My go to would probably be the 7th generation (i.e Xbox 360/PS3) just for the community alone.
Best generation of consoles?
Im gonna have to say the 4th and 5th generations, together.
4th gen had Super Nintendo, and it is my opinion that gaming would not be what it is today if the SNES did not appear. It was such a revolutionary leap forward, Not so much technically, but just in how games were made and played. You had RPGs that could be played for a hundred hours, with beautiful lush graphics. You had stuff that seem pulled straight from the future, like F-Zero and Star Fox, and you just had a lot of brilliant games in between.
And 5th gen had the Playstation, Which basically took everything that the SNES did, and iterated it to the next level. The only place where the PSX failed being a straight SNES upgrade was on load times, due to the abandoning of carts for CDs.
You have to give an honorable mention, of course, to the NES for revitalizing the home games industry after Atari’s collapse, where maybe none of what we have today would exist as we know it if it wasnt for the NES.
I think anything from the PS3 later started getting too obsessed with computing power and graphics, to the significant detriment of game quality, story, and playability. of course there were still games from there after, but they felt more rare than at any time before it.
Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, PS2, PS3, XBOX 360 and Wii. The Nintendo Switch is a good modern one and so is the Steam Deck.
Edit: I didn’t like Sega because its controls were confusing. ;-;
Ps2. Still have two today that are on the network and have hard drives and they get played.
Xbox can go fuck itself. Never microsoft.
I am struggling on this one.
I want to say the 4th, but that may be rose tinted glasses. SNES and Genesis were amazing, games were finished, no DLC, no updates, no accounts, no online, but the more I look at it, the more I think that is rose tinted because of other family and societal issues at the time. But 16 bit hardware is ALWAYS special to me.
Then I’m tied on 6th or 7th (6-7, if you will). The era of local co-ops with Xboxes and 360s (I think you could link 360s the same way?) networked together is hard to beat. Halo-Halo 3 with friends are some of my fondest teenage memories. 16 people on 4 Xboxes was amazing, and I’m sad it’s not really a thing anymore. My PS3 still gets used, my Wii is amazing, it opened up games to non gamers. My GameCube was awesome for its time. It’s tough to say. But I’m gonna go with 7th gen for my halo 3 and halo 3 master chief 360, sadly gone now.
- I mean, the Gamecube was basically a home defense weapon. Actually, the original XBox controller was pretty hefty, too. Sony really dropped the ball unless we’re giving the PS2 slim a pass as a throwing star.
PS2, GameCube, N64 hands down. Saturn was alright, Dreamcast was ahead of it’s time and cost a boat load. OG Xbox was alright, but beyond Halo…meh. IMO.
I’m still so upset about this
Same - I paid them a down payment and they stole it dude
That was the first generation I encountered the good old, “screw what you want to do, we have to update!”, BS.
I really want to say 6th gen, but I’ll go with 7th too, the improvements were amazing.
6th. Gaming was mature but internet enabled greed wasn’t there and budgets weren’t too bloated for companies to take risks.
360/ps3 first gen to be online gaming first. In my opinion gaming is at its best when you get to play with and against other people. There is truely nothing like the competition of online gaming. Couple that with voice chat and a social system I just had so much more fun on ps3 than ps1 or ps2.
PS2/GC/XB was the last generation where, with very few exceptions, the game on the disk was the entire game. No post-launch patches, no DLCs, no microtransactions.
I’m not blinkered enough to say those things are always bad, but it was nice to know you could take a game off a shelf and it’d be the complete product.
How dare you leave out the Dreamcast.
Because they had to come correct the first time around or else it wouldn’t sell due to bad feedback. That could come at a steep cost to the studio, so there was more incentive to get it right the first time, since post-release patches weren’t really a thing before the 360 came around.
Rose tinted glasses…
“Game breaking glitches” were less prevelant back then, but they still existed. And without patches, if it made it to the game, it was always going to be in the game.
Like, patches being considered a bad thing is wild.
And ignores that most games can actually still be played off just a disk. I saw a crazy high percentage the other day in reference to PlayStation getting rid of disks, something like >80% of PS5 games can be played off a disc with no Internet.
If your going to make a complaint, complain that they don’t take as much care for release as they used to, but then you have to admit most stuff is fixed in days or even hours of launch via patch.
I wonder if this is just a proxy question for “what game system did you have when you were 14?”
The best years for music are [birthyear + 12] until maaaybe [birthyear + 18] but I’d certainly listen to your points about extending that up to [birthyear + 25] because that’s when [band #5] came from behind and pulled to the lead after [band #2] and [band #4] broke up. Glad to hear you had the same experience
For my childhood, Super NES/Genesis (though, I started with Pong and had a 2600).
Now I say 360/PS3 because looking back, those games tend to have been the best. You had the Mass Effect trilogy, the more fun/silly Saints Row games, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, Oblivion and Skyrim, the best Grand Theft Auto to date (San Andreas) and the two before it… and the two after it… Just loads of great games came out on those systems. Going back on my XSX and looking at the sales on 360 games, it’s insane how much game you can get.
Playstation2/Gamecube, GBA/NDS
For me Twilight Princess is the GOAT of single player games, so I agree. And I started gaming at the beginning, so it isn’t just nostalgia for me.
The one that had the N64.
Agreed. I played my n64 sooooo much. I wanna get one again.
A few years ago, this would have been my answer just because we spent so many hours on GoldenEye and Mario 64, but I’ve since realized that aside from a few gems, most of the games on that system were garbage.
