haha

Yep, here it is.

GooberTheHat wrote:

Having not owned either, I will give my vote to the one that has had the greatest impact on video gaming.

NES.

GooberTheHat wrote:

regmcfly wrote:

Utter destruction.

20-6 for the PS4

Pretty sure I voted NES too.

So I fucked it again.

I'm shit at this.

PS2.

PS3 was utterly pathetic.

The PS2 had such a strong library of games, as well as a ton of shit. But it gave me some of my all-time greatest games, including some in top 10 or 20.  Some games, then:

ICO
Shadow of the Colossus
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy XII
Dragon Quest VIII
Metal Gear Solid 2
Metal Gear Solid 3
Okami
Devil May Cry
Devil May Cry 3
God Hand
Katamari Damacy
Silent Hill 2
Persona 4 (though I played Golden on Vita)
Gradius V
Pro Evo games
Castlevania: Lament of Innocence (I liked it!)
Guilty Gear X2
Guitar Hero games
Guitaroo Man
Frequency
Amplitude
Yakuza 1 and 2
Disgaea and other Nippon Ichi games

Some games that are meant to be good but not among my faves or I didn’t play:

GTA3 and follow ups
God of War games
Kingdom Hearts games
Dark Cloud and Chronicle
Ratchet games
Jak series
Monster Hunter

Curios/alright games like:

Fantavision
Gregory’s Horror Show
Freak Out
Oz/Chains of Power/Sword of Etheria
Mark of Kri
Genji
Shadow of Rome


Lots of other (J)RPGs and Atlus games
Lots of shmups (import or otherwise)

Tonnes of great games!

Kara_Jane_Addams wrote:

dynamiteReady wrote:

Not being crass, just curious... Give a specific example? Like, how did their standards change in the light of competition?

Following the New York lawsuit in 1992 that stated Nintendo had created and unfair monopoly of the US video game market, Nintendo relaxed their licensing changing it so that a developer now only had to wait two years before porting a game to a rival console, following further lawsuits and the involvement of both the US and Japanese governments they abandoned the restriction entirely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0MK7qz13bU

Hate PS2 because it was a DC killing hype box.

Love it because of its library. It's a real workhorse of a console. You'll get plenty of what your fancy is.

Also because : RType Final, Gradius V, Katamari, Ico, Amplitude, Fantavision.

dpad is shit - for shmups I use an old PS1 stick for those. And it has a splendid library of them. It also has the splendid Sega Ages 2500 series.

Never had a PS3 but I like the PS2 enough to vote for it.

**  I vote PS2  **

The PS3, for me, was overshadowed by the 360 with its XBLA games, better (for me) controller and online service leading me to play multiplats on MS’s console instead, and actually not many great exclusives that appealed to me.  None the less, still gave me some of my greatest and some other great games:

flower
Journey
Last of Us
Demon’s Souls
Uncharted 2
Metal Gear Solid 4

Erm...

Er...

The Yakuza games? Nippon Ichi games?

Erm...

Valkyria Chronicles? (Didn’t play much of it though.)

Oh dear.

hylian_elf wrote:

To say what I already knew, then: PS2 absolutely smashes PS3 to oblivion. 

Only within the last week have I learned that it hosts quite possibly the best shmup ever - DDP DOJ.  Though my personal jury is still out I think I know the outcome of its deliberations.

I never owned a PS2 or PS3. I had a Gamecube and an XBox, then a Wii and a 360. But I definitely have a preference because there's only one of them I really regretted not buying.

There were only a handful of PS3 games I missed out on as the 360 had nearly everything I wanted on it. Demon's Souls, basically.

The PS2 on the other hand had the majority of all the good games of that generation and many of them were exclusives. The GC and XBox had some good stuff, but were shit in comparison. I'm pleased at least that I've been able to play stuff like FFXII, MGS3, Disgaea and Okami in later re-releases.

So PS2.

Old reg is good

PS2. I was late to the party with both, but the 360 dominated the PS3 so much that I couldn’t really think or recall why I eventually bought a PS3.

PS2 I really bought for ICO, which was enough.

As those of you who read my long PS4 post already know, I had originally planned for my main console in the seventh generation to be the PlayStation 3. As it was, I ended up getting the 360 first. I didn’t pick up a PS3 until the second iteration of the hardware came bundled with Uncharted 2.

It’s a curious beast of a machine, and I didn’t love it until nearer the end of its lifespan. I never found the XrossMediaBar to be the most elegant of solutions. The shaping of the triggers on the Sixaxis and DualShock 3 are not great, if we’re being honest. I have bits of plastic clipped to mine so that they curve outwards, and not inwards. I was always a little confused why it needed to make things quite so awkward with PSone memory card folders, PSP folders, and lets not forget the whole needing twice as much space as a game needs to be able to download and install fiasco.

But.

But.

But those foibles are worth overlooking when you consider some of the games. First up, the first three Uncharted games. We’ve had debates about the order of quality (they got progressively better is the correct answer) and we’ve rightfully pointed out some of the problems with the gameplay when facing the supernatural enemies, but as bombastic, epic adventures, they’re incredible. The Uboat up a waterfall. The dangling train carriage. The fall from a cargo plane.

Apparently not satisfied with providing three of the best titles on the console, they also brought us The Last of Us; while only a subtle shift in gameplay, it was tonally quite a departure from Nathan Drake’s cheeky charm.

The racing carnage of Motorstorm was one of the reasons I had initially thought I would opt for the PS3 over its rival; although I’ve had mixed experiences with them, there’s no denying the impact that flOw, flower and Journey had on other videogames; the first inFamous games were knockabout fun; MAG ambitiously pushed the boundaries of online multiplayer; Siren Blood Curse was another game so scary I failed to make much progress; a whole new sub-genre was kickstarted with Demon’s Souls. (Let’s just not mention the Lairs and Hazes, though. Hush, now.)

Rewind.

I graduated in May 2000. An MA (Hons) in English Literature qualifies you to do pretty much fuck all. So, I toddled back to the same summer job I’d had in Amsterdam for the two previous summers, and was tremendously grateful when, as I contemplated my return to Scotland in September, my parents said, “Why don’t you take a year out? Your brother had one between school and uni, you could have one now.” They suggested that I could start applying for jobs straight away, but that didn’t sound like a year out to me, that sounded like doing what I thought I’d be doing if the offer wasn’t there.

Looking back, I think they expected me to write the great Scottish novel and set myself up for life. In reality I faffed, bimbled, and got a temp job in Bookworld as my cash ran low. And my cash principally ran low because I had preordered a PS2, to be released on Friday 24 November. I also preordered FIFA 2001, Kessen and Silent Scope.

Weirdly, the branch of Electronics Boutique where I had my preorder (which was a short distance away in the same shopping centre as the Bookworld I worked in) put Smuggler’s Run up for sale a week before the PS2 launched. I had gone in, I think, to confirm which games I wanted to preorder, and they had it on the shelf already. As they couldn’t guarantee how much stock they’d get of the games I was hoping to buy, I picked up Smuggler’s Run to ensure I had something to play a week later.

The morning of launch day, my mum agreed to leave for work early so I could pick up my console before work, and leave it in the boot of her car. I waited in the queue and, as I reached the till, disaster struck. “Have you got your letter?” Which letter? “The one confirming your preorder.” No, it was at home. “You need it to collect your console.” But... I’ve got ID, you know it’s me. “You need your letter.” Crestfallen, I returned to my mum’s car and told her what happened.

That morning, I was obviously a poor soul at work, the wind taken out of my sales. This was before the proliferation of mobile phones, of course, so you can imagine my surprise when my girlfriend and her dad arrived in the shop with my letter. My mum had phoned home, got my girlfriend to find the letter, and she’d called her dad to give her a lift in. (Its really no wonder that I proposed to her a month later.) If I thought it had been a slow morning, that last hour before my lunch break felt like eternity.

The rules of the shop were, weirdly, that you could only be off the premises for half-an-hour, and for the second half of your lunch break you were supposed to be able to help at the tills if it got too busy, and then extend your break at the end. A bollocks rule, but one I obeyed, so I was grateful to the managers who, knowing what it meant to me, turned a blind eye to my one hour fifteen minute lunch break, queueing in a now heaving Electronics Boutique. I did get all three games I’d preordered, so the four new titles, plus the backwards compatibility of the PS1 games I was still playing felt like a healthy library.

The other thing that I can tell you about Friday 24 November 2000 is that it was my uncle’s 40th birthday party at a function room in town. Now, he’s one of my favourite relatives, but it did mean that my first night of my new console was little more than a furtive fumble. And, of course, I was working the following day.

Any plans my parents had for me spending the rest of the year constructively were torpedoed that day. Despite having been the just-in-case impulse buy, Smuggler’s Run became a firm favourite and is, to this day, one of my all-time favourites. It wasn’t long before I added to my library with the inimitable Timesplitters, as well as Madden 2001. My brother gave me SSX for Christmas, and that became one of the most played games on my console.

It wasn’t that much later that I was standing in line in a branch of HMV, when a magazine cover caught my eye. Burnout looked exciting, but I’d never bought one of these multi-platform magazines before, because it felt like I was paying for a lot of content of no interest to me. I’d been an avid reader of Play magazine thus far, but I thought I’d give this Edge magazine a try. If I hadn’t picked that magazine up that day, I probably wouldn’t be typing this now.

Edge encouraged me to broaden my game-playing horizons, and explore titles on my PS2 that I might otherwise have ignored, like Mister Mosquito or Mad Maestro. I can’t be sure I would have tried ICO or Shadow of the Colossus without their influence.

There are scores of multi-platform games I adored on PS2 (honourable mentions to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and Freedom Fighters, Manhunt and Def Jam: Fight for NY, FlatOut and Red Dead Revolver - still the best of that series) but, again, it feels like cheating to use them as fuel.

I opted for Battle Engine Aquila over Yaeger, and don’t regret that choice, but I think the latter was more popular. Dropship: United Peace Force is another of my all time favourites. Man, I was hyped for that game; I downloaded a zip file to my work computer so that my desktop wallpaper and file icons were all images from the game in the weeks leading up to its release. Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was probably the start of my love affair with Naughty Dog. I used to sit up late, on the end of my bed, playing for hours after my then fiancée had gone to sleep. She objected to me playing Ring of Red because the way it accessed the disc made too much noise, but Victorious Boxers: Ippo’s Road to Glory was allowed; I think the thumbstick controls also meant less button clicking. I loved the lonely atmosphere of Sky Odyssey.

I confess, I didn’t stick by the PS2 for the full generation. After breaking up with my fiancée, my next girlfriend bought me an Xbox with Halo one Christmas. I originally intended to keep my PS2 as my main console and only get the Xbox exclusives son that platform, but I did end up doing the opposite. However, it’s the PS2 that I’ve stuck with the longest; I’ve got one of the slim consoles set up in my bedroom now, ready to play the small selection of games I’ve pulled together, including a number of my favourites.

With the greatest of respect to the PS3, which I by no means dislike (it’s still connected to my main TV in the living room) my vote has to go to the PS2.

My mum has told us about a recurring nightmare she had when we were growing up. She’d be at the swimming pool with us, and either my brother or I would get into difficulty. And, as she went to help one, the other would get into difficulty. And so this would go on, unable to save us both, until she woke up.

I have no idea why that comes to mind...

hylian_elf wrote:

Can’t have both PS2 and PS4 winning...

Technically possible, you’d just need a way to rig the tournament, a time machine, and a complete disregard for the butterfly effect, although to be fair the knowledge that the timestream you end up in might not be the optimal one is the kind of thing that would eat away at you as time progresses, with every little problem that arises weighing heavy as you inevitably question if things would have been better had you not gambled your future happiness on changing the outcome of an on-line console ranking tournament.

Oh wait, you mean simultaneously.