Comment by jedbrooke
16 hours ago
The Wii was truly the peak of gaming consoles.
Games still came on disk so there wasn’t the madness of endless buggy updates (disks had one opportunity to be bug free so quality was at a higher standard) and internet connectivity was not guaranteed, so there was no way for micro transactions.
However, internet connectivity was available, so things like optional online play were still possible, as well as some basic user generated content.
Wouldn’t this criteria make PS2 and Xbox “peak gaming” also? I remember playing CoD online on PS2 and many praising Xbox for its online features.
Once PS3 and Xbox 360 came in picture, things changed slightly since they relied more heavily on their network services… albeit, PSN back then was free for online gameplay. These were on the same generation as Wii, but Wii was a winner for casual playing.
A lot of aging millennials would agree with this statement. PS2 was peak Sony for sure and the original Xbox is one of the very few things Microsoft got right.
some late system releases of games on ps2 were weaker ports of things on the ps3/360. But other than that ps2 is a solid consideration for peak gaming alongside xbox/dreamcast/wii
2001 for the PS2 was one of the greatest years in gaming history.
Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Gran Turismo, and GTA.
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360 was excellent. Yeah RROD but the library actually is very impressive.
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Xbox 360 was pretty great. My favorite game to play online there was fight night round 3. It was an incredible experience. Managed to climb to the top 50 on the leaderboards!
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Xbox360 might not be the most important console out of ALL consoles, but I think it's the most important _modern_ console. Online gaming, online store, an indie game channel with XNA (which itself was revolutionary, even though some of its importance might be forgotten today), HD support. A lot of things it got right back when these were all brand new on a console. Plus it had geometry wars.
It was the first system of a modern design in a lot of ways.
Six hardware threads, so the thread per subsystem model didn't really work. Instead you got the best results from a DAG of tasks submitted to a job stealing scheduler running on most of the CPU resources. But beside that, no little DSPs that you had to separate work out onto other than the GPU.
And it had the first consumer GPU to incorporate unified shaders (so vertex and pixel shaders ran on the same cores, dynamically scheduled to improve utilization).
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Geometry wars was very fun. I played on PC always trying to top my friends high scores.
PS2 is certainly a high-point in retro gaming via emulation. The huge, diverse game library spanning >10 years, a great emulator in PCSX2 and tons of community mods and HD texture packs make it amazing.
You've got the option of OG authenticity with CRT emulation (although I use a shader emulating a high-end analog RGB CRT so the effect is more subtle) or you can 'upgrade' games to looking and feeling quite modern yet without the modern cruft. Also want to give a nod to PS3 / X360 emulation as both have come a long way in the last ~18 months and I'm really enjoying working my way through a backlog of titles I never played back in the day.
I wouldn't disagree with that!
Mind you, I broke my video game addiction shortly after that time-period - my last console was an Xbox 360 - and haven't got a firm grasp on what's come since.
Dreamcast came with a modem and an optional Ethernet adapter 8 years earlier. The GD-ROM was too clever by half. But perhaps it was the prototype of peak game consoles. I have a soft spot because the home brew scene on that started a full quarter century ago.
> The Wii was truly the peak of gaming consoles.
everyone says that about their childhood :)
There's an objective argument behind this statement that could be made though - everyone, and I mean _almost literally everyone_ tried a Wii at some point during its regular lifespan. Even if it was just Wii Sports, it brought millions of people into video games who only considered them another toy. Parents, grandparents, a lot of the people who chastised video games for years were suddenly enamoured with virtual bowling and sword fights, while the rest of us still got our fill of Mario et. al.
I don't know a single person in my country except for me who ever played Wii, and only a handful of people who even heard about it.
So, a ridiculous statement. :)
As much as it pains me to say that, the same could be said about mobile gaming. In fact, I am pretty sure a lot of countries did not have access to Nintendo hardware but they can now enjoy gaming thanks to their phone.
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>There's an objective argument behind this statement that could be made though
Everyone says that about their childhood too :)
> _almost literally everyone_
Sorry to disappoint, but I don't even know what a Wii looks like. I've always been using my computer to play games on.
I grew up playing NES and SNES games and DOS games like Doom and Quake, and while I have a lot of fond memories and still think very highly of many of the games of that era, there’s no way I’d call it peak gaming. I’ve revisited them a lot over the years and game development as an art has certainly come a long way since then IMO.
Wii U is even better since it can play all the Wii games. And that's NOT my childhood - my childhood was audio cassette drives for storage.
I was 26 when I bought one, and agree. I long for a modern STB with the Wii interface and lots of OSS to tinker with. The sounds, the music, the tactile feel of using the WiiMode to navigate was sublime.
The games were cool too.
The Wii had possibly the best big screen UI I’ve ever used. I always thought having the live icon tiles on a regular TV with station previews would be incredible. The WiiMotes worked so much better than the Samsung and LG remote pointers do now.
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We bought the first Wii at 35. We still have a Wii U for the family and still play 4-player games, and have 8 WiiMotes for Smash Brothers.
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guilty as charged here. I will say my parents are quite fond of the Wii too though. (they’re not really gamers though)
Yeah part of the magic of the Wii was that everyone seemed to have one. Even grandparents and other folks that wouldn't usually have a game console seemed to have them and be able to figure it out.
In defense the Wii was popular with people that very likely died of natural causes years ago.
For me it's the (New) 3DS. It's about the peak for handheld gaming. It can run GB, GBC, NES, SNES very well, GBA can run natively and obviously DS/3DS. You can run pretty much any Zelda game up to the GameCube on it with the official ports of Ocarina/Majora. The emulation community also has some promising demos of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, but who knows about that. I have a Switch and it's frustrating seeing games that Nintendo haven't released for it (like WW and Pokopia), but maybe after a decade I'll get a Switch 2 OLED whenever that comes out.
rare as an unicorn though, especially the smaller version
I've got one of those smaller ones in its box, bought back in 2016 from a GameStop I still frequent. Is it really particularly rare?
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I'll forgive you for thinking Wii was the peak because people are obviously biased based on the time they grew up. For me it was the SNES/Genesis era. Or arguably PlayStation 1.
The motion controls make it age really poorly imo (motion controls aren't bad, but forced motion controls to do anything is)
The pointing feature was snappy and worked well. The motion controls were pretty badly implemented.
Outside of a handful pf motionplus compatible games, there was no gyroscope. Everything relied on a 3axis accelerometer.
When they were shoved in yes, it's terrible. But the effortless way they were incorporated in games like Super Mario Galaxy is something special.
Agree to disagree on the Wii. It was fun, but the poor thing got a lot of dust in our households. A bit too gimmicky for us. Doubly so for the Wii U.
not every console stays connected to my tv... and wii stayed. wii sports is still fun and get everyone moving during a rainy day which is quite an achievement all by itself
The Wii was the first era where game discs came with console firmware updates that were silently installed and could lock you out owning your device.
> so quality was at a higher standard
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I don't disagree, but the wii remote market was/is the absolute worst console device market.