Ballmer thought for a second or two, before leaping to his feet to deliver his answer. Would the über-macho Microsoft boss pick something brutal, such as Halo or Call of Duty? Or what about a title his boardroom buddies could empathise with, such as Tiger Woods PGA Tour?

Nope. Instead 54-year-old Steven Anthony Ballmer beamed the broadest of smiles and in entirely typical fashion yelled: “Beach Volleyball, baby!”

I wonder why that 2003 title has remained in his affections for so long???

Ask any avid PC gamer and they’ll regale you with stories of the many hours spent getting their machine to work at all. Putting in a new graphics card sounds like a basic upgrade but can often deteriorate into a horrendous rigmarole of driver updates and seemingly random problems and crashes. And that’s a relatively simple upgrade.

I should know the pain of upgrading: I recently built a new PC from scratch. My old rig really wasn’t cut out for gaming any more – it ran on integrated graphics and had no PCI Express slot – so it was definitely time for a change.

Stuart Turton recently wrote that computers no longer have a soul, but I disagree. After installing the motherboard as well as everything else, I had to rip it all apart again and re-seat the CPU heatsink the correct way round; I was convinced that my PC had a soul, and also convinced that it was demonic and needed to be thrown through the nearest window, alongside the rest of the components.

When it was built – and I’d made sure that every header and connector on the motherboard was plugged into the right sockets – I sat back and prodded the power button. Against all odds, the little access light flickered and the fans chugged into life. It was true – I’d built my own computer. We put together many rigs in the PC Pro Labs, but those are different – they normally sit on specially-designed test beds and lack many of the mod-cons that feature in the average home PC.

This was different. My very own PC, assembled from the ground up. Sure, neither the hard disk or the optical drive were actually secured into the chassis – instead, they had been crammed into the respective bays and left to lean on struts of metal – but it didn’t matter. Neither did it matter when I realised that my fan, which was purchased because it had automatic control, needed to run at full pelt to keep the CPU cooled. I simply turned up the speakers and zoned it out, marvelling at the stunning graphics that the new rig enabled me to see.

Hopefully, the point of this long and rambling rant is that computers – and gaming on computers – really shouldn’t be discounted. People claim that playing PC games is far more expensive than playing them on consoles – but I’m not so sure. A reasonable processor, graphics card and couple of gigabytes of RAM can be had for under £200 and will still let you play modern titles at decent levels of quality – and take any of your slightly older games and play them at the highest levels of graphical excellence, as they were originally intended. Up your budget to £300 – which is how much the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost until recently, don’t forget – and your upgrade will have you playing at with many of the settings ramped up to the max, even in the newest games.

There’s a huge amount of satisfaction when it comes to upgrading or building a machine. I recently spent a morning in the office ripping apart an old Shuttle machine and rebuilding it for some Blu-ray testing – and, remarkably, it was pretty enjoyable. Granted, it wasn’t as fun when I realised that I’d got the wrong RAM and had to trek downstairs to get some more, but to see it burst into life at the end of the re-build made me feel like a proud father.

Building or upgrading a PC immediately guarantees that you’ll have more of an emotional connection to a machine than you would with a console. I have a PS3 and the set-up process consisted of no more than getting it out of the box, plugging it, and registering a new account. It’s a remarkable thing and has delivered many hours of gaming pleasure – but, as Stuart pointed out in regards to his current PC, it’s a mere machine. The same could be said of my PS2 and PSX; the only consoles that differ are my old Megadrive and Atari, and those are probably tainted with the rose-tinted goggles of nostalgia more than anything else.

My computer is something different entirely. Turton may argue that now, with machines no more than incremental upgrades over the last expensive, must-have part, they offer little in the way of personality to compare to the past. Not true. I know the various grunts and groans from my hard disk, recognise the exact moment to turn my fan down if I want any silence at all, and can predict when I’ll come a cropper because I’ve been a bit greedy and turned a few settings up too high.

Also consider that new console games cost £40, whereas the latest PC releases are almost never this expensive. Grand Theft Auto 4 costs less than £25 including VAT on Amazon for PC – fifteen pounds cheaper than it did when released on PS3 and Xbox 360 earlier in the year. You’ll soon recoup your potentially higher investment as you work your way through the year’s top releases.

There’s also the overriding factor when it comes to PC gaming: some games are just better played on a desktop. David Bayon will argue against this, but first-person shooter games demand a mouse and keyboard. RTS titles are the same. Whack a decent graphics card in your PC, and almost all PC games will look better than their console equivalents, too. Invest in a gamepad or steering wheel and you’ve got a machine that will put any console in its place.

Consoles do have their charms: I love playing FIFA 09 on my PS3, and I’ll concede that plenty of games – such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band – are better played in front of the TV. There’s something different about PC gaming, though – from the whirring, juddering machine in the corner crafted by my own hands to the better graphics and sheer depth of software available – that means it’s my favourite format. And I don’t care how many people slag it off.

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