What are the top 4 consoles of all time?

[Tanooki]

I would put that xbox comment just above as a negative away from a top. Adding storage caused so many damned problems with systems since. It introduced the wonderful world of unfinished game releases, zero day patches of huge size, DLC to exploit consumers, easily bricked games from updates (firmware too for systems), and the ability to ban people through TOS violations on a whim slamming shut a system from being used closing you out of games you paid for. HDD in consoles are an ongoing curse.

[Jmustang1968]

I would put that xbox comment just above as a negative away from a top. Adding storage caused so many damned problems with systems since. It introduced the wonderful world of unfinished game releases, zero day patches of huge size, DLC to exploit consumers, easily bricked games from updates (firmware too for systems), and the ability to ban people through TOS violations on a whim slamming shut a system from being used closing you out of games you paid for. HDD in consoles are an ongoing curse.

Yeah, we need to go back to the day when a game was released with bugs or unfinished, it stayed that way!!

[BogusMeatFactory]

I would put that xbox comment just above as a negative away from a top. Adding storage caused so many damned problems with systems since. It introduced the wonderful world of unfinished game releases, zero day patches of huge size, DLC to exploit consumers, easily bricked games from updates (firmware too for systems), and the ability to ban people through TOS violations on a whim slamming shut a system from being used closing you out of games you paid for. HDD in consoles are an ongoing curse.

Yeah, we need to go back to the day when a game was released with bugs or unfinished, it stayed that way!!

Back in my day, games were poorly designed, bug riddled, a slow slog lacking much content AND WE LIKED IT!!!!!!!

[Gunstar Green]

Well duh! The obvious answer is Sega Genesis four times.

/thread

[Tanooki]

Nice sarcasm, you damn well know most of the games that came out worked just fine, and in the off chance something had a big enough of an issue they got silent 1.1 style updates, it was rare you'd get some form of an apology as it was truly hosed with a replacement like Turok Rage Wars. I guess today people are just so used to taking it, it's just easier to ignore that past and accept it.

The games now are released unfinished and with bugs because there's little to no encouragement to get it right since it's not stuck on permanent media. And yes I get that stuff back then may have been worked on a couple or a dozen people, and now you're looking into dozens or over a hundred but still it's not a wrong statement either even if the stuff is more complex in most cases. I'm just saying people should show some pride in their work and get it right before it goes out, not finish it after the fact.

[Jmustang1968]

Nice sarcasm, you damn well know most of the games that came out worked just fine, and in the off chance something had a big enough of an issue they got silent 1.1 style updates, it was rare you'd get some form of an apology as it was truly hosed with a replacement like Turok Rage Wars. I guess today people are just so used to taking it, it's just easier to ignore that past and accept it.

The games now are released unfinished and with bugs because there's little to no encouragement to get it right since it's not stuck on permanent media. And yes I get that stuff back then may have been worked on a couple or a dozen people, and now you're looking into dozens or over a hundred but still it's not a wrong statement either even if the stuff is more complex in most cases. I'm just saying people should show some pride in their work and get it right before it goes out, not finish it after the fact.

Stuff was still rushed back then, and wrong and broken, or poorly optimized and was never fixed. I actually like the fact that games can be updated, fixed, or enhanced via player feedback to make it a more enjoyable experience. You are only remembering the good or not buggy games, and not all the ones that also had problems, which was even less forgivable then, because by and large, games were much less complex.

[Gunstar Green]

Nice sarcasm, you damn well know most of the games that came out worked just fine, and in the off chance something had a big enough of an issue they got silent 1.1 style updates, it was rare you'd get some form of an apology as it was truly hosed with a replacement like Turok Rage Wars. I guess today people are just so used to taking it, it's just easier to ignore that past and accept it.

The games now are released unfinished and with bugs because there's little to no encouragement to get it right since it's not stuck on permanent media. And yes I get that stuff back then may have been worked on a couple or a dozen people, and now you're looking into dozens or over a hundred but still it's not a wrong statement either even if the stuff is more complex in most cases. I'm just saying people should show some pride in their work and get it right before it goes out, not finish it after the fact.

I was thinking about this recently due to Doom's 25th anniversary. Let me put just how complicated things are today into perspective. We went from Wolfenstein 3D to Quake in 4 years. Today the development cycle of a single AAA game is that if you're lucky. The problem here being that if a game isn't coming out, they're not making money. And then they're expected to sell the game for the same $60 they've been charging for decades? And people wonder why DLC is necessary and why many developers have started using other tactics like early access?

I think most games still tend to release pretty intact and the ones that don't get savaged by critics and the community, so they're all you hear about.

For PC gamers none of this is new, there have always been patches and sorta broken releases. Classics like Daggerfall and MechWarior 2: Mercenaries are still extremely buggy games. Patches were one of the main advantages that the PC had over consoles, and now it doesn't anymore.

I'm not saying I want single player games to be released unplayably broken, because that is an issue, but it's at the point where it's unrealistic to expect absolutely nothing to be broken on release.

[BogusMeatFactory]

For PC gamers none of this is new, there have always been patches and sorta broken releases. Classics like Daggerfall and MechWarior 2: Mercenaries are still extremely buggy games. Patches were one of the main advantages that the PC had over consoles, and now it doesn't anymore.

Spot on.

I would like to point out games like vampire the masquerade: redemption that released unplayable with your party members ai so terrible that in combat they would immediately use up all their powers to enter a frenzy and attack you, killing you almost instantly, Daggerfall crashing every 5 seconds, Ultima 9 being impossible to run on modern computers, quake 2 requiring specific graphics cards to be even playable at a stable framerate, having to edit your autoexec.bat to free up memory for every game in DOS. It was never ending.

Or let's talk about 8.5 inch floppy games that on an apple ii where you had to have your own disc to save games on, swapping disc's every five minutes. Or about games that you purchase and they just don't run like my personal copy of the wheel of time game or spear of destiny that just straight never worked at purchase.

Want to get a patched version? You need to contact the company directly and wait for a revised version to be made and shipped to you, which could be months or straight up not at all.

Now we have buggy games where textures don't load, or the ai is a bit whonky or your game crashes and you just need to restart the game... Inconvenience, sure, but you can still play the game (unless it is fallout 76 muahahahahahahaha)

[Gunstar Green]

My copy of Spear of Destiny worked, but the installer failed, so I had to manually copy the files from the CD to my hard drive. Instead of showing the title screen it would load up the second level immediately so I'd have to go back to the main menu to start from the first level. I never figured out why this was happening.

[BogusMeatFactory]

My copy of Spear of Destiny worked, but the installer failed, so I had to manually copy the files from the CD to my hard drive. Instead of showing the title screen it would load up the second level immediately so I'd have to go back to the main menu to start from the first level. I never figured out why this was happening.

Yeah back in the day there was such a diverse amount of hardware on pc that everything didn't work for a giant list of reasons and it was an absolute mess. It is so much better now than it was before. There are still issues, of that there is no question, but it is so much better than it was before. The amount of games that we get that just don't play on any hardware is almost nil.