Great to see so many different perspectives!
For me...
4th Gen: Donkey Kong Country. Back in the day, it was an absolute mind-fuck that an SNES game could look this good. With its pre-rendered backgrounds and characters, it felt like a game from 10 years into the future had somehow been brought back into time and crammed into an SNES cart.
5th Gen: Gonna go with a lot of other folks here and say Mario 64. The sense of scope, freedom, and complexity it offered was staggering. A truly epic generational leap.
6th Gen: Again, like quite a few of you, seeing Rogue Squadron II running on the Gamecube for the first time. To my 12 year old's eye, on an SDTV, it truly looked like movie CGI quality in a video game, I could hardly believe what I was seeing.
7th Gen: Being introduced to motion controls in Wii Sports Resort. I didn't jump on the Wii train til 2009 so it was Resort rather than the original Wii Sports that was my entry point. And holy cow, it felt downright futuristic, like something out of Star Trek. Using my own movements to sword-fight with 1:1 accuracy was a generational leap to match the 5th gen's jump from 2D to 3D.
8th Gen: Breath of the Wild's organic interactivity. Before this gen started one of my great hopes for it was that game worlds would be packed with far more dynamic elements. Sadly this wasn't really the case overall, but with BOTW at least this dream came to fruition. Shooting a bomb arrow to set a patch of grass on fire which then created an updraft I could use to get a mid-air bullet-time kill was awesome in itself, but that same explosion coincidentally bringing down an apple tree and its apples rolling into the grass fire so that when it was over I had a bunch of roasted apples to pick up? Now that's what I'm talking about.
