No you can't hence why I called the Wii U genorationless not the old systems.

No one said it had to  play the "original carts" or "can't be backwards compatible" just "X consoles games" was used,  so I demonstrated how silly that definition is in general. Then people added more restrictions to the definition of " X consoles games".

How about we add HDtwins remasters on their successors, Gamecube remasters on Wii U and N64 remasters on 3DS into the restrictions too because well you know they do have "physical media"

The gaming crash is why that happened, they lumped them to forget about that short time it existed lol.

A generation is just a step in a line from an ancestor. I.E. 4 generations of a family would be children, parents, grandparents, and great grandparents. Sometimes generations of people are given labels based on big events of their lifetimes or births, like the Baby Boomers, which are all of the babies born after world war 2.

ok. now you've confused me. 

Can you take say the GOW collection remaster on the PS3 and pop that into a PS2 and it works? 

I don't know why or how you are managing to complicate this. But it's simple. The PS3 will play PS3 discs/media and may have BC support for PS2/1 media/games. that makes the PS3 it's own generation of console. The PS4 is its own generation of console cause you can't take a PS4 game and pop it into a PS3 and have it work. If you could, then both the PS3/4 will be regarded to be of the same generation. 

New generation: new console/handheld hardware AND the majority of new titles doesn't work on the older systems of the same company.

New 3DS / DSi : only very few new Nintendo titles needed that revision, most others titles of the same year still ran fine on the older hardware, so no new generation.

Gameboy Color was a new generation IMHO, there were a lot of titles that wouldn't run on the older Gameboy models.

There wasn't really a videogame console crash, that is kind of a myth. It was mostly that some companies failed and others succeeded. Commodore and others had their golden age between Atari and NES. It was largely because the games were much better than what was on Atari.

As for the whole "generation" thing, it is kind of stupid when it comes to videogame consoles because there's no purpose to it.

It made sense back in the 8-bit vs. 16-bit era, because there was a clear definition of what consoles released in this time period separated them from their predecessors released in a past time period. Then the 32/64-bit generation came along, and that was clearly something defineable too.

Then things get muddy from the Dreamcast onward. What really defined the Wii generation were motion controls. But what really separates the current consoles from consoles back then? Some of them are a little more powerful, but not in any significant capacity to really make them different. You can't really lump consoles together in generations anymore. PS4 is Sony's newest generation hardware, and Wii U is Nintendo's newest, and 3DS and Vita, etc... But saying that these all belong to the same generation is not a good definition since each one is doing different things, there's no feature between them that makes them a unique grouping.

We the gamers.

Specific sets of consoles, all around the same general time and level of power, dictate when a new generation has arrived, in my eyes. Outliers exist (Neo Geo), but their impact during their gen isn't enough to warrant inclusion. Handhelds have never applied to generations, since the Gameboy lingered forever and competitors have mostly crumbled. PC almost has its own generations based on what's the most dominant iteration of Windows (95/98, XP, 7, 10). (And yeah, this is based on my experience, hence gens 1-2 aren't represented here.)

3 - NES, SMS
4 - SMD, SNES
5 - PS1, N64
6 - NGC, PS2, XBox
7 - XB360, Wii, PS3
8 - PS4, XB1, NNX (?)

But it's not that surprising the graphics improved enough (especially first generation titles), considering that the 7 years from PS3 to PS4 is still really a very long period in electronic, we switched from specific and hard to optimize architecture to easy to develop PC architecture, and for the first time we got away from memory constrained hardware  (x16, on par with PC). The diminishing return rate will only increase, and I believe there is no big hardware revolution to come for the next generation. In this context, I believe the PS4.5 (and any hardware with similar specs) could make this generation last for a very long time. It's not a prediction but an example of such scenario, if a (true) new generation of XBox/Nintendo launches in the next 2 years and last 5 years, that means the PS4.5 will not face a significantly better hardware for the next 7 years, making the PS4 last 10 years overall.

Obviously you get confused, you are just looking the specs

you should look for the 'generation' definition itself, then you'll get the idea what is a video game console generation