When did game consoles reach their peak for you?

[BydoEmpire]

18 hours ago, Flojomojo said:

So true. Mark mine at "on the occasion of the birth of my child," which was when Xbox 360 had red ring of death, just when I wanted to play Orange Box. When the UPS driver came around with my fixed console, saw the baby, and said, "you don't have time for this anymore," he was completely correct. 

I think that's pretty similar for me, which is about the Wii/360 era.  I really enjoyed the Wii, and I still do.  I enjoyed the 360 to a point, but I don't think I ever bought a full-priced 360 game the entire time I had the console.  I certainly didn't have a big library, but I enjoyed a bunch of the games.  Spending dozens of hours on a game was just no longer a priority in my life, so I shifted back to pre-crash / arcade games I could have fun with in 10-15 minutes once every couple of weeks without a lot of re-ramp-up.

Edited August 30, 2019 by BydoEmpire

[DragonGrafx-16]

I have  a decent amount of 360 games as I  find a lot at Goodwill.  I do miss the days of finding NES, SNES, and Genesis games for $1. I'd buy everything I could find even the bad ones, AKA "the shitty games that suck ass" (LJN). But I dropped a lot of the really bad stuff at my local games store just so I didn't need to see them anymore. 

Edited August 30, 2019 by DragonGrafx-16

[+davidcalgary29]

Wow, you guys. Unless you count my Lynx (1990), the Jag was the first console that I owned, and I bought that in 2002. I was a live-and-die A8 owner until then (and still am), and really didn't have time for anything else. For me, the Dreamcast was the only console (bought in 2005) that really impressed me with its library, and captures my attention to this day. I've owned an Xbox, Xbox 360, and PS4 since then, but haven't really been impressed with any of them.

[Flojomojo]

There's a group on Reddit for people like you, they call it "patient gamers." 

[Tanooki]

Full price games as a thing. I stopped that as the usual with the end of the GameCube era. It just seemed stupid and wasteful in ever increasing amounts of releases and time. 

[homerhomer]

This is a though one for me.  I'm going with the NES.  Back in the day, I would rent NES games at the local video stores and there was enough of them to always have something new to try every week.  I can remember be giddy renting Gauntlet and Double Dragon.  Even bad games were fun because it was only like 3 dollars. So many cool games. The NES had a ton of arcade ports too.  

 

The 16 and 32bit generations are amazing but I didn't have the experience with the library like I did with the NES.  

[juansolo]

The ones I played the most were probably the VCS and the SNES, but for me peak console gaming was the Dreamcast. It was the first time that a console surpassed an arcade machine. It's library was small but the quality was so high. Soul Calibur was a release title! It's one of the few games I can hand on heart declare as perfect. Indeed that whole generation was special: the PS2, GameCube and Xbox. All stunning consoles, all offering something a little different.

 

Since then they've only been getting progressively worse. A lot of this I put down to consoles going online and the practice of releasing unfinished games and patching them later becoming a thing. It all just mars the experience for me. Installing games... Nope, that's not what a console is about. Games aiming for photo realism at the expense of FPS. 30fps being common place when most games used to run at 50 or 60 (depending on region). It's at the point where I didn't buy into this generation until it was 3 years in... Which considering I've bought most of them on release, that's a sign. As for whatever's next, given the state of the industry with 'games as a service' now. I'm just not interested at all. 

[Agamon]

Probably the NES era, for me.  I was a console player in the 80s (2600 and NES), but moved mostly to PC after that (I owned an SNES, Genesis, and PlayStation, but I didn't use them much).  Stayed with PCs until the XBox 360, and now I'm a mix of both.

[IntelliMission]

For consoles, I agree with many of you that it has to be the 32/64 bit era. Games were really original, systems were very different, there was offline multiplayer and 2D games were still important. It is not a coincidence that so many modern games are versions or sequels to the games released in that era.

 

For games in general, I would say my favorite "system" are MS-DOS PCs from 1989 to 1995. Doom, Monkey Island, all the graphic adventures... and I don't even like RPGs or strategy games, but I guess that would have felt like being in heaven for fans of those games. Computer games were often very different from console games from 1985 to 1995, and in my opinion they were much more interesting (consoles were still aimed towards kids back then and Sega and Nintendo forced developers to release more "standard" games, this is the reason why there are so many 2D platformers for those systems). I believe too many people have been "removing" computers from the history of video games, mentioning only consoles as it they were the only way to play video games. I admit piracy was important, too: cartridges were too expensive.

 

Controversial opinion: A ZX Spectrum is more fun than a NES/Master System, and an MS-DOS PC more fun than a SNES/Mega Drive. More games, more original games, cheaper games, anyone could program or modify games for the machines.

Edited September 9, 2019 by IntelliMission

[Silverfleet]

Holy necro-bump!

 

I'm going with the early 2000's during the PS2/Xbox/GC/Dreamcast era. It was a great time for gaming, and it was the last console generation before everything needed to download a patch to run correctly. Nothing kills the buzz of bringing home a top-tier game and having to wait a half hour for the game to download extra content and updates. I still love this era today.

On top of that, retro collecting was still cheap and easy. I stocked up on tons of older games during this time from a number of different places like Gamestop, Play and Trade, and local pawn shops and flea markets. I really started collecting in earnest during this time, buying in bulk for dirt cheap! Nothing like being able to grab a box of 100 Atari games, all with manuals, and a working console with a ton of accessories for $30, a N64 with a pile of great games for $15, or a Dreamcast out of the clearance bin at Gamestop for $20. Miss those days! 

[Magmavision2000]

For me it was the PS1/Saturn/N64 era. It was the first time arcade game ports looked almost 1:1 with the real thing.(probably because some consoles used the same internals as the arcade cabinet)

Some game franchises also got their start on these systems (Grand Theft Auto, Crash Bandicoot, Quake (some of these started on PC but their first console ports were on these systems)).

 

These systems were also some if the first systems to have online play (Sega Net Link and Randnet).

[Flojomojo]

On 8/29/2019 at 10:27 PM, Flojomojo said:

So true. Mark mine at "on the occasion of the birth of my child," which was when Xbox 360 had red ring of death, just when I wanted to play Orange Box. When the UPS driver came around with my fixed console, saw the baby, and said, "you don't have time for this anymore," he was completely correct. 

Update: I just gave away my Orange Box disc to my kid's friend (12 years old) who is really into Portal. 

[adamchevy]

Holy necro-bump!   I'm going with the early 2000's during the PS2/Xbox/GC/Dreamcast era. It was a great time for gaming, and it was the last console generation before everything needed to download a patch to run correctly. Nothing kills the buzz of bringing home a top-tier game and having to wait a half hour for the game to download extra content and updates. I still love this era today.

 

On top of that, retro collecting was still cheap and easy. I stocked up on tons of older games during this time from a number of different places like Gamestop, Play and Trade, and local pawn shops and flea markets. I really started collecting in earnest during this time, buying in bulk for dirt cheap! Nothing like being able to grab a box of 100 Atari games, all with manuals, and a working console with a ton of accessories for $30, a N64 with a pile of great games for $15, or a Dreamcast out of the clearance bin at Gamestop for $20. Miss those days! 

 

 

 This is one of the reasons I went back to playing on the 2600 7 years ago. I agree with the early 2000s. It was great to be able to pop a game in and just play. I predicted a return to Solid State media during the 360/PS3/Wii era, hence the Switch. I hope with how cheap Micro SDs are getting the other console makers will follow suit, but I doubt it. It’s also impossible to release a finished game. The current generation of consoles have to install your physical media to the hard drive so the data can be verified for DRM. Bullshit, it’s so they can continue to patch their multi million dollar pile of high level coded garbage until they release the next iteration. Once they get tired of keeping that particular game operative on the servers, then bye bye. It looks like Retro gaming will stay in the past in the future.