Oh I see what you’re saying now: Once you’re finished playing Mouse. I thought it was something for Dusk.

Fair, yeah I wasn't clear.  But Dusk is next up, looks amazing.  

My viewpoint is this:

Non-competitive Generations
2, 3, 5, 6, 8 (i.e. PS4/XB1/Wii U)

Competitive Generations
4, 7, 9 (i.e. PS5/Series/Switch)

In most cases, I prefer the non-competitive generations.  This is usually because the other systems actually are trying their best to compete, but one system ends up being so amazing that it just obliterates the competition.  Sega is a great game developer, and they were trying their best to make the SMS successful, but the NES just kept releasing titles so amazing that we are still celebrating their 40th anniversary this year.  The competitive generations have good games too, but you have to buy multiple systems to enjoy most of those good games.

So, basically I prefer to just buy one piece of hardware that has almost all of the good games on it. 

Competition is good for gamers!

Interesting question because they say competition is better for everyone, and you can see why.

But the most one-sided generation was probably the PS2 era?
And I feel like that was the best era as a gamer in terms of the different type of games available, and how accessible they were.

That last part (for me at least) was also partially influenced by how easy it was to play Japan-only releases through modded consoles.

My favourite generations are 3, 4, 5, and 6 (the best). Three of these had a clear dominant player.

Gen 9 is imo great in terms of games, but modern systems lack strong identities, generational wow factor is gone, and innovation is becoming rare. Nothing really feels fresh enough.

Usually, in my opinion, when a platform holder gets too comfortable they get complacent and arrogant and start short-changing their customers; see Nintendo in 2012, Sony in 2006 and currently.

A little competition helps keep them honest.

This is how it plays out in practice.  Generation 6 (PS2) was not competitive, but it kind of ruined the PS3, because Sony got too cocky.  And the Wii was Nintendo's most successful home console by far up to that point, but that kind of ruined the Wii U.  The huge success of one generation can ruin the successor console.  But that really says that the console market is competitive overall, even if some generations have an extremely dominant winner.

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)

I just prefer which had the best games and my favorite generations are 4, 6 and 7. Only one was one sided whereas the other two were competitive. I can't say I prefer one or the other, but what I can say is competition is better for the customer since everyone is trying to get your money. Even if one company isn't doing as well compared to another if they offer something (or multiple things) that others don't offer they can still succeed in their own way.