For the longest time I didn't like console first person shooters (Goldeneye and Perfect Dark being the exceptions). I grew up with Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Doom. I even spent an unhealthy amount of time playing Unreal Tournament in high school. By the time I put down the original Unreal Tournament, I could beat the hardest bot setting in a 1 on 1 death match.
I did play some console FPS games as well, but really the only things which were out there worth playing were Goldeneye and its sequel, Perfect Dark. I never thought of them as being in the same category as PC FPS games since the playing style was completely different. The primary difference was the fact that you never really had to worry about more than one axis of rotation when lining up a shot. Auto-aim took care of when an enemy was above or below you; you simply had to point the crosshairs in their general direction and they are dead.
When the X-Box generation consoles started getting FPS games, I immediately hated them. They fixed the problem with the previous generation of console FPS games: auto-aim. These new-fangled games require you to use two joysticks to control your crosshairs, adding skill back into the game, but they lacked one thing which the PC games got right: finesse. If two players of equal skill are playing an FPS against each other, with one person using a controller and the other using a keyboard and mouse, the mouse would win every time.
For those of you who have never seen a skilled player on a PC FPS, you may have a hard time believing this. A skilled player will set the mouse sensitivity very high, so that they can quickly adjust their crosshairs when they see a target. As an example, lets compare Unreal Tournament 2004 for the PC to Halo for the original X-Box. If you compared the crosshair movement in Halo to the mouse sensitivity I set UT to play at, you would see my mouse sensitivity is roughly 4-5 times the speed of the crosshairs in Halo. Now you can increase the sensitivity in Halo up from its default, but this will not give you as much control as a mouse will when you are moving your cursor.
What is the result of this? When I see someone in a PC FPS, I use the mouse to perform a "Sweeping Shot," meaning I sweep the crosshairs directly to the person I want to shoot and pull the trigger. This is done so fast that I sometimes sweep past them, but I still click at the right time, landing the shot roughly 90% of the time. For something analogous to the Flack Cannon in UT or the Shotgun in F.E.A.R., this is usually an instant kill within the first split second of the encounter. This is in contrast to most console FPS games I've played where the average 1 on 1 encounter lasts slightly longer, requiring extra time (but still not very long) to line up the shot.
Maybe this all is just a result of my upbringing. I'll be the first to tell you I'm no expert in console FPS games. I'm pretty good, but my cousin still kills me in Halo multiplayer, and I slaughter him at Unreal Tournament. Initially it was hard to convince him that I was actually good at FPS games until we started playing UT in Assault mode on the same side. At the end of the match I had roughly 100 kills to his 40, and I died half as much as he did. He was so used to stomping me at Halo it took a while to sink in.
I had a similar experience my second year of college. There was a LAN party hosted on campus where the primary tournament featured Quake 3: Arena. One of the local gamer groups, consisting mostly of frat boys who considered themselves gods of FPS gaming (both console and PC), showed up and talked non stop about how good they were and how they were going to dominate the tournament. They shut up after the first two rounds. In their defense, they were fairly good, taking home second and third place, but I'd bet for all their bragging about how good they are at first person shooters, they had never met anyone who was actually good at PC FPS games.
More recently, I've started adding that twitch reflex into my console gaming. In Rainbow Six: Vegas, I do pretty well with a shotgun by upping my controller sensitivity and using sweeping shots. This is effective, but not as effective as it is with a mouse. Maybe I'm just asking for too much out of the controller.
