jawa asks... what is your favourite TV gaming console?

Jenuall wrote:That MGS2 trailer was a big nail in the Dreamcast coffin...

I've not really played much of the MGS games but I recall people being so excited for that MGS2 demo... and I believe that some folk said they played it for hours.

Admittedly, there's a degree of rose tinted specs, but, for me, it's the SNES.
1. My first proper home console whereby it felt like the arcade in your living room.
2. The age I was at the time, with no responsibilities and plenty of time to devote to games.
3. The sheer number / variety of great games and access through swapping / playing at mate's
4. Also, Super Play

dmin wrote:Admittedly, there's a degree of rose tinted specs, but, for me, it's the SNES.
...
4. Also, Super Play

You know, I do miss gaming mags, dmin. As you've highlighted, they can really add a lot to the experience of owning a particular console. It's absolutely great being able to look up information in a second or two on the internet but, for me, Eurogamer / Nintendo Life / Push Square / Pure Xbox just don't match that sense of fun or excitement that the mags had.

Tsunade wrote:When my brother moved out of mums, she told me she had to filling about 20 holes in his bedroom walls. All made from getting mad at games and destroying the controllers. He went through about 10 360 ones and about 20 PS2 controllers too.

I once bit a Saturn controller so hard it left tooth marks in the plastic.

Usually though, I would just 'mic drop' the controller when a game pissed me off, nowaday I just get a bit sweary.

GameCube, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch for me

jawa_ wrote:

dmin wrote:Admittedly, there's a degree of rose tinted specs, but, for me, it's the SNES.
...
4. Also, Super Play

You know, I do miss gaming mags, dmin. As you've highlighted, they can really add a lot to the experience of owning a particular console. It's absolutely great being able to look up information in a second or two on the internet but, for me, Eurogamer / Nintendo Life / Push Square / Pure Xbox just don't match that sense of fun or excitement that the mags had.

Yeah, definitely. Waiting patiently each month to see the latest review or release on the horizon, garnered a real sense of excitement. Also, with relation to Super Play, that was my first real immersion into Japanese culture and that sense of a shared gaming community (hence ending up on these forums!). Helped by the fact it was so well written and presented too; each issue was a work of art.

I voted for the Wii. I have a soft spot for it, if each game console has a personality the Wii would be happy-go-lucky. The game library is superb in my opinion, I have more games for the Wii than any other system. I think it benefitted from being the last "non-HD" console ever made, allowing experimentation by lots of developers.

This is always a hard one to answer. It's also easy in some respects. I class the Commodore Amiga as a console as no kid at the time ever used them for anything other than playing games. For me, the Amiga is a games console with a keyboard. I used to connect my Mega Drive control pad to it as I hated joysticks and the majority of my favourite gaming moments and experiences are on the Amiga. I insist it was a console.

The Amiga was also lightyears ahead of the Mega Drive & SNES in terms of what it could do. I used to love the MicroProse games - everything from Silent Service, to Knights of the Sky, to Geoff Crammond's Formula 1 Grand Prix (still the best racer I've played). There was nothing else like these games at the time and even when they were ported to the 16-bit machines they lost a lot of that magic as they didn't translate well. Meanwhile, most games that went from console to Amiga ended up being the 'definitive' version purely as the developers were not restricted to the expensive and limited memory size of the game cartridges.

Games on the Amiga were also cheap and easy to pirate. Most new releases were around £20-£25, but then these games would eventually be re-released as budget titles for as little as £9.99. So that is my number 1.

Traditional consoles? Well, the 360 has to get a mention as it had everything just as the PS2 did the generation before.

1. Amiga
2. 360
3. PS2

If I take nostalgia out of it then it reads like this:

1. PS4 Pro
2. 360
3. PS2

When I am asked the same question in 5 years time I hope my top two reads like this:

1. Series X/PS5
2. PS5/Series X

The Ninth Gen should allow developers to give us the best games we've ever played. And they might if they stop shipping games that are not finished.

dmin wrote:Admittedly, there's a degree of rose tinted specs, but, for me, it's the SNES.
1. My first proper home console whereby it felt like the arcade in your living room.
2. The age I was at the time, with no responsibilities and plenty of time to devote to games.
3. The sheer number / variety of great games and access through swapping / playing at mate's
4. Also, Super Play

I had both the Mega Drive and SNES.

The SNES was clearly a technically superior machine, but for me the Mega Drive had more of the games I wanted to play.

I still remember people losing their minds when Star Fox/Wing was announced with the SuperFX chip. That really was like an arcade game in the living room! The SNES flew off the shelves when Nintendo packaged the game with the console. Quite literally a system seller.

Unpopular opinion, I thought the game was boring

Sega releases their own version of the SuperFX chip, I think it was called the SVP chip. I literally almost spaffed my pants when I bought Virtua Racing (£70 on release in 1994) and started playing it for the first time. A game like this on the Mega Drive? Amazing.

These chips seemed like the future at the time but they made games very expensive. I believe only a handful of games were made that used them.

Mommy wrote:I liked my 3DO too. Interesting quirk with controller A plugging into the console, then controller B plugging into the out port. Standard 9 pin joystick interface as used on the Speccy. Loading time were a bit slow but a good version of SF2 Turbo was ported over.

3DO! That's something I haven't thought about for a very long time! This was meant to be the future of gaming at the time.

The first time I saw it was either in Mean Machines magazine or on the Games Master TV show. Everyone at school was convinced they were going to buy one when they were released, despite them costing around £399 at the time.

The first time I played one was in the Beatties toy shop. It was running either a demo or a full version of FIFA which was in 3D. As someone who loved football games this was mind-blowing - until I played it and realised it was a broken mess. The high cost of the hardware and poor support soon saw the 3DO into an early grave.

OrangeRKN wrote:PS2 for me, its library is simply unmatched.

One of the major points of a console that plugs into a TV for me is that it is plug-and-play, so that discounts anything from PS3 generation upwards that both layers getting into a game through its own menu and, more detrimentally, has install times and updates to download. A PS2 is obviously different to a PC, a PS5 isn't.

The thing is gaming started to change dramatically from the 360/PS3 era - all for the better. Games consoles were essentially an entertainment hub as they allowed people to either game, watch films or buy/rent films.

I thought the UI on PS3 was a strawberry floating car crash though and I don't think Sony has ever really got to grips with a decent user interface even to this day so I understand why you don't like being forced to navigate through that 'layer'. I don't really know what Microsoft are doing either as the Xbox UI is a mess as well.

Outrunner wrote:I genuinely think that the gaming industry lost something special when Sega dropped out of the console market. I'm not arguing that they should have stayed, clearly they weren't in a position to, I just miss the old Sega and feel they did most (but not all) of their best work on their own consoles.

I've owned the Master System II, Mega Drive, Saturn & Dreamcast and none of the hardware was cutting edge, even at the time they were released. The Dreamcast was essentially dead on arrival. It had a severe lack of 3rd party support and Sega opted for their own custom discs instead of going for DVD's. So they got it all wrong. Fortunately the Dreamcast had some classic games but it wasn't enough to save it. The PS2 hype train murdered it. We probably saw some of Sega's best efforts on the DC though.

Master System was basic but acceptable for the time so I can't really say anything negative about it. Just a shame it was trounced by the NES but Sega released dozens of classic games on the Master System, even though most arcade conversions were stripped down versions of coin-op games, they were still obvious Sega games.

Mega Drive was decent but you could tell developers were struggling to get any more out of it than they were already getting from quite early on in its lifespan. It's a legendary console though so I am not slating it. But even Sega knew the Mega Drive was underpowered, hence the disastrous MegaCD add-on. This was a massive expensive failure for Sega.

Speaking of massive expensive mistakes, the Saturn was a train wreck of a machine and was completely annihilated by the PlayStation. Sega Rally was a stand-out title but it only had 3 tracks, so it was fine for a quick blast but that was it. The Saturn wasn't very good at 3D gaming, hence why even at the time Virtua Fighter looked comical. VF was meant to be a flagship title!

The Saturn was the death of Sega's hardware business. The Dreamcast was a fine redemption but it was killed by lack of support and developers putting all their resources into PS2 game development. Too little, too late. Sega made a lot of mistakes due to a lack of vision and by completely underestimating Sony. Sega always did software better than hardware but I do agree that their best work was on their own hardware.

Steve wrote:The thing is gaming started to change dramatically from the 360/PS3 era - all for the better. Games consoles were essentially an entertainment hub as they allowed people to either game, watch films or buy/rent films.

I'd use my PS2 as a DVD player without needing to hop through a UI! But yes digital media and streaming services have made some UI layer necessary, the problem is when they aren't good. The PS5 is my least favourite yet - navigation isn't clear, you get tiles of advertising everywhere, the new party system is confusing, and worst of all the PS button behaves inconsistently depending on whether you are in a game or not.

The UI side is the less significant complaint though, the need to sit through installs and updates and then choose between performance and display settings is really what I could do without. It's not impossible to do these things minimally, I have rarely ever been waiting on a Switch game to install or update as any updates seem to be much smaller, less frequent and better handled.

Steve wrote: Just a shame it was trounced by the NES

Commercially definitely but I still reckon it had a better software library than the NES. I was admittedly a Sega kid in the 1980's but I've since been back and played a lot of NES titles. I can see how they laid the template for a lot of what came after but I found many of them quite dull.

I still don't 'get' 2D Mario but I could play Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Sonic all day long. I'd even say Sonic 1 on the Master System is better and more challenging than the Mega Drive version.

Metroid? Not as good as Zillion. Zelda? Wonderboy 3 is a much better game.

Steve wrote:I still remember people losing their minds when Star Fox/Wing was announced with the SuperFX chip. That really was like an arcade game in the living room!

For me, it was Street Fighter II; seeing and playing that for the first time was unreal. I just had to have it!

dmin wrote:For me, it was Street Fighter II; seeing and playing that for the first time was unreal. I just had to have it!

I was never a fan of beat 'em ups so I always ignored Street Fighter II in the arcade, but I do remember the magazines at the time going nuts about the SNES version. It was clearly an amazing achievement to get the game playing as well as it did on the SNES.

The first time I bought Street Fighter II was on the Mega Drive. It was also the Championship Edition rather than World Warrior SNES version. It was an expensive day because I also had to shell out for 2 x 6 button Mega Drive controllers as the game was simply unplayable with the 3 button controller.

I remember Final Fight being really good on the SNES as well. Probably the inspiration for Streets of Rage series...

Carlos wrote:

Steve wrote: Just a shame it was trounced by the NES

Commercially definitely but I still reckon it had a better software library than the NES. I was admittedly a Sega kid in the 1980's but I've since been back and played a lot of NES titles. I can see how they laid the template for a lot of what came after but I found many of them quite dull.

I still don't 'get' 2D Mario but I could play Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Sonic all day long. I'd even say Sonic 1 on the Master System is better and more challenging than the Mega Drive version.

Metroid? Not as good as Zillion. Zelda? Wonderboy 3 is a much better game.

I thought the Master System was unfairly dismissed by a lot of people. I opted for it over the NES as it had more of the games I wanted to play, but the NES had some killer system selling titles at the time.

Nintendo got huge sales when packaging the likes of Mario 3 and Ninja Turtles with the console. Nintendo always had the correct licenced game at the right time to push the NES sales, it was something Sega always overlooked. Games like Batman were huge at the time as it tied in with the movie. I was just bewildered as I thought Turtles, Batman etc were strawberry floating awful!

Never did like that NES controller either...

Carlos wrote:Easily the Dreamcast. This was the first console I ever brought 100% with my own money and as someone who wears their Sega fanboy heart on his sleeve I think that those 2-3 years of unfettered creativity from Sega were the high point of Japanese gaming.

It gave me my first proper internet portal, my first taste of online gaming and some top games nights playing Powerstone and Soulcalibur. In 2001 I got to the point where I nearly gave up playing videogames altogether having lost a lot of interest in the medium. Then I got Jet Set Radio which blew my mind.

I remember having a few hundred quid in accrued holiday pay and going down town in Derby to buy the DC with Sonic Adventure, Soulcalibur and Shenmue. The bus broke down halfway home and on a cold December evening I had to walk home in the rain with this large box. Finally getting in and opening it was a feeling I will never forget.

There was always something about collecting and opening a new console on launch day. It was just special.

I think because most of us have got so many new consoles over the years that the feeling has worn off. Now they just appear on the doorstep & there's no stories to tell.

Since the 360 all my console purchases have been online but I too remember picking up my Dreamcast from GAME (or was it still called Electronics Boutique back then?). I knew the console was in trouble on day 1 because there were only 3 or 4 people waiting in line to pick it up and they were all pre-orders. There wasn't a single person in line to make a spontaneous day 1 purchase. Unheard of for a major new console launch. I'm sure other stores had more interest but the Dreamcast was pretty much dead on arrival.

Collecting other consoles on launch days were just manic. So many people were around and the shops back then used to get a lot of promo material so the stores would all be dressed with appropriate branding and posters for a launch day/week. The Dreamcast launch had none of that.

As we rush into the final couple of hours of the vote... things are very tight! The Cube is just holding off the Switch and - making an incredible late burst! - the 360, with the N64 close behind. There's still a chance that the Wii U could storm into the lead, too .

Thanks for taking part, everyone - we've had some amazing stories and memories shared here. Gaming can be pretty cool, can't it?

Did anyone here ever own an Atari Jaguar? By coincidence I was in Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street on release day and they had piles of them ready for sale but not a single console was bought while I was in the store

I presume they must have shifted a few of them at some point, but that was doomed from day 1.