I’d been planning to write this week about the different platforms on which Spore is going to be available as of this Sunday. I’d been planning on discussing the potential pros and cons of each platform and asking readers on which platform they’d be playing Spore. I’d been planning to do this… until I went and did the actual research about Spore’s launch, at which time I realized, as I’ve realized so many times in the past, that I am in fact an ignoramus.

This Sunday, Spore is launching for the PC and Mac, and you’ll also be able to get a version of the creature creator on the Nintendo DS. No Playstation 3, Xbox 360, or Wii versions yet. So I guess there’s not immediately much of a choice. The only sad thing is that I’m really poor and my PC is in desperate need of upgrading. As you can see by my gamercard on the sidebar, I’ve been playing Baldurs Gate II, which is a decade old.

Fortunately, when I look at Spore’s system requirements, I see

Windows XP/Vista, 2.0 GHz P4 processor or eq., 512 MB RAM (768 for Vista), 128 MB video card (Pixel Shader 2.0 support), 6 GB HDD. Internet connection.

Whew! So it looks like my Athlon X64 and Radeon X1600 might just be able to pull it off.

And with that thought, I’ve come to realize something. The last games I’ve really played on my PC, I played about six months ago: Penny Arcade Adventures, Team Fortress 2, Bioshock, and Call of Duty 4. Aside from that, only Baldur’s Gate 2. Why? Because I can play the console games on my big high-def LCD TV, and the Playstation 3 has a heck of a lot more horsepower than my PC does, so the games are going to look a whole lot better. The PC is overall a much better platform – I’ve always been a proponent of PC gaming. I hate playing shooters without a mouse, and the resolution on a PC display can be much higher than the best HDTV. But PC hardware is expensive. That’s why I’m still running on a PC over three years old, and I’m sure that I’m not alone in my situation. Right now, I just don’t have two thousand dollars to drop on a new rig. And that’s really the crux of the PC gaming problem for a lot of people.

Enter Spore, with its wonderfully low system requirements, enabling folks without DirectX10 cards and dual core processors to actually enjoy the game. Aside from the system requirements, note that the PC and Mac versions are launching ahead of their console counterparts. End result: I’ll be buying the PC version. Not the eventual Playstation 3 version. Score one for PC gaming.