Comment by brunoluiz
16 hours ago
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.
> GTA
I'm guessing you mean GTA 3, but then we also had GTA Vice City... and GTA San Andreas. Which are all three in the top 5 selling games for the PS2.
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Relevant video from one of my favourite youtube channels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwnphd_QUXo
360 was excellent. Yeah RROD but the library actually is very impressive.
The 360 remains my favorite M$ console to date. The indie game store was a wild place with some real hidden gems, the controller is still good, and it had the last good iteration of Geometry Wars
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!
Also the peak console experience for me as an 80s kid, but the RRoD means MS definitely didn’t get it right.
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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).
The 360’s GPU was very modern, but I’m hesitant to give the 360 the “modern design” label because of how esoteric those CPU cores were; And the major hoops developers needed to jump through to get them preforming at peak performance, along with offloading work to the GPU.
They had SMT, but unlike every other implementation of SMT I’m aware of, memory stalls on one thread would stall both threads… which kind of defeats the primary purpose of SMT.
At least with the PS3’s Cell, the SPUs were designed to be esoteric on purpose. It seems like Xenon kind of just ended up being esoteric by accident. (Or maybe they ended up like that because Microsoft were cheating off Sony’s homework)
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.