Do you prefer the generations that were competitive, or one-sided?

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Spindel said:

I like when they are competitive because of hardware differentiation.

I will get some flak for this:
If you look at MS and Sony in current and last generation they are basically the same hardware (x86 cpu AMD gpu) and otherwise minute differences. That kind of competition is useless and not really competition and those consoles might as well be lumped tighter as the same thing competing against Nintendos ARM and Nvidia based platform (but even that is a stretch since the difference isn’t that large).

Last kind of interesting competition era was the PS3/Xbox360/Wii era because larger differences in core architecture. Before that the PS1/Saturn/N64 was interesting because both architectural and storage medium differences.

But it was much more ”fun” in the 8- and 16-bit eras. Even if the CPUs would have been the same those consoles handled graphics and sound/music in vastly different ways which meant that there were actually substantial differences between multi platform games (most often with one being superior to the other but in some cases both where good and worth playing for more reasons than determining which is better). And yeah that era was just Sega vs Nintendo* (Master System/Mega Drive, NES/SNES) but that was still the best competition. I mean just things like the Mega Drive having a second Z80 CPU for only handling music and sound was really cool.

Today ”competition” is really dull. Everything using prerecorded waveform samples for all the sound FX and pre recorded waveform music run through the same decoder. Add on top of that everything using the same boring graphics API. This leads to the same boring discussions on forums (like this and other) about how platform A is superior to platform B because it runs the game 2 fps faster or displays 5 more vertical pixels. That is shit discussions compared to let us say comparing Rock ’n Roll Racing on Mega Drive and SNES where everything differs from sound FX to music to graphics on top of general performance.

With all this said I’m not saying that modern games suck or anything. What l’m saying that the competition between consoles nowadays is an illusion. The only competition there is is Nintendo against everyone else and that comes down to 100 % Nintendo games, not the hardware.

*I’m fully aware that there where other systems too like PC Engine/Turbo GraFx or Atari 7800 but the market share of those was so small it doesn’t really count. Also I do not count C64 or Amiga since those where actual multi purpose computers (even if most of them where used mostly for gaming)

This is a really good point, I do kinda miss when the consoles were more differentiated and had totally different approaches to graphics, audio, storage, etc.

Today's more standardised setup isn't quite as interesting, even if it is better for developers.