The Ten Greatest Video Game Consoles in History

[Christophero Sly]

So you'd say that the negative skew is creating rather than revealing a dissimilarity between the consoles?

Another qualifed yes, more or less, and the upward shift in the mean is playing a part too, I believe. However, it's still just a hypothesis. I'd like to graph the data for the Wii, 360, and PS3, and maybe some handhelds, before I sign off on it completely.

 

Perhaps another visual would help to clarify what I'm seeing.

 

 

The crude illustration above depicts two equivalent distributions. The top distribution, however, is based on a larger library of games. You see how if you drag the distribution from the bottom to the top position, it opens additional space under the curve on the negative side of the distribution (the area in red). When these additional low-scoring games get factored in to a calculation of the mean of the console with the most games, they drag that mean down.

 

It'd be too bad if the small differences we found turn out to be almost wholly useless since it looks more and more like it's based wholly on # of games released. Por otro lado, that does increase the value of "total # of games" as a factor, so that's a sort of consolation prize.

I do think the differences are too small to make much difference, and honestly, I still don't like "total # of games" as a criteria. Sure, it can act as something of a proxy for a host of other criteria, variety, as you brought up, the most important to my mind, but "total # of games" also has it's negatives, like more bad games, that must be accounted for. I think it's better to look at those parameters and statistics that specifically measure the criteria we're most interested in, like # of good games, or variety, directly. Nevertheless, to be clear, when I initially raised this issue of the consequences of equivalent distributions, it wasn't to suggest that there was anything necessarily wrong with your original model as a result, or that any particular criterion you were looking at was unsound, it was only to suggest that some of the criteria you were looking at probably won't reveal much about the qualitative distinctions between consoles. I mean, it's fine if you include "average game rating" in your model, it's just that it's not going to tell you much because the differences between consoles are so minute in regards to that statistic. Not to mention that those differences are largely illusions anyway, for reasons I've already mentioned. Of course, the Wii appears to represent something of an exception, but even so, a 5% difference really isn't a lot, especially when you reduce it by 80% by weighting that particular criterion at only 20%.

 

My original model values innovation very lightly and marketplace Success not at all - but does give some value to availability, which is of course very closely tied to success. My view is that while the more historically-minded of us are more than happy to say 'This was first, That was first', it doesn't really matter that much as - if That is better than This, that is the end of this.

I don't think so, and I'm definitely a Wii-booster as I said. I am actually playing Wii right now. Anyway, we're just rolling with popular opinion as to what is good, also known as the "50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong" plan. But can they? Of course. Still, I look at the list and say "yeah, all that stuff up at the top IS really good when I play it myself, and all that stuff at the bottom IS really bad. I guess the weird conclusion is that by and large, there IS accounting for taste. This is it.

I agree with what you've said in these two paragraphs. I don't think we should treat the Wii with kid gloves just because it does things a bit differently.

 

These long, pedantic tangents of mine are probably boring the crap out of people.

not yet!

[in the dark]

The 64, I think, is an overrated system. A recent poll in nintendo power showed that it was the first system of many people who are active in game collecting and culture at the moment. I believe nostalgia is swaying them in a way that is unsustainable and that the system's halo will eventually fade.

 

Weird to think that. I guess I'm "old" at 28, but I started with the NES - I actually never have had an N64, though I imagine I'll get one for cheap one of these days to round out my modern console collection. I do agree that it is and always was overrated for the time. I wonder how many people 25-50 have "graduated" from game collecting/culture over the past decade or so? I hope I don't ever feel like leaving my gaming passion behind.

 

Oh - and just to add to your shovelware comment, I agree. People talk about current possible rares on the Wii (gotta love the speculators), and so many people talk about how even if some shovelware titles end up being rare down the line, no one would want them anyway. Then you look at some of the rarest NES games, and a lot of it is shovelware crap. That said, I have a hard time believing their will be Wii completists out there...that's just too crazy. Don't mean to offend anyone though, more power to you if you have something like that in mind.

I just had to make a comment. I am 55 and the passion for gaming is still there. I have gravitated toward retro gaming and there is where my passion for gaming has remained. Not sure in what ways that is being referred to, the N64 being over rated. I do know that it being up against the Saturn and the PS1, at the time, it was the most power hardware. It was only hampered by the cart medium. But it did manage to set standards in 3D gaming that has effected the way we play 3D games today. Even though the N64 was restricted by the cart, it is one of the reasons I love gaming on the system today. It is because I love cart based gaming rather than the disc, personal preference. Not sure if the N64 is considered something that collectors look for though. You can purchase most games for 99 cents or more.

 

 

[Christophero Sly]

Here's one final graph. This one includes the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. The means for each console are given in the legend. Besides the Wii, nothing really stands out. However, the Xbox 360's mean is lower than it should be relative to the other consoles because metacritic includes XBLA games in it's database. The majority of those games have terrible reviews, and they appear to be really dragging the 360's mean down. I don't have the patience to pick those out, so this will have to do. Nevertheless, without those XBLA titles as part of the calculation, I suspect the 360's mean would be much closer to the PS3's.

 

 

EDIT: Ignore the title of that graph, I just forgot to change it.

[DickNixonArisen]

That's good in a way though, because it shows about how much statistical force needs to be exerted to move the means up or down. I'll do some writing on this over the weekend when I get my head back together.

[Cliff Friedel]

To me, the SNES has to be number 2. It's fun to play, worked really well, the controllers were comfortable in your hand, the games were good and original, and they had good licensing with other companies to get the "other" games you wanted to play (like MKII). Also, there were a huge supply of used games, which meant you could trade them in and play other stuff on the cheap. This to me made it better than anything except the NES. Even the 2600 comes in a close 3rd behind it. Otherwise though, I think your list is pretty good.

[DickNixonArisen]

Yea, we kinda hijacked this one. But this last post does include something I hadn't figured in to my ratings - secondary market availability. Are there a lot of used games and accessories floating around? It would be tied to at least two other factors that I can think of - durability of the games and accessories, and total number of them sold.

[Cliff Friedel]

I would swap the first two and place the 2600 first and NES second and would bump the N64 for the Intellevision since the grpahics were real good and the adventure and sports games (and intellevoice) were all ground breaking.

 

For its day, I think the Intellivision had better adventure games. I can still remember that damn dragon scaring the hell out of me when I was playing AD&D. Also, there were a lot of cool innovations that didn't seem to resurface for quite a while (the gradually exposing map comes to mind). Also, the AD&D games were probably one of the few games that actually used the controller correctly. Both Treasures of Tarmin and the other one had keys that made sense and worked when you wanted them to. For its day, it was pretty amazing. I remember wanting an INTV for ages just to play those games. Never had that happen with the N64.

[DickNixonArisen]

While I agree that those two games were near-perfect implementations of the INTV's potential, and I love them, I still don't believe the INTV makes it into a top ten list. Maybe top fifteen though, it's no slouch.

[carmel_andrews]

There should only be ONE games system on that list, that system is ATARI....is there any other

 

remember the old saying, imitation is the first sign of flattery

Edited June 18, 2010 by carmel_andrews

[Rev. Rob]

There should only be ONE games system on that list, that system is ATARI....is there any other

 

remember the old saying, imitation is the first sign of flattery

 

So, Atari was imitating Fairchild by making the world's third reprogrammable game console?

[+thegoldenband]

Re: the first female protagonist, Girl's Garden for the SG-1000 came out in 1984, two years before Metroid. (And yes, she's a human female.)

[carmel_andrews]

There should only be ONE games system on that list, that system is ATARI....is there any other

 

remember the old saying, imitation is the first sign of flattery

 

So, Atari was imitating Fairchild by making the world's third reprogrammable game console?

 

 

 

 

 

Fairchild got lucky, don't forget that atari's machine was held back because of a legal wrangle, if it weren't for that and atari had the lolly/wonga atari would have probably beat fairchild to the market (with it's programmable machine)

[Herbarius]

I probably should have said "systemic bias". What I would expect to see in a graph of non-biased reviews that are based on a 100 point scale, is a mean closer to 50. The fact that it's up in the high-60's seems to indicate that all games review scores are somewhat inflated. However, I'm not sure what the source of that inflation is.

Read this!

[Christophero Sly]

I probably should have said "systemic bias". What I would expect to see in a graph of non-biased reviews that are based on a 100 point scale, is a mean closer to 50. The fact that it's up in the high-60's seems to indicate that all games review scores are somewhat inflated. However, I'm not sure what the source of that inflation is.

Read this!

I suspected as much. Thanks for the link. It's very interesting to see just how pervasive and robust this phenomenon is.

[DracIsBack]

To me, the SNES has to be number 2. It's fun to play, worked really well, the controllers were comfortable in your hand, the games were good and original, and they had good licensing with other companies to get the "other" games you wanted to play (like MKII). Also, there were a huge supply of used games, which meant you could trade them in and play other stuff on the cheap. This to me made it better than anything except the NES. Even the 2600 comes in a close 3rd behind it. Otherwise though, I think your list is pretty good.

 

 

I really have to give this system another try ... I really do.

 

When it was new, I wanted it to fail. I hated Nintendo's 'bully tactics' and thought they were arrogant. Given the amount of time they had to 'improve' on what Sega had released, I thought what they released was disappointing hardware wise given the 2 year gap. I was glad when Sega came along and knocked them down a bunch of pegs by fighting like an animal.

 

But in hindsight, Nintendo does best when cornered and I missed out on some great games spurned on by fear of what Sega could do to them if they weren't careful.

[DickNixonArisen]

Is it realistic to say that the company acts as a whole to produce great games for reasons like outside pressure? Another view would say that individuals (the creators and producers) make games based more on what they feel like doing and what they think will be fun. I guess the question is "how much of a factor is competition on the quality of titles?"

 

 

 

I haven't had the internet for a while so i'm still mulling over a lot of these statistics issues. If the four point scale effect is consistent, it could be corrected for or even just ignored. It would account for that swell in ratings, and then you just pull it right back down by whatever margin it's inflated by.

[DracIsBack]

Is it realistic to say that the company acts as a whole to produce great games for reasons like outside pressure? Another view would say that individuals (the creators and producers) make games based more on what they feel like doing and what they think will be fun. I guess the question is "how much of a factor is competition on the quality of titles?"

 

Wasn't talking about companies in general - but was talking about Nintendo specifically during the SNES era because that is exactly what seemed to happen. I have no doubt in my mind that - behind closed doors, someone said to Shigeru Miyamoto that he and his team better deliver some magic or the Genesis was going to take everything away. Nintendo was no longer "cool" in kids eyes, their market share was no longer an overwhelming majority and Sega was fighting like a wild animal.

 

There were a lot of great games born on the SNES when Nintendo's leadership was under one nasty attack. True, the individuals create, but management also employs the individuals, the creative directors, approves what goes and what doesn't, what gets funding and what doesn't and what sets company direction.

 

There is no way a risky, totally different venture like the Wii would have gone ahead without management from up high standing behind, supporting etc.

Edited July 3, 2010 by DracIsBack

[kool kitty89]

Is it realistic to say that the company acts as a whole to produce great games for reasons like outside pressure? Another view would say that individuals (the creators and producers) make games based more on what they feel like doing and what they think will be fun. I guess the question is "how much of a factor is competition on the quality of titles?"

 

It depends if it's healthy competition or crushing and sudden competition that forces panic and rash decisions. That wasn't quite the case with the NES, but it did force competition to a minimum (a number of factors fueling it), Sega's subsequent competition (NEC first in Japan -along with Sega to a lesser extent) did break that and make for some healthy competition...

 

Sony otoh came screaming in with tons of cash and caused several to falter: Panasonic dropped the M2, NEC rushed out an old shelved project to try to keep up instead of a timely design right for the rapidly changing market, Sega had rushed to rework the saturn and ended up with the 32x as well on top of the mess of internal conflicts, Nintendo... well they were kind of weird witht he N64 in general, can't so much blame Sony for anything, and of course Atari Corp had any hope crushed. (though they managed to get out of the business very favorably)

NEC was just a bit dumb doing what they did, rather like Nintendo, except Nintendo did so with the benefit of hindsight (given the considerably later release) and then went onto the even stranger addition of the DD (more expensive and less useful than optical media/drives -and released a year after Sega introduced their custom GD-ROM format -and Ninteno didn't even deed something that advanced for the secure/proprietary format they wanted -they ended up going with conventional mini DVD with hefty security for the GC)

 

That's hardware more than software to a fair extent, but there's a fiar bit of software issues tied to that as well.

 

 

 

Is it realistic to say that the company acts as a whole to produce great games for reasons like outside pressure? Another view would say that individuals (the creators and producers) make games based more on what they feel like doing and what they think will be fun. I guess the question is "how much of a factor is competition on the quality of titles?"

 

Wasn't talking about companies in general - but was talking about Nintendo specifically during the SNES era because that is exactly what seemed to happen. I have no doubt in my mind that - behind closed doors, someone said to Shigeru Miyamoto that he and his team better deliver some magic or the Genesis was going to take everything away. Nintendo was no longer "cool" in kids eyes, their market share was no longer an overwhelming majority and Sega was fighting like a wild animal.

That was only true in the west, and largely due to NoA's restrictive policies in the first place, not until AFTER Sega introduced the ratings system (which Nintendo rejected and went to court over) did Ninendo definitively push ahead, though that was only part of the contributing factors. (part of it being Sega's software wasn't quite as competitive from 1994 onward and there were a number of JP titles that should have been localized but weren't -including some that did go to Europe and some to sega channel exclusively)

 

In Japan Sega was never a big factor prior to the Saturn. NEC was, but Nintendo still had a huge lead in market share (it's because of Japan that the SNES outsold the MD/Genesis by a good margin -take that out of the picture and you do indeed have a close match probably a lead for the MD -popular in continental Asia, North America, Europe, India and parts of the Middle East, South America, and Australia). NEC failed to establish the PCE very well outside of Japan (and some parts of Asia), did a poor job in the US and never even went to Europe. (even though that would have been more favorable)

 

NoJ never had the censorship issues of NoA or NoE (even some western Sega titles had notable censorship, moreso in Europe, but SF II SCE's intro replacing the black guy getting punched with white guy was universal in the western releases -left as original in Japan, Bloodlines was notably censored in Europe including the title -oddly enough battle frenzy was renamed bloodshot in Europe)

 

 

There were a lot of great games born on the SNES when Nintendo's leadership was under one nasty attack. True, the individuals create, but management also employs the individuals, the creative directors, approves what goes and what doesn't, what gets funding and what doesn't and what sets company direction.

 

There is no way a risky, totally different venture like the Wii would have gone ahead without management from up high standing behind, supporting etc.

Risky or not, that's true for almost every major product, so I really fail to see the significance there.

 

Hell the Wii's design is FAR less risky in many respects: namely the low per unit cost and low R&D costs (even the controller tech is all pretty old stuff, nothing that would merit high patent royalties if patents are even still valid for it).

 

The Famicom in Japan (Nintendo was small with only limited experience in the industry and there was a very limited home console makert in Japan at the time) and again to the US with the NES (totally unknown brand brought over in the post-crash era -though it would likely have been tougher had there not been the crash due to strong competition -hell they got in just when the market was starting to recover and got the marketing right by the time they launched the NES in early/mid 1986 -right marketing and a killer app in, like Atari with Space Invaders)

[Christophero Sly]

If the four point scale effect is consistent, it could be corrected for or even just ignored. It would account for that swell in ratings, and then you just pull it right back down by whatever margin it's inflated by.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a satisfactory way to do what you suggest. There are multiple factors contributing to the inflation of the mean, and it would be nearly impossible to identify them all and account for their specific influences.

 

Moreover, the 0-100 point scale is finite. Simply dragging the distribution to the right twenty points, and centering it around a mean of 50 (the mean we would expect from a non-biased distribution) would leave nowhere for the lowest scores (those already below 20) to go. After scaling, those score would end up in negative territory, and of course, that's impossible. Furthermore, the games with deservedly high rankings (>90) would be dragged down to the 70's, and I don't think that's the outcome you're after either.

[DracIsBack]

Risky or not, that's true for almost every major product, so I really fail to see the significance there.

 

Was replying to the assertion "Is it realistic to say that the company acts as a whole to produce great games for reasons like outside pressure?".

 

Hell the Wii's design is FAR less risky in many respects: namely the low per unit cost and low R&D costs (even the controller tech is all pretty old stuff, nothing that would merit high patent royalties if patents are even still valid for it).

 

Absolutely it cost less. It was also a gamble as to whether or not consumers would be willing to embrace a console with far less graphical prowress than competitors. And regardless of whether or not motion controls technically existed in some limited fashion before, Nintendo went after an entirely new market (extremely risky) with a primary means of playing that had not been done before.

 

It was very much a blue ocean strategy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy

[kool kitty89]

Absolutely it cost less. It was also a gamble as to whether or not consumers would be willing to embrace a console with far less graphical prowress than competitors. And regardless of whether or not motion controls technically existed in some limited fashion before, Nintendo went after an entirely new market (extremely risky) with a primary means of playing that had not been done before.

 

I think they may have reasoned that digging a growingly neglected niche (while supporting some of their mainstay stuff) was the best chance to really hit the market. They could have done that with or without better tech... Could have still gone cheap and went with something considerably more capable than the GC/Xbox, but cheaper and somewhat less powerful than the 360 and sold it near to cost rather than making a tidy profit off far cheaper hardware. (regardless of making use of new controls or aiming at a different sector of the market)

 

They also got pretty lucky on top of that, with both competitors really screwing themselves: MS with their reliability problems (and really stupid ones that that, just poor engineering, or management cheaping out and still insisting on an unrealistic form factor) and Sony with their exceptionally high price: Nintendo would have likely done well with any reasonable piece of hardware, even a more conventional one. (I personally don't much care for the Wii overall, though it's our only current gen console... one thing I'd have really likes is an option for GC controller support on most, or even all games by default, some games are ruined by control gimmicks, others are OK but better with conventional controls, and others quite good but having the option would still be preferred; definitely had more fun on the GC)

I'm really hoping the whole motion control (etc) vs conventional input devices thing balances out a bit down the road or I may ed up shifting to PC games when I opt to go to more modern stuff again... or simply stick with retro. (dozens of great of great games in my favorite genres I've not yet touched, many of which are big time classics I missed at the time: especially graphic adventures and space/flight combat sims)

 

I may not be particularly happy about it, but I can respect Nintendo's marketing ability... don't really care for the way VC is run overall. (for emulation ranging from close to as good as you get on a PC to unacceptable in a few cases and prices that may sometimes be attractive but are often rather inordinate given you could buy the real games for less with shipping online or less than that if you look elsewhere, or far less in compilation form, or even cheap standalone ports) Again, if they're making money at it I can't really fault them. (I think one could argue that lower prices in many areas would increase profits... or especially if deals were made on bundles of games or sets in a series in particular)

Some say that's paying for convenience, but I really don't find it such given how simple and non-time consuming most PC emulators are to use and the prices for PC gamepads.

 

 

But I've gotten way off topic: the only other thing to say is that regardless of their console success Nintendo has the handheld market pretty much nailed, which gives them a fair bit of security regardless.

That may have been part of what fueled the Wii as well: the design and subsequent success of the DS. That gimmick went even more extreme for a while than the Wii and hurt more games IMO, certainly more 1st/2nd party/licensed games. (most disappointing being Star Fox Command, not unplayable but it certainly sucked the bun out of it; if there's ever a Wii star fox game here's to hoping they don't screw that up -be it Nintendo or a 3rd party as has been the case with the last couple games)