Defending Your Favorite System

Playstation 2

This is me putting on my flame suit and stepping out into the sweltering heat of the system wars, folks. While I have many systems that I’ve played the heck out of and cherished, I’ve maintained that the Playstation 2 is one of the greatest systems we’ve had to date, if not the greatest, simply due to its long resume of excellent games during its tenure on the gaming throne.

Apparently GamesRadar agrees with me in a recent article where they detail Six Reasons the PS2 Is the Best System of All Time. They actually give some compelling thoughts, including the fact that the PS2 was both casual and hardcore simultaneously, and that it had real backwards compatibility. Oddly enough, they actually fail to leave one of the most important things off the list: first party games.

Now, I know we’ve talked about what our favorite systems are plenty of times, but this gave me an idea to start the same discussion with a new twist: tell us your favorite systems and give your top six reasons why.

A quick rule: if you take the entire backlog of PC games, it easily wins out over any system, so I think you have to divide the PC up based on the console generation of that time. It’d be like calling the PS3 the greatest system because some models are capable of backwards compatibility for PS2 and PS1 games. Kind of unfair. There’s some argument there, for sure, so make it if you wish. Go!

Source – GamesRadar

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I write about samurai girls and space marines. Writer for Smooth Few Films. Rooster Teeth Freelancer. Author of Red vs. Blue, The Ultimate Fan Guide, out NOW!

7 thoughts on “Defending Your Favorite System”

  1. I fell in love with the PlayStation back in 1997. I remember playing Resident Evil running around a mansion lost and confessed. The PS used CDs for the games and I was like wow what I idea, it also played music discs. I love the PlayStation 2 adding a DVD player was awesome and games just kept getting better. Now the PS3 is genius! With the Blu-ray and the online its just pure genius! I remember getting Resident Evil 5 the day it came out and thinking, RE should be played on the PlayStation and only the PlayStation! Not only does the PS3 play Blue-ray movies but its just a kick ass system, oh and Sony not changing the controller was a plus two lol.

  2. Sega Dreamcast

    1: Awesome first party games (Sonic Adventure 1 & 2, Phantasy Star Online, Sega Rally 2, House of the Dead 1 & 2, Crazy Taxi, Jet Grind Radio, Skies of Arcadia, Rez, Samba de Amigo, etc)

    2: Fantastic 3rd party exclusives (Soul Calibur, Power Stone 1 & 2, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Starlancer, Grandia 2, Ikaruga, Street Fighter 3 @ SF Alpha 3, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves, etc)

    3: Out of the box online capability: This seems like a forgone conclusion today, but ten years ago it was a rush plugging your Dreamcast into the telephone jack to gun people down in Quake 3 or bust heads on PSO.

    4: Multiplayer madness: The DC continued the N64’s tradition of offering top notch multiplayer gaming in an era before online gaming took off. The console supported 4 controllers and gathering four people for a game of Bomberman, Power Stone, or Unreal was simply fantastic.

    5: Who needs EA Sports anyway?: EA refused to support the DC because they’d gotten screwed so badly on the Saturn, but luckily this was before EA decided that the best way to beat the competition was to secure exclusive licenses from pro sports leagues. The NFL and NBA 2k games were light years better than the Madden and NBA Live franchises when they came out (and, in the case of 2k1 and 2k2, supported online play). NHL 2k was generally superior to EA’s hockey games and the World Series Baseball, while uneven, was usually better than EA’s baseball games since EA hadn’t figured out how to make a good baseball game yet. Oh, and don’t forget Virtua Tennis, which was beyond awesome even if you thought tennis was boring.

    6: Anti-Aliasing!: It sounds stupid now, but DC supporters never got tired of reminding anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot that the DC hardware supported anti-aliasing (a technique that smooths out the jagged edges of polygons) and the PS2 did not. The first generation of PS2 games certainly gave DC owners a lot to brag about. Pretty much any argument could be ended by saying, “Just look at Soul Calibur!” But then the second generation of PS2 games started coming out (Twisted Metal Black and MGS2) and DC fans had to face the ugly truth that they weren’t going to win the fight against the 800 lbs Sony gorilla (especially with the similarly heavyweight Microsoft monkey fixing to climb into the ring, too).

    Because #6 is almost a joke reason, I’ll give you an extra point.

    7: Dreamcast is dead. Long live the Dreamcast!: Two factors have combined to give the DC an incredibly long lifespan after it was officially discontinued in 2001: Its copyright protection is beyond pathetic and the hardware itself was built using Microsoft CE as the principle operating system. Not only can you find .iso files of long out of print games on any torrent site (including cool, unreleased games like the DC port of Half-Life and the “controversial” Propeller Arena Online), but there are also dozens of fan made games that can be downloaded and ripped to an ordinary CD-R disc.

    As you can see, I’m passionate about the Dreamcast. It was probably the one time Sega did everything right as a developer and console manufacturer. Too bad they’d accumulated too much bad karma and ill will during the Genesis and Saturn era. A part of that company died with the Dreamcast, I’m afraid, and it is sorely missed.

  3. Super Nintendo for 6 reasons:

    1. Final Fantasy III (VI)
    2. Chrono Trigger
    3. Super Mario World
    4. Super Metroid
    5. Super Mario Kart
    6. Super Mario RPG

  4. My obvious answer is PC.

    1 Keyboard & Mouse > Any controller

    2i STEAM
    2ii Access to the internet by hitting shift+enter (for me) if I get stuck, also friends network

    3 The ability to change resolution, rebind keys, alter any aspect of the game

    4 console commands

    5 playing both the most hardcore or the most casual games within one minute of eachother, without getting up and looking through all my discs on a shelf

    6i enormous modding communities for great games, and super cool communities for smaller unknown titles

    6ii beta testing, being an admin, being able to type how I feel with all 10 fingers

    6iii the choice to pirate something if I want to without having to mod my system and potentially ruin it.

  5. System flame wars aren’t nearly as much fun as they used to be.

    Where’s the joy in arguing over whether or not a system supports a 1040i HD display when you could be debating the merits of things that REALLY matter like Blast Processing?

  6. Here my (earnest, honest and really not trying to flame) choice: The iPhone 4. I’ve always been a casual gamer, even if occasionally obsessed with an individual game. I feel like this is the first platform I’ve ever really clicked with as a whole, and I believe it’s because:

    1) Portable – It’s always with me for when I have those unexpected ten minutes to kill. And I can do Five Minutes of Fury or pick up right where I left off last night with something else I was enjoying. I also travel alot for work, and literally every game I am playing right now is there for the flight and the dull evening in the hotel by the conference center.

    2) Quantity of Games – There is so. much. out. there. Several times a week i get excited about a game i read about on toucharcade.

    3) Quality of Gameplay – I don’t really feel like I’m compromising. Certainly not with with those originating for the platform, but even those that attempt to covert a platform or PC type experience to the format come off really well. And I’m not talking about a port or series title like Need for Speed. NOVA, Galaxy on Fire, etc really satisfy. This is not to say that these games even hold a candle to the experience of what you get on a proper platform – somehow it works though.

    4) Price – Holy crap do I have more games for this than any other system I’ve ever owned and for what feels like nothing.

    5) Changes what a game is – So, I have more achievements in FourSquare than Angry Birds. And I know it’s because I approach it like a game. Why go to the same place for lunch when maybe I can go check in somewhere and unlock some random badge I didn’t even know I was on the path for (when I unlocked the Frat Boy badge in another city recently, I felt like a winner in exactly the same dumb way I feel like a winner when I beat a level). I’m not even into GeoCaching, but I’ll fire that up from time to time.

    6) It’s also everything else – a cop out, but even with all the convergence of things like Netflix and Facebook and Twitter into the PS3, Xbox and Wii, none of it works as well as it does on the iPhone. To say nothing of the internet, email, music, etc. Oh and it’s a phone.

    7) iDos – because it’s disqualifying, a seventh. I was able to pick up iDos during the few hours it was available. I’ve been loading classic PC titles and playing them a few minutes each to check and see if they work. Yeah, i’m rocking Space Quest, Wing Commander, Star Commander 1&2, Quest for Glory 3&4 and Codename – ICEMAN(!!!) in my pocket. That was after spending only ten minutes looking for the files online. Yus.

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