PixlBit

So I more or less wrote NWP a blog post yesterday in the comments. 

Here's that comment, which is now a blog post because all faculty has to read and discuss some book that takes time away from other things I could be doing. All ends this week though, so we're good. 

Julian picked the perfect number of home consoles to rank, since I've only ever owned 3 of them (my Steam laptop would not count according to the rules). 

So without further ado: 

3 favorite consoles: 

3. N64

You'd think this would be my number one, since it was the first console of my own, my most memorable Christmas console, and one of my favorite games came in it in the form of Star Fox 64. And it was great. But honestly, I looked at my older brother's PlayStation with some envy for the more "mature" stuff on his console. I got to play stuff like Driver and Syphon Filter and does anyone remember Bruce Willis in Armageddon(?) when no one was looking, but there was a mystique to the PlayStation the N64 didn't have. Part of it was the fact it was also a CD player and I was starting to get into music around 1998 (Garbage 2.0 and Hanson's Middle of Nowhere being my first two albums; still have the former, though "When I Grow Up" from the Happy Gilmore soundtrack I bought it for isn't my favorite song on there today). 

Having said that, the N64 WAS pretty awesome, but if I'm being honest I just wasn't playing the same games as everyone else. I didn't really like Goldeneye as much as everyone else did, and I got tired of it always being #1 seller in Nintendo Power sales lists over games I preferred or were newer. I still like the original Mario Kart more than I like Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine more than I like Mario 64. I got the system in 1997, so Mario being in 3D wasn't new to me. 

But then titles like Star Fox 64, F-Zero X, the two Zelda titles, Snowboard Kids 2, Donkey Kong 64 and Extreme G (only thing in this list I don't own, though I remember finding the instruction booklet in my room after turning the game back in to Blockbuster) among others were great. I also own Shadows of the Empire, which was ... way too hard for all the wrong reasons and still is. 

2. Gamecube

This is the first console I owned because I paid for it. My parents paid some of the tax and maybe for Luigi's Mansion, but I was told to scrounge up my lawn mowing money at age 11 if I wanted something as expensive as a console for Christmas. So I did. 

Because I had to pay for it and it was the cheapest console available in 2001, and because I was precocious enough to realize that console sales = more game variety, I became a HUGE console fanboy for pretty much just this era. There was a separation on the playground between Xbox and Gamecube fanboys that pretty much mirrored SNES vs. Genesis (in which the Xbox/Genesis kids were the more popular ones, while Nintendo and nerd were more synonymous). ... Pretty much everyone was down with PS2, which, again, made me a bit jealous of all the stuff available for my older brother's new console of choice. 

Sadly, my effort to get more games on the GCN by convincing everybody it was the best via playground douchery and ostracizing myself along with fellow less popular kids didn't go as planned, and I am still pissed off Psychonauts, a kid-friendly looking game, never came to my purple lunchbox (which will come up later).

BUT the exclusives were AMAZING. As Julian mentions in this podcast, people HATED Wind Waker's look. I honestly only pre-ordered it because EGM April Fooled me into believing you could get a more realistic-looking skin of the game that way. Yes, that's absurd if you know about game development, but I was 11. The game ended up being great. So did Metroid Prime (which I hated at first, cause I wasn't used to backtracking being part of a game and felt lost) and Super Mario Sunshine. Oh, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is the only horror game I have ever played for all that long and one of the most creative ones to boot. I got MAD when it pretended to erase my memory card. 

Rogue Squadron looked amazing, Super Monkey Ball  was super fun, and this is the era where I was most obsessed with games, eventually getting an EGM subscription after realizing I was paying more by getting it at the supermarket every month. Such good times. 

1. PlayStation 4

Literally the only two games I own physical copies of for PS4

I'm probably gonna get hate for this, but hear me out. I didn't game on home consoles during the 7th gen. My loyalty to Nintendo died with the Wii (still think Revolution was a better name, but I can see how that would turn off the casual market they wanted) and my Residence Life job in college paid in room and board and about $7.25/month. I saved a LOT of money doing that job, but by the time I was promoted to Assistant Hall Director my senior year and getting a $400 stipend on top of all that, my interest in 7th gen had waned quite a bit. Not having the disposable income to afford these things when they were new and fresh pretty much meant I didn't care anymore. 

I did get a laptop that could play a lot of 360 and PS3 games via Steam, but it was unreliable for those and even games like Fez could prove problematic, so honestly buying that laptop in 2012 after getting some money for painting my parents' house a bit (well, parts of it) after graduating college just solidified for me that I wasn't going to become a PC gamer. 

With the PS4 however, I have literally 100s of games where I used to own less than 10 per console. I do miss brick-and-mortar rentals, but I have way more disposable income than I ever did and games are cheaper than they ever were. I can't stand PS Now and wish they'd just put PS3 games in the store, but because of PS+, I could just buy a PS3 and start with a ton of free games anyway. 

I've really dug the experiences I've had on PS4, from everything from indie PS+ games, $5-$10 blockbusters like Need for Speed from just the past year and half-off masterpieces like Rise of the Tomb Raider. I'm interested in pretty much every exlusive that's come out or been announced for this system, and it feels like I finally made the right choice as far as "best library" in a generation. Even $20 stuff like Until Dawn is stuff I really want to play. 

I know a lot of people on this site are down on the current generation, but in my case I haven't gamed this much ... ever.