other then bioshock do those games have actual good gameplay and combat by today standards i would say no. He's right it's nostalgia more then anything unless you are type of gamer that just plays for graphics and story mode. 

It's not nostalgia for me; I still play 7th gen games now and then and in terms of the core gameplay I feel most 7th gen games hold up. The visuals have aged, but as a retro gamer that doesn't bother me. To me, something like Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect 2, Bayonetta, Xenoblade Chronicles, or Dead Space are still great.

Honestly didn't play all those games but uncharted, gears and mario galaxy are were all super repetitive and simple imo. playing mario odyssey and it's leagues better then Mario galaxy with much better controls and even though it's not that challenging same as galaxy the exploration and gimmicks are really great and feel like banjo Kazooie true sequel.

I agree, Dead Space still looks really good.

I think the atmosphere helps it a lot.

We're just gonna have to disagree there as I thought they were excellent.

I love Odyssey, but that was a Switch game so for the purposes of this specific thread, the relevant 8th gen equivalent would be Super Mario 3D World, which I thought was a good game but far less creative and ambitious than Galaxy.

For me the Wii U and Xbone drag down the 8th gen average a lot compared to Wii and 360.

I'm not really seeing how the wii line up is  better then wiiu. Botw is considered the goat by many, tropical freeze considered the best 2d platformer ever by many, and mario kart 8 is the best mario kart, just look at the top wiiu games it seems like you are judging the wiiu more on sales then actual great games.

I agree with you on xbox though but sony has delivered massively for ps4 compared to ps3 and fromsoft has changed the game and are now massive. capcom as well, they went from being mediocre 7th gen to capkings in the 8th. Japanese developers came back to life with 8th gen consoles and that's why 7th gen was so boring to me as well with Japanese devs having the worst gen they have had. 

I agree with a lot of this.

7th gen was dominated by the EA/Activision/Ubisoft triumvirate. I found most of their games to be boring as hell. BioWare's games never did anything for me, nor did Call of Duty. There were overall too many brown shooters in 7th generation.  Japanese developers basically got shat upon by gamers and the gaming press. Capcom kept getting dragged for things like on-disc DLC.  Bioshock was okay, but Infinite over-promised and under-delivered. The one Western series I really enjoyed from that time was Fallout. Fallout 3 and New Vegas were amazing. 

PS3 started off pretty weak, though it got stronger in its later years and set the stage for PS4's success once they started remembering what made the PS1 and PS2 great, and it wasn't weaker versions of Western third party games.

360 was really only good for a few years, and that was because of Sony's mistakes and because Microsoft moneyhatted a bunch of Japanese exclusives. Once those bombed in sales and the 360 still flopped in Japan, Microsoft stopped, but the damage was done, and a cynical part of me thinks that Microsoft cared more about blocking content from PS3 owners than about building bridges with RPG fans.  The RRoD and E74 pretty much soured my experience with the 360, and once the PS3 started getting decent games in 2008, my replacement 360 was pretty much a dust magnet. The Xbox One flopped because Microsoft started going all in on Kinect with the 360 (which is when the 360's sales really took off) and they figured that gravy train would keep rolling with biscuit wheels forever. The consumers ended up punishing them for it in 8th gen. I tried games like Gears and Halo, but they were not for me. 

As for Wii and DS, I was glad to see Nintendo doing better after their struggles on the Gamecube, but there was a lot about that era that rubbed me the wrong way. I ended up enjoying games like Fire Emblem and Punch-Out more than Wii Sports or Wii Fit, which lost their novelty fairly quickly. Plus, I wasn't a fan of Reggie Fils-Aime, who preferred to tell people what he thought they should want rather than give them what they were asking for. It's thanks to him that the US almost didn't get Xenoblade Chronicles. Skyward Sword was pretty emblematic of the negative aspects of Nintendo's philosophy during the Wii/DS era.  But we did get Dragon Quest 5 and 6 out of it. 

PSP was representative of another problem in 7th gen. Japanese developers preferred to develop on PSP rather than PS3 or Wii. There were so many games I would much rather have played on PS3 than on PSP. 

7th generation was when I seriously considered hanging up gaming for good. 

8th generation was, in my opinion, when the gaming world began to heal itself. Japanese developers were back. At the end of 7th generation, there were blaring headlines saying that Capcom was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and was rife for a buyout. Just a few years later, Capcom pulled off a breathtaking comeback  surpassed only by Nintendo's huge comeback with the Switch in 9th generation. RPGs were finally back. I was kind of bummed that Fallout fizzled out somewhat on PS4/X1, but I was having too much fun with other games to care much. 

Definitely not nostalgia. (Ugh)

Mario Galaxy was and is still brilliance, like Curl says it’s scope is incomparable to 3D World. Uncharted 2 and 3 beat 4 hands down and the 7th Gen also has Guitar Hero; my final gaming addiction. There hasn’t been anything like it afterwards that I ended up playing like I played Guitar Hero, and I’d still have as much fun with it today. The 8th Gen can technically claim BotW as a clear win, sure, but in my perception that game was never really the WiiU or 8th Gen’s to claim (if you consider Switch 9th) because of how the Switch version overshadows the WiiU version in every way. Not just sales, but also exposure. Similarly I consider Twilight Princess, which is excellent so WiiU’s win through BotW is minor anyway, to be Wii’s.

7th, and it's not even close, for the existence of the Wii alone. Last time the HC industry saw real innovation in the way you interact with your games in a major way (c'mon! Wii had no bundled controller apart of the WiiMote), not a side or complimentary way, and a company willing to risk almost everything they had in the home console department (it really showed guts!!) and come out successful. But it did leave a sour taste in many a mouth, because the motion control, even if still in use, is not a major factor anymore and I really wanted to see the concept getting expanded in mainstream gaming rather than simply being added as another possible feature.

Mario galaxy love is pure nostalgia : The game has so many flaws it boggles my mind how this is considered one of the games ever.

I am shocked at how frequently poorly this game plays. I submit it is the most frustrating and fun-sucking mainline Mario game after SM64DS.

Far too often, Mario does not do what I want him to do. I am fighting the game, the controls, the camera. It feels variably like wading through thick sludge, or trying to catch a soap bubble in the wind. For all the excellence in presentation and creative design, the core gameplay is bad for any game, but shocking bad for a Super Mario.

Specifics:

the camera control from previous 3D Marios was (almost entirely) taken away. This, in combination with wildly shifting orientations means you are at the mercy of trying to navigate a shifting 3D space with a 2D control option and it doesn't work as often as it needs to.

The level design of scattered planetoids and poor camera control means you are typically disoriented as to where you are in the big picture, and despite it being the 'most 3D' Mario, it plays like a series of linear discontinuous sections, with little to unite them or utilize the grand scope of being in a fully 3D singular space

Mario can't jump! His basic leap isn't high enough for almost any traversal. He feels weak, neutered. Going up a flight of 3 steps, he can't jump to the top of them, and they're not spaced far enough apart to chain together 2 jumps. You just crash in the 2nd or 3rd step, halt momentum, and then have to jump up the remainder with zero horizontal speed. It's terrible.

The inertia sucks. It takes far too long to get moving at any functional speed. And yet Mario is animated like's hurrying.

The run/traversal speed is slow. Lasagna legs

Is long jumping broken? I cannot get the timing down and end up backflipping, or skidding to a normal leap more than half the time I try to long jump - which I'm doing to speed movement cuz Mario is slow AF. I didn't have this issue in SM64 or Sunshine. UPDATE: I did figure this out much better by the end of the game (the game did not teach the move well and only requires a long jump ~once thru all the stars), but it's still less easy to quickly and reliably activate than other 3D Mario games

Scripted changing camera angles results in misaligned jumps as the camera shifts mid leap, and clipping corners and rubbing against walls as your joystick orientation suddenly applies to a different direction

Getting stuck on small objects is such a pain. There's no gliding off non-obstacle objects or surfaces or rubbing past them. All momentum ground to a halt because of a tiny stone or pole in an otherwise open field.

Mario gets sent too far from taking the slightest damage, knocking him back and off multiple platforms and undoing significant platforming progress. Unnecessarily punishing on top of the health loss

Jumping out of water, which many games struggle with, is bonkers bad here. You'll tread mush and find yourself diving under what you're trying to climb onto or spinning in circles.

Skating when you want to be still, unable to stay in place, forced to do loops and crash into things or fly off platforms.

Air control in this game is like fanning a pamphlet at a rock. Once you commit to a jump, trying to readjust mostly just slows speed and makes a bad problem worse.

There's mid-air falling and recovery animations for walking off even the smallest ledge. Try running down the green steps from Rosalina to Captain Toad. Completely kills speed and pacing. Atrocious

Edge climbing up is far too slow. This is MARIO not some cinematic adventure title where I need to feel his effort. Let me MOVE.

Spring suit controls like piss, with the inability to stick a place on the ground and stay there (whilst bouncing). Trying to get the star in the air after the spring/mole boss was more difficult than the boss itself.

Spring, bee suit, swimming are unable to 180 and instead force these little loops that just ruin any precision.

exceptions:

Flying Mario and shell-swimming seems to work just fine, both in large part due to the brake button and the laser sights that show where you're oriented.

2D plane locked sections are more successful, tho still share several of the problems above.