1980s: You have to walk to the arcade, you have to stand to play, and you are charged for every minute of play time.
1990s: Computer technology has improved to the point that anyone can have the arcade in their home, you sit to play, and you are charged once for the game and can play for as long as you want.
2010s and onward: Home internet connections are now ubiquitous, enabling instant digital money transactions from anywhere, so the games industry can now nickel and dime you for everything. Video games are casinos. The coin machines are back.
There’s a golden age of gaming starting with the introduction of home consoles and ending when they started needing an internet connection.
you are charged for every minute of play time
I mean yeah, except that if you were good you could play a really long fucking time on one quarter so your per-minute rate was very low.
Bullshit, there are more high-quality games out now than ever before.
Not only are all the games from back then easy to get and emulate, you also have high quality pay-once-enjoy-forever PC games: indie up to big corporations.
Who cares that mostly indies and mid-sized studios produce non-exploitative shit? There are so many masterpieces constantly coming out.
The golden age is now.
Fortune in misfortune though, at least in this day and age it’s much easier to play those games without paying for them. Although the DRM on some of the newer games have been a a bitch and a half.
Still, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!!
edit, added pic putting my money where my mouth is
Dreamcast.
Gotta give some of its still exclusive games a go, like Napple Tale
I believe the PS3 was.
Very powerful machine, Sony was losing money on every sale.
Full of features including a web browser (which at the time was very impressive).
Full online functionality without any monthly costs
Upgradable hard drive
Full backwards compatibility (at launch).
It just didn’t sell as much as the ps2
Nahhhh the 360 was better…
At the time, i was all-in onps3, because of the rrod bullshit, but looking back, virtually every single title that was released on both platforms, runs and plays better on 360.
both consoles were and are amazing today!
you can soft-exploit any ps3 in existence with only a usb stick and run all the unsigned code you want.
the 360 is significantly more complicated, there is a soft-mod out there now, but it’s a little finicky. if you are brave and handy with a soldering iron you can put an RHG chip in there and reflash the bios to allow you to run unsigned code. I dropped a 2tb hdd into mine, which is more than i need for any and every game i ever even considered playing.
the ps3 is worth owning and playing for ps3 titles, the xbox360 is better for everything else.
bottom line: seventh gen was best gen
The ps3 was superior to the 360 in raw performance. The problem was the architecture was so novel, most developers never bother porting their engines. So games ran like shit.
Agreed, that’s why PS3 exclusives were so much ch better than anything else that gen
Well, late PS3 exclusives. It took a long time for even first party developers to figure out how to take advantage of the hardware. Uncharted 1 and The Last of Us look like they were released during completely different generations.
I have one of the super chunky OG PS3s thats compatable with PS1/2 games as well as DVD and bluray. I don’t play it anymore but I’m never getting rid of it.
Conditional backwards compatability and while it did have online features a lot of them required a subscription to access.
Which features needed subscription?
I remember, on the ps3, if a game had multiplayer it was free whereas you had to pay for Xbox live on the 360.
Maybe it was for premium features? I didn’t really care about that
You’re right, I looked it up and PSN for PS3 was free. I may have had it confused with PSP.
Had linux too
I think I spent more time trying to get the PSO hack to work than I did playing the actual games.
that’s a lie i played animal crossing and double dash until my eyes were bleeding
I hope the GabeCube has a handle too
I mean they’ve shown it, so we know it doesn’t.
But the community will make it happen.
I had a GameCube back in the day no one ever moved it around with the handle. Sure you could move the console but you still had all of the wires and of course the controller to move as well so the handle, and of course you would need TV at the destination so wasn’t really helpful.
I never understood who they handle was aimed at.
In theory you could take it over to your friends house but realistically all you did was just set it up where you wanted it and then never move it.
I sort of agree and sort of disagree.
People absolutely did move their consoles around then. When I’d stay at my friend’s or a family member’s house, I’d often take my Dreamcast or GameCube, because I knew they didn’t have one.
They’d do the same when they came over to my house, because I never had a PS1/PS2.
Where the handle doesn’t make sense is what you said with the cables and controllers. I’d always put the console in the same place I put my controller(s) and cables - a bag that has its own handles.
Didn’t it have local LAN multiplayer for some titles? I think that’s why the handle was on it, but it’s been a long time.
I believe there was an attachment for the bottom that had a LAN port.
Wasn’t the Wii objectively better since it could also play GameCube games?
Maybe, but the GameCube was really riding a particular techno aesthetic, both externally and in the menu design. It was really the very tail-end of the “just because we can!” breed of design.
The Wii went all nice and soft white, rounded buttons, happy and family-friendly, which was absolutely the correct move for Nintendo commercially to make it mass-market, but it lost something at the same time.
By that logic, PC is objectively better because it can emulate almost any console.
Yeah, the original Wii revision with the ports for GC controllers and memory cards had legit GameCube hardware right on the motherboard, much like the OG “fat” PS2 had built-in PS1 hardware.
In fact, some custom Gamecube builds eschew the GC motherboard altogether in favor of a cut-down Wii motherboard, modified to boot directly into GC mode. It’s pretty cool.
I’m surprised they aren’t just desoldering chips off the Wii at this point. It wouldn’t be any less nerve-wracking.
I see what you’re going for, but for the average console modder, it’s far easier to just trim the “wrong” motherboard than transplant the relevant chips onto a custom substrate.
People cramming a Gamecube into a GBA SP are not average.
Note - That’s why I said “average console modder”, not “average person”, the two are very much not the same 😂
mfw someone calls nintendo “based” 🤢
I refused to buy one for two reasons:
-
the principle of me not having any money
-
it’s not a fucking cube. It’s a cuboid.
2 might seem like pedantry, but it would have cost them almost nothing in terms of plastic to make it a cube without having to redesign the internals, or they had used an honest designer in the first place.
Honestly, it still itches me now. If I had one I’d 3d-print a little extension to fix it.
It sounds like it should have mostly been point 1, but the GC was wildly affordable when it came out.
2, if you have a game boy player installed, it becomes an actual cube. I stumbled into a matching orange set at a thrift shop in Japan years ago and will keep it forever.
I’ve just looked that up and it fixes everything!
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No it was the 4.77 MHz 8086. It beeped and it hummed, providing much needed warm air to my room - the only insulation of which was nkotb posters.
I KNEW I MISSED SOMETHING!
Opening that case and seeing the two discs was mind-blowing at the time. I remember getting stuck and scouring gamefaqs, only to ask on the forums and was told I was stuck on the “hard” path.
Thanks for reminding me, I’ll add it :)
Simply put, yes. This reminds me, I have to look into using the GameCube startup animation for booting my computer
animal crossing on the gamecube had a lot of “microtransactions”. part of the functionality of the game was tied to having a gba/gamecube link cable. another part was tied to having an e-reader, along with several series of cards you had to collect in almost a “gacha” like sense.
I don’t know about objectivity being the best. I do remember a video where the dropped that generation off a stairs and was only one that worked, although the lid had to be held down. Also I remember hearing it was both the most powerful of its gen and wasn’t sold at a loss.
It was definitely my favorite console. Got into the wii but overtime I grew out of concals and moved onto doing all my gaming on pc.
Back in the web forum days, I joined a gaming one where one bloke had a falling out with his girlfriend and so she picked up his GameCube and hurled it at the wall.
After kicking her the fuck out, he expected to have to buy a new one (GameCube, not girlfriend), only to find very superficial damage to the casing and that it still worked perfectly fine.
Morgan Webb from X-Play - Console Durability Test
I was going to reference this too!
Dreamcast because you could just burn a game to CD and run it on an unmodded console.
Original Xbox because you could slap on a no solder mod chip and boot from the hard drive. Suddenly you could switch up the loader, run modded games, run emulators… Truly ground breaking for the console scene.
Or SNES if you’re the kind of weirdo who buys a console because they like games.
I will always die on the hill claiming Dreamcast as the best console. It was so far ahead of it’s time and it had so many great games. I would kill for Sega to release a new console, but I imagine many of the people who helped create the Dreamcast went on to work for Nintendo. I’ve always considered the Wii and Wii U to be the true successors to the Dreamcast and I’ve wondered if they were created with the help of people who made the Dreamcast.
Dreamcast because you could just burn a game to CD and run it on an unmodded console
My friend spent summers in Greece with his family. He said there was a shop there where you would give them like a few dollars and you would take the game home, burn it, and bring it back. Of course this is what doomed the Dreamcast. Noone wants to make a game for a system where you can just throw a disc into a consumer burner and copy.
Yeah… Then we were all sad and shocked when Sega got out of the console market.
But it was fun while it lasted.
