PixlBit

Also, the video of the FF 6 intro someone made using FF 14 Julian talks about was made by @LordServbot on Twitter.

Stage Select
3. NES- The console that started console gaming for me. Circa 1989, my older brother won $100 from his middle school for being the top honor roll student. He took that money and got the NES Action Set. After playing the Super Mario Bros. Duck Hunt for the first time it was the beginning of a beautiful thing.

2. Super NES- It was the consoles I spent the most imt eplaying with my brother. We spend countless hours playing NBA Live '96, Super Mario WorldKart, Kirby's Dream Course, and our all-time fovrite-- Tetris Attack. But perhaps the best SNES moment for me was sometime in 1995 when he brought home Super Metroid and played it for the first time. We were hooked from the opening sequence to the end credits. It was an experience I just could get on the Genesis.

1. PlayStation baby!! To quote Angelo, it was my "coming of age system". It was the first console I saved for with my own money earned from 10 weeks of shining my dad's shoes (and other house chores). I ahd to scrimp, save, andor trade for every every game I purchaed and played each game unitl I could play them in my sleep. Best of all, this was the console that introduced me to JRPGS-- Final Fantasy 7, FF Chronicles (Chrono Trigger), Star Ocean: 2nd Story, Legend of Dragoon, and Chrono Cross. In short, the PlayStation was the system that confirmed I'd be gaming for the rest of my life.

Chrono Crossing
My pick is Crono Cross. Beautiful graphics. Awesome soundtrack. Story was great. Probably the game I spent the most time with during that time period. Also, special shoutout to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and Legend of Dragoon.

Stage Select (3 favorite consoles)

3. Xbox 360 - A lot of the franchises I love to this day were ones I played on my Xbox. Mass Effect, Portal, Fallout, Red Dead Redemption, and many others. The 360 & PS3 generation was almost a decade of really great gaming; I just happened to have the Xbox.

2. N64 - Nintendo 64 is where I first played Zelda and started to look at games as art. I loved Mario Kart 64, Body Harvest, Turok, and all the great wrestling games that came to N64.

1. PS2 - Playstation 2 had an incredible controller, a massive library, and it was my first DVD player! The PS2 also introduced me to new genres, the biggest one being RPGs. Shoutout to Champions of Norrath and Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance. I also played way more Kessen than a person probably should.

Chrono Crossing 2000

Majora's Mask - I was 11, slowly losing my innocence, and Majora's Mask was the game that uncomfortably welcomed me to the new millennium. It was apocalyptic, bizarre, and forced you to acknowledge everyone's mortality. You get to be the hero trying to save a world full of sympathetic characters & interesting cultures, but the designers require you to fail everyone repeatedly along your macabre journey before you can eventually piece it all together.

Look at how dark the TV ads were:

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

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. 

Chrono Crossing 2001:

Super Smash Bros. Melee. I remember getting the achievement for playing for 100s of hours without trying. There are only three or so challeneges I never completed and I got most of the trophies in the game, I believe. It wasn't even based on multiplayer, I was just addicted to all the modes in single player. 

Shout outs to:

SSX Tricky

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor

Metal Gear Solid 2 (holy crap, I totally forgot that was one of my favorite intros and theme songs)

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

Dave Mira Freestyle BMX

Tony Hawk 3

GTA III (had to sneak playing that one)

Chrono Crossing 2000:

Ummm ... Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Really like the song "You" by Bad Religion. 

If we counted the Spider-Man game that came out that year for PS1 ... then I played it quite a bit on N64 ...

Also, The World is Not Enough 007 is one I rented a couple times. Forget which system I played it on. Guessing N64 ... 

GTA always looked cartoony to me, to be honest. I think they look bad now, sure, but I never thought they looked "realistic." I'm actually still playing through Vice City on PS4. Some things don't hold up, but it's still enjoyable. 

I'm with Patrick though, I play for the story mainly. The shooting people up just bores me. 

Some of the mechanics suck, but not nearly as much on a PS4 controller as when you're playing with a poorly mapped 360 controller on Steam. 

Good Conan reference. I was a huge fan of his growing up. 

Tony Hawk 2 was really fun, and I loved that soundtrack. Bad Religion, Rage Against the Machine, Millencolin, Lagwagon, Anthrax, Naughty By Nature, Public Enemy, and Swinging Utters were all really great

All those soundtracks were awesome, but I always tried to play one song in particular over and over. For the first THPS, that was "Superman."

That's a great one. Most of the TH games I played had good soundtracks. Jerry Was a Racecar Driver was good, but I liked playing Superman the most

I respect Primus, but never really got into them. I like that song a lot more now than i did then, honestly.

Julian, could you start making a quick comment in these posts when you record the next episode as, like, a cut off for Stage Select and Chrono Crossing? I commented on Episode 105 only to discover that I was apparently too late for 106, and that was pretty depressing.

Stage Select

3. PlayStation 4 - Really loving my PS4. Between my wife and me it gets used all the time. So many cool games to play these days.

2. GameCube - This was my "coming of age" console and I played so many great games on it (too many to mention...except Metroid Prime, my all-time favorite).

1. SNES - Do I really have to justify this? The Super Nintendo was the best. Totally not being influenced by notalgia for my childhood or anything...

Chrono Crossing 2000 - Chrono Cross

Let's get this out of the way up front. Chrono Cross is a bad sequel to Chrono Trigger. But taken on its own merits as an RPG it is fantastic. It's a gorgeous PS1 game, has one of the best soundtracks in gaming, it's plot is full of twists and turns, and the battle system was very unique. I've played it several times and would love to go back and experience it again.

We currently record on the Thursday after the episode comes out, but yes, I will put a note in the show post from now on. It will help if we have to change a recording date. I think you submitted your last picks right as we wrapped up recording this one. :/

Figured I'd add video of R-Type 3. I also forgot how friggin metal the music was. Too bad the SNES sound chip didn't really have the 'punch' it needed to drive this one home.

Hopefully I'm not late to comment. I'll be omitting current generation consoles since it's still going. 

Stage Select: Favorite Consoles

3. Sega Genesis: While I started with NES, I spent the majority of my younger years playing this. Sega Channel introduced me to hundreds of games and many gems like Gunstar Heroes, Gain Ground, Dr. Robotniks Mean Bean Machine, Shinobi 3, and so many more. 

2. Xbox 360: It's real close between this and PS3 but I give the edge to 360 for the superior online service. 

1. Playstation 2: This console was the one I played through high-school. I had my first job, at Gamestop no less, around this time so my PS2 collection is huge. Some of my all time favorite games came from this console.

Sorry but I may rant a bit for this Chrono Crossing.

Chrono Crossing 2000: Chrono Cross 

Easily my favorite game of 2000 and even my favorite of all time. Without it I don't think I'd be here listening to NWP which would be a shame. I've replayed Chrono Cross enough times to see all endings and collect everything. It was my first trip into RPGs which may be while I'm so nostalgic for it. I remember seeing the commercial for it. The cutscenes and music grabbed me and knew I had to have it based off nothing else. I can still recite the opening poem since I'd watch the whole opening cutscene before starting the game every time. I would even sit down the controller while I listened to "Another World" play in the background constantly. I realize it isn't perfect, especially as years have passed, but it's still the game I remember most fondly. I know I'll be replaying it well into my old age. 

Sorry, Exrian! You did comment too late, but I think you'll find the new episode particularly funny for a couple of reasons. Per Daftman's suggestion, I put the submission deadline in the new show post, but now that I think about it I think I'll also say the deadline in the actual show. We used to have nine days between an episode releasing and the next recording, but now it's only seven. 

It's alright. The new schedule along with my new job has me off a bit. Either way I won't miss my chance to praise my favorite game. I initially had it for the year prior with quick Google searches. Turns out that I saw the Japan release which is why I was off a year.

Top 3 consoles: 3) NES - My first and one of my faves. 2) Sega Genesis - Played a lot of games and still same of my favorite games of all time. 1) PlayStation 2 - Peak of my gaming, best games in my opinion, and when I had the most time to devote. The fact that it was backwards compatiable and also a DVD player really helps its case too.