graphics quality that PCs can offer is becoming less and less of a draw since the “bad” graphics of PlayStation 2, GameCube and Xbox aren’t that bad at all.

It’s preposterous that one year after buying a top of the line $3,000 computer I have to deal with choppy framerates and poor textures on PC games just because I don’t have the FX 30 billion or whatever card Nvidia popped out of its silicon womb last week.

The console market is much different in this respect. Sony, whose PS2 is the oldest console on the market by one year, sold 100,000 more consoles in the last three months of 2002 than Microsoft’s Xbox. A console gets better with age because the library of games grows. Microsoft actually reported a quarterly loss of $348 million for its Xbox, and in the wake of that loss they have released a new bargain program in which select games will cost only $19.99. These “platinum hits” include many of the best games from last year.

I think if you like video games, you can’t go wrong with any three of the consoles out there right now, but the best deal seems to be the Xbox. While the GameCube costs less overall, it doesn’t include a DVD player and has fewer features and a smaller game selection. But don’t tell a Nintendo loyalist that I said that.

For now, I think I’ll just sit on my few hundred dollars and see what happens. I know I won’t be shelling out $400 just to be able to run the two or three PC games actually worth playing right now.

If you’d like to give Esposito your birthday wishes or any free gaming gear, e-mail him at resposito@media.ucla.edu.