sevin0seven wrote:I think the title of this thread should be rename: What are "you're" top 4 consoles of all time.
I think console titles, at least in the cartridge days, tended to be less buggy than PC games. I'm not sure why, but that tended to be the case. It may be the requirements to craft such compact and tight code to fit everything into limited cartridge space, but most bugs in console titles tended to be a hair more obscure or difficult to trigger.
I think there's a variety of reasons.
While there are exceptions most console developers were part of a larger company or at least under the purview of a large publisher so they had access to a bit more quality control and oftentimes more money. A vast majority of PC developers were more akin to today's independent scene (especially shareware gaming) except that they had to make their own tools from scratch most of the time if they wanted to make a game. Their feedback and quality control was often just releasing alpha content onto a BBS.
Until the graphics acceleration days they were also developing games for hardware that was ostensibly not designed to play games, using clever programming to make PCs do things they weren't really intended to do at the time while consoles had both hardware made specifically for video games and access to development tools to make them. Even later on as Bogus already said, you didn't have standardized hardware on PC which only added to the difficulties.
Though I feel like we're giving things like terrible slowdown and massive sprite flickering a pass because of our retro-colored glasses. Console games were not perfect.
1) PS3 2) PS2 3) SNES 4).....a tie between a bunch of other consoles...but probably Xbox 360
Logic for why PS3 (and 360) is so highly ranked
Okay - so SNES is great and all, but it has a huge weakness. It literally does not have 3D games. NES, Genesis and SNES are missing a ton of genres.
N64, PSX, PS2, GC and Xbox all have the opposite problems - they heavily neglected 2D games. For what ever reason, even though 2D games were clearly still very fun, they were looked upon as archaic and most companies stayed away from them.
Since this is a retro forum and in general the PS3 is not as celebrated as its two predecessors this will probably be an unpopular opinion, but the PS3 generation (Ps3/360/Wii) were the first generation to embrace both 2D and 3D. The PS3 has something for everyone. It really beats all consoles before it in terms of genre diversity, and it has better exclusives than its counter part - the 360. The Wii falls behind because it lacks 3rd party support. A lot of the PS3's library is also overlooked because it was multi plat with 360 and PC, but a good game is a good game (the Wii would have been much better if it had more options, you can't even play Street Fighter on it man).
PS3 and 360 also had online play - while prior gens either had no online play or limited (original Xbox I guess did, but I did not have it at the time when Xbox live was active). This obviously adds a whole other dimension since it's hard playing with friends all the time when you're an adult, online functionality makes things convenient.
So yeah...PS3 is the GOAT console so far (haven't dived too much into PS4, but I have played with Wii-U and Switch).
PS2 and SNES are kinda obvious, so I don't need to explain them.
I'm not really sure about 360 being 4th, more of a gun to my head - the argument might be that the PS3 makes the 360 semi obsolete, but the 360 has enough exclusives (or non-PS3 exclusive) to hold its own.
Competitors for the 4th spot are Genesis, 3DS, PSP and Saturn. For the last 4 consoles, I need to explore their libraries more to confirm their quality.
I don't believe in saying things like "games were good for their time" - a good game is timeless, so I'm not giving bonus points for older consoles. If anything, I think it is more impressive that a console like the Snes or Genesis can still be top 5 based on the quality of the gaming alone rather than influence given their age.
Also, while genre diversity is important - I do think that in a vacuum I could probably name more great games for the PS3 than any other console as well, it isn't lacking in top game quality. I think people might get too caught up in first party support when judging consoles, Sony has good first party games but it's not why their consoles are amazing.
