| Leynos said: 90s. Best games. Most classics. Most franchises today owe their existence to either starting their or being inspired by games from this era. Mario 64 and OoT set the blueprint for 3D design. Best consoles. Genesis. SNES. PCE/TG16. Plus the Turbo CD and SCD. PS1. SEGA Saturn. N64. Dreamcast. PC gaming was amazing then. Arcades still in peak form. Expansions were actual expansions. Shareware was a thing. No MTX. No awful DLC practices and yes games did have DLC. The fact SEGA was still in arcades and consoles. Developers were far less risk-averse. Capcom, Konami were in their best shape. New IPs by the dozens of each generation. Remakes were not the rule but the exception. Same with yearly games.Best consoles. Best games. Peak creativity with new and old series. |
PC Engine 1987, PC Engine CD-Rom 1988, TurboGrafx-CD 1989. Sega Mega Drive 1988. You have a strange idea of when the 90's began. I know many of the games came out after the start of 1990, but by that logic the Dreamcast is a 2000's system. I do agree though that the first half of the 90's was a powerhouse time for video games with 2D graphics reaching their peak beauty before being killed a generation too soon by the Playstation and polygons. Those early 3D games haven't aged well at all, for the most part, and really don't look good until the Dreamcast and games like DoA. I should be happy that my favorite game, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was somehow allowed to be released in 97 on the PSX.
And as far as the 80's go, you have to look to the arcades to really get what was special about that decade. I think I'm older than many here and was a young one during the Pac-Man era. You just had to be there at the time, the arcades were amazing in a way that is hard to imagine even by the late 80's. The arcades had mostly shut down or faded to pale shadows of their former glory by 86 and I mostly played games from that point on at convenience stores or bowling alleys. Another thing, if you play early 80's games emulated on LCD screens and with a gamepad you will almost always be disappointed. Many early games have unique controls and are super frustrating and not fun without them. Also these early games look much better on true raster monitors, but look lousy on LCD displays. Scan line filters help, but these filters are still a long way from how they look on a CRT and tend to dim the image, when the CRT had better contrast and brightness than most modern LCD's.
I will say that there were some awesome arcade titles in the 90's, CPS 1 games, Metal Slug and many others. And the arcade games did seem to have a 2nd hayday with the explosion of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. Too bad the arcades faded away for good as the 90's passed.
