What Are Your Top Five All-Time Game Consoles?

[Eug]

Atari 2600
NES
Sega Genesis
PlayStation

 

[Arkaign]

Did you ever compare the Genesis and SNES versions of The Lion King? I think you did not...


What? The SNES was the more powerful console by almost every possible measure. We're you fooled by Sega's "blast processing(tm)" ads?

Next, compare Earthworm Jim between SNES and Genesis. Better colors on SNES. Better music on SNES. Better special effects on SNES.

Then compare the Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter games. Almost anything that exists on both systems looks better on SNES.

...and that bit about how Sega's would make the most powerful console if they still made consoles...how do you think they would pull that off? They don't engineer CPU microarchitecture. If their system had more powerful components than the competition, it would also cost more and have weaker sales. Simple as that.

I agree with all that with a caveat :

The CPU in the SNES was glacially slow. It was immensely well suited for RPGs, slower platformers (SMW was damned genius), and the FX chip and mode 7 stuff, but anything that needed a ton of super fast onscreen sprite action was tough. Some games were basically ruined by it (Super Ghouls n Ghosts, Super R Type, Gradius III, the list is long).

So shmups, and many sports games were just better suited to Genesis/TG16. There were some exceptions that were awesome like Contra III.

As for the claims that Genesis was the best, lol yeah that was a stupid post. SNES had better colors, much much much better sound, better stock controller by infinity. But the faster processor on Genesis really did make a better match for some games. Things like MUSHA, Gunstar Heroes, Gaiares, Lightning Force, Sonic (meh on that from me) all would have been tough/impossible to really pull off on SNES, just like FF2, FF3, Chrono Trigger would have been bleh on Genesis by comparison.

Thankfully the consoles weren't insanely expensive back then, so it was super easy to have both. There were dozens and dozens of amazing games for both that any 16-bit fan should have, and I feel genuinely bad for the idiots that miss out on one side or the other due to some misplaced feeling of superiority one way or the other.

 

[waggy]

Atari 2600. i spent many hours playing this.

Intelivision man what a system. B16 bomber was the bomb.

sega dreamcast great system. to bad it was dropped so fast

Playstation 2. as others said it has a bunch of JRPG's

DSI 3d XL. got my son one..i just might have to get myself one.

 

[Ichinisan]

I agree with all that with a caveat :

The CPU in the SNES was glacially slow. It was immensely well suited for RPGs, slower platformers (SMW was damned genius), and the FX chip and mode 7 stuff, but anything that needed a ton of super fast onscreen sprite action was tough. Some games were basically ruined by it (Super Ghouls n Ghosts, Super R Type, Gradius III, the list is long).

So shmups, and many sports games were just better suited to Genesis/TG16. There were some exceptions that were awesome like Contra III.

As for the claims that Genesis was the best, lol yeah that was a stupid post. SNES had better colors, much much much better sound, better stock controller by infinity. But the faster processor on Genesis really did make a better match for some games. Things like MUSHA, Gunstar Heroes, Gaiares, Lightning Force, Sonic (meh on that from me) all would have been tough/impossible to really pull off on SNES, just like FF2, FF3, Chrono Trigger would have been bleh on Genesis by comparison.

Thankfully the consoles weren't insanely expensive back then, so it was super easy to have both. There were dozens and dozens of amazing games for both that any 16-bit fan should have, and I feel genuinely bad for the idiots that miss out on one side or the other due to some misplaced feeling of superiority one way or the other.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yAJOu3btoY#t=28m5s
(If time jump doesn't work, skip to 28:05)

I wish I had played this one. It looks incredible.

 

[Arkaign]

Wild Guns is super awesome. It should be played as a combo with Sunset Riders, another awesome way that Japan somehow translated the Western genre into something ala to Contra, lol.

Check out MUSHA : http://youtu.be/bxN6eA3-eZg?t=12m20s

I bought it new back when it came out, and didn't find out until much much much later that it's one the more rare Genesis titles. Totally worth playing though for any Shmup/fast game fan. The scrolling and use of depth is super cool/creative (some enemies just explode, some fall away falling into the chasms).

 

[exdeath]

Both of them had slow CPUs. CPU didn't matter. The ASICs did all the work. CPU only served to poke settings into registers, do some trivial AI and collision detection, and poll the controller ports.

"super fast onscreen sprite action" and slowdown issues on SNES had nothing to do with the CPU but rather programmers violating OAM register and sprites per scanline rules imposed by the ASIC. The DMAC had zero issues uploading the 128-512 bytes per frame to the OAM tables from a shadow copy in WRAM, nor does the PPU have any issue at all with all 128 sprites on screen when sorted and programmed properly.

Also keep in mind that "sprites" in a game are not the same as max # of hardware sprites or OAMs. Sprite defined by hardware is a single 8x8 or 8x16 tile. Even a simple mushroom object in SMW uses 2-4 hardware sprites, but the calculations for the mushroom moving is for one object only. You might have 8 to 16 game objects on the screen that require AI and collision calculations, but it takes all 128 OAM entries to draw on screen. You do the calcs for the object, not each individual OAM. Once you determine the position of an "object", or what we can refer to as the larger "metasprite" made up of numerous hardware sprites, the OAM entries for the tiles that make up that object are just offset by multiples of 8 and ganged together. In other words 128 hardware sprites != having to update movement data for 128 independent objects, as most game objects of any tangible size other than a bullet used at least 4 OAM entries.

As for scrolling, you can scroll the entire screen width in a single WORD write in one CPU instruction. What mattered is filling the name table with new tiles fast enough to keep up with the scroll speed, and this was limited by VRAM write speed and vblank time. And neither system was powerful enough to redraw the entire name table per frame so even then scroll speed had nothing to do with CPU speed. You simply could not copy 1000+ entries to VRAM in the few scanlines of vblank time you had, CPU speed be damned. Most really fast scrolling on either system, the BG layer with the changing level map and not just repeating background (eg the foreground) was mostly tile 0 (transparent) and the actual map that changed was relatively simple to keep name table updates to a minimum. Due to the foreground showing the repeating background also moving really fast, it's hard to notice not a whole lot is actually being updated at those very high scroll speeds. Genesis was not immune to this either. Some of the 4 way scrolling with huge name table updates for example in Chemical Plant zone were terribly slow, and god help you if you got hit and dumped rings all over the screen, it turned to a slide show. This had nothing to do with the CPU speed.

Genesis also had no limitations preventing it from doing great RPGs. Look up Pier Solar, not to mention the Working Designs Sega CD games which still ran with the Genesis PPU limitations (64 colors, etc). SNES only had the RPGs because Nintendo had exclusive rights agreements with all the big third parties that made RPGs. Square, Enix, etc were basically 2nd party Nintendo companies.

The biggest issue with Genesis IMO was it's FM synth sound. It was god awful and couldn't do anything other than techno chip music. Even then music that is MADE for it sounds incredible. I listen to Green Hill Zone looping with my "High Definition Graphics" model 1 about as often as I listen to FFII/FFIII/SoM on my SNES.

 

[norseamd]

Did you ever compare the Genesis and SNES versions of The Lion King? I think you did not...

taht was the game i played less than the other games

What? The SNES was the more powerful console by almost every possible measure. We're you fooled by Sega's "blast processing(tm)" ads? Next, compare Earthworm Jim between SNES and Genesis. Better colors on SNES. Better music on SNES. Better special effects on SNES. Then compare the Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter games. Almost anything that exists on both systems looks better on SNES. ...and that bit about how Sega would make the most powerful console if they still made consoles...how do you think they would pull that off? They don't engineer CPU microarchitecture. If their system had more powerful components than the competition, it would also cost more and have weaker sales. Simple as that.

remember reading that the snes had a more powerful audio chip. the genesis was made between the nes and snes although. you have to remember i was a kid back then. most of what i played was nes and genesis. snes was actually after genesis and i did not play that much in comparision to either the nes or genesis.

what i am saying is that sega would make a better console than sony not necessarily nintendo.

 

[Arkaign]

"CPU only served to poke settings into registers, do some trivial AI and collision detection, and poll the controller ports." <-- I know that's false for an absolute fact, demonstrably so in many cases. I know that the CPU doesn't do as much as some people think (especially on the SNES), but it's not as unused as you say.

I've seen some really heated arguments over SNES vs. Genesis, which seems ludicrous to me at this point, but it's definitely alive and well. Nintendo fanboys never seem to be able to get over the fact that the SNES was slower, and Genesis fanboys never seem to be able to get over the fact that the Genesis audio/RF quality/color palette was seriously lacking by contrast.

Saying both had slow CPUs is a gross oversimplification of its own. Of course they're slow by modern standards (hell, slow by 1995!), but at the time there was a pretty fair gap between them. Games that didn't use the enhancement add-ons were really prone to the infamous slowdown. And we're not talking retard basement-dweller companies that had games with slowdown, we're talking Konami, Capcom, etc.

The SNES's limitations were the entire reason these existed :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips

"As part of the overall plan for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, rather than include an expensive CPU that would still become obsolete in a few years, the hardware designers made it easy to interface special coprocessor chips to the console. Rather than require a console upgrade, these enhancement chips were included inside the plug-in game cartridges. The presence of an enhancement chip is most often indicated by the presence of 16 additional pins on the cartridge card edge"

Pretty awesome idea really.

The real proof is in the games. Pier Solar is a great game in it's own right, but it's pretty ugly compared to even FF3, and we're talking about a homebrew title that was made using a 64 meg size never seen at the time on SNES or Genesis. And for whatever reason, unless the coders were REALLY good, most games on SNES were either slower paced, or suffered slowdown. There are exceptions to that, but some of the comparisons are kind of amazing.

Hell even ancient PC Engine did well :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOJk7sOcbMA

This game had loads of slowdown :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t6Mv_XML7o

so did this :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBRkqsX-YR8

The SNES Ghouls game was WAY prettier, but the Genesis one moved so much smoother, and it was far older.

I'm not saying that it makes or breaks the systems by any means, I love both of them to death. There are just some general rules that come across pretty clearly :

Genesis does shmups and super fast games better in most cases.
SNES has way better colors, and cool modes, and the games with additional processors are sometimes fairly amazing for what they are. And the audio, wow. Some used the Genesis abilities to decent effect, but it's nowhere near what was in the SNES.

 

[mizzou]

Atari 2600
NES
Sega Genesis
PlayStation

I'd go

atari2600
NES
Sega Genesis
N64
XBOX (original)


I think the super nintendo plaid second fiddle to the xtreme sega nation
I think N64 had way too many highly rated games to be left out
I think the original XBOX blew away the ps2 when it came to game quality and gaming community
I think the ps3/360 competition was just splitting hairs, and you are hard pressed to really see what major point makes one stand out from another.
No mention on the Wii because the console was basically only used for Wii Sports.

 

[exdeath]

I think N64 had way too many highly rated games to be left out
I think the original XBOX blew away the ps2 when it came to game quality and gaming community
.

Really? I suppose if all you played was Madden and Halo and crappy movie license titles starring Shrek and Scooby Doo!

Diversity sucked absolute @%#& on original Xbox.

PS2 pretty much dominated that generation.

Ah well there is Conker Reloaded on original Xbox. Honestly without Halo most would have forgotten Xbox in a year.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I remember Microsoft had their own sports games. NFL fever and top spin tennis. They still did get the 2k and ea sports games too.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Pretty awesome idea really.

Agreed. I much prefered the SNES upgrade plan ($60+ games with chips inside) vs having to buy a 32X. The SNES was able to deliver amazing games at the end of its run that almost seemed 32 bit: Super Mario RPG, Yoshi's Island, and heck Star Fox counts.

 

[poofyhairguy]

I think the original XBOX blew away the ps2 when it came to game quality and gaming community

Really? PS2 won that generation like no console before or since the NES, while the Xbox was killed quickly into its life. I loved the XBox hardware for things like XBMC, but the game library was lacking.

No mention on the Wii because the console was basically only used for Wii Sports.

Actually there were many awesome Wii games. They just all look like crap in SD so hardcore gamers ignored them. Play something like Donkey Kong Country Returns at 1080p on Dolphin and you will be amazed.

 

[Ichinisan]

Agreed. I much prefered the SNES upgrade plan ($60+ games with chips inside) vs having to buy a 32X. The SNES was able to deliver amazing games at the end of its run that almost seemed 32 bit: Super Mario RPG, Yoshi's Island, and heck Star Fox counts.

Donkey Kong Country looked amazing without any add-on chips...but Yoshi's Island definitely did things that would have been impossible without the FX-2 chip.

 

[Ichinisan]

Actually there were many awesome Wii games. They just all look like crap in SD so hardcore gamers ignored them. Play something like Donkey Kong Country Returns at 1080p on Dolphin and you will be amazed.

Oh yes...I played that game for a couple days and I was very, very impressed with the overall gameplay and level design.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Donkey Kong Country looked amazing without any add-on chips...

To be fair, DKC was a (huge at the time) 32mb game. I remember my Sega friends (yes I was team Nintendo) telling me that NOA was taking on loss on each copy of the game sold to force the SNES to seem modern.

Honestly, you look at the power of some of those add-ons and it was pretty amazing. That was really leveraging the power of the cartridge format to have a Super FX 2 in there that could cream what the SNES came with and some of the early "32-bit" consoles.

Too bad the N64 never got power upgrades like that late in life, all we got was that ram upgrade.

 

[exdeath]

Yeah I bet. A 21 MHz 32 bit RISC DSP with its own dedicated framebuffer on board faster than a 3.58 MHz 65816? Just a little. All SNES did in that case was provide the music chip, controllers, and a planed bitmapped 256 color display mode (mode 7) to dump the frame buffer to the TV screen since it was the only route to the AV port.

The Super FX chips were far far more than what they were utilized for on SNES.

Can't wait for Super FX, SA1, and SDD1 to be fully implemented in the SD2SNES flash cart FPGA.

 

[poofyhairguy]

Yeah I bet. A 21 MHz 32 bit RISC DSP with its own dedicated framebuffer on board faster than a 3.58 MHz 65816? Just a little. All SNES did in that case was provide the music chip, controllers, and a planed bitmapped 256 color display mode (mode 7) to dump the frame buffer to the TV screen since it was the only route to the AV port.

The Super FX chips were far far more than what they were utilized for on SNES.

I don't know. SMW2 is AMAZING. Like probably one of the prettiest 2D games ever. I mean, take out the 3D effects and a "true" 32 platformer like SOTN looks very equivalent. I remember being blown away by that game upon release.

The real fun add-on was the SA1 though. I mean that thing was basically the SNES guts times three in a cart. Even had its own ram. And the fun part was it didn't replace the original SNES cpu but ran alongside it. So you buy a game with it and you got the 32X dual-core upgrade without the price tag associated with it.

And Super Mario RPG really really used that power too. I mean that thing make DKC look primitive!

Can't wait for Super FX, SA1, and SDD1 to be fully implemented in the SD2SNES flash cart FPGA.

Me too. I have gone the other way with retro-gaming (I have dumped every cart I have owned outside of N64 and the 2600), but that flash cart has my attention.

 

[exdeath]

Yeah but 32x had an RGB overlay and expanded the graphics abilities greatly.

SNES enhancement chips are forever limited to the 256x224 8 bpp color index mode of the SNES mode 7 internal framebuffer that all final results must eventually be copied to over the 8 bit "B" bus in order to show on screen.

 

[digiram]

Genesis - b/c I was a sega kid in the 90's.. Warsong, Shining Force, Streets of Rage, Xmen game, Flashback, Alladin, Sonic 2, I can go on here..
SNES - I adopted later when i got a job, and wow.. Super Metroid and Chrono Trigger nuff said.
PS1 - FF7, Tactics, Xenogears, MGS, SOTN,
Xbox 360 - Online mp, social experience.
NES - I owned a Master system b/c that's what my oldest brother bought for me on xmas, but I have more fond memories of playing my cousins NES. Weekends in Tecmo league, Punchout (my dad bought it for me on my bday so i can play it on my cousins console), excitebike, the list can go on.

If you guys like FF Tactics, look for warsong.. that game got me into Turned based Strat RPG. It was amzing for it's time. I ran into it in the EB games bargain bin at 10 bucks. Best 10 bucks I have ever spent, the music battle scenes, etc.. all epic. It never got it's due in the US, but it was called Langrisser in Japan, and we never got the sequals to it . Just like we never got parts 2 and 3 to SF3... extra .

 

[poofyhairguy]

Yeah but 32x had an RGB overlay and expanded the graphics abilities greatly.

SNES enhancement chips are forever limited to the 256x224 x 256 color index mode of the SNES mode 7 internal framebuffer.

True, but I would argue that the SNES add-on chips were more fully utilized than the 32X ever was during their lifetimes. Especially if we look at the audio chip in the 32X- almost every 32x game used the YM2612 instead. Funny thing is that Sega had a Super FX killer. Ah what could have been:

http://www.sega-16.com/2006/03/segas-svp-chip-the-road-not-taken/

 

[Randum]

PS2 - Most games of all gens for me that really hold up and just great playing couch co-op too. Also was able to play my ps1 backlog on this made it an easy decision to get when it came out

Xbox360 - First console to really do the online portion right, and give us a reason to jump from PC games for a while

PS3 - eventually shaped up to be one heck of a system with a great library, and robust online features

3DS - easy to play on the go, great games, and the 3d screen does look fantastic

NES (nostalgia only really..) - First console I owned and still holds a special spot, but really was kind of a rough era for games

 

[mizzou]

Really? I suppose if all you played was Madden and Halo and crappy movie license titles starring Shrek and Scooby Doo!

Diversity sucked absolute @%#& on original Xbox.

PS2 pretty much dominated that generation.

Ah well there is Conker Reloaded on original Xbox. Honestly without Halo most would have forgotten Xbox in a year.

I was a ps2 owner, not a xbox owner. I suppose I look at it through rose colored lenses. I just remember various games all performing better under xbox.

 

[gothamhunter]

SNES, ps1, ps2, gb(c), Gamecube

 

[cmdrdredd]

I was a ps2 owner, not a xbox owner. I suppose I look at it through rose colored lenses. I just remember various games all performing better under xbox.

Heh...I remember the frequent issues with the DVD drive failing to read disks, the HDD going kaput, and how huge the original controller was. Once they came out with the S controller I was fine with it though. I had to send my Xbox for repair 3 times and had to replace my PS2 twice. Both consoles had numerous issues with the original hardware. I don't remember any redesigned Xbox systems, but the slimmer PS2 had a more reliable DVD drive.