"Although it was promoted as the first 64-bit gaming system, the Jaguar proved to be a commercial failure and prompted Atari to leave the home video game console market." - Wikipedia

Yes I know Wikipedia is not the best source but it is true. Atari launched the very first 64-bit console. Even before Nintendo's N64 Atari had a 64-bit platform on the market. Of course much like developers tend to do with platforms they port and use out dated graphics engines etc...etc...

The new hardware was extremely difficult to develope for and developers were pretty much on their own. Sounds familiar doesn't it. The Atari Jaguar only sold 500,000 units in the end, it was killed off fairly quickly by Sony/Sega and died right as Nintendo entered the fray.

At the time (1993/94) the only competition was 16-bit and 32-bit. Atari got support from 3rd parties and internally but never actually pushed its hardware to the max. When PlayStation/Saturn and Nintendo 64 hit the shelves it was all over for the Jaguar.

But in the end spec's wise the Jaguar was superior to the PlayStation!

The PS2 was not the weakling its imagined to be. Its main CPU was slower than that of the GameCube, but it had two vector processors to supplement it, and the GC didn't. The PS2 and GC were arguably very similar in horsepower, despite the fact that the GC's power was much more accessible to your average developer. You never saw awe-inspiring titles like God of War 1/2, and Shadow of the Colossus on the GC, despite its faster main CPU (okay you might argue that Starfox: Adventures, the latter Zelda and some of the Rebel Strike line were close... but I don't think you could actually claim them to be "better" looking... just "as good", or nearly so).

I would argue that your list correlates just as much to "installed base" as it does to the inverse of computing power -- since installed base goes up with earlier console releases, and CPU power goes down with earlier releases (when considering competition), this makes sense.

Actually, the SNES was quite a bit more powerful than the Genesis/Megadrive, but yeah, most of the time the more powerful console doesn't win the console war.

You are somewhat correct. But I notice in your argument you only name a few of the more polished GameCube games. Take ResidentEvil4 and ResidentEvil4 on PS2 and sit them side by side and you see the hardware's differances. Capcom tried as hard as they could to directly port RE4 but the PS2 version still looked a little grainy and not as polished as its GameCube counter part. Infact it has been argued that GameCube's ATi/IBM proccessors made it almost as powerful as the X-Box.

You did name some of the best looking games on the PS2 and yes they do look pretty good. But to be honest GodOfWar2 and Shadow Of the Collosus. Games like Sega's Spartan Total War and EternalDarkness which I'd say are the closest game's to GodOfWar on a genre basis do look just as good if not better then their PS2 counter parts. Take a look at Konami's MetalGearSolid:TwinSnakes and compare it to MetalGearSolid3 for example. You can see the differance in hardware strength.

Installed Base plays a role to me but not much of one. PS2 had the largest installed base and PS3 sold worth crap. The Super Nintendo had the largest installed base (From NES/GameBoy) yet the N64 bombed compared to the PlayStation. Brand loyalty does play a role. GameCube is the perfect example it survived pretty much on loyal gamers and hardcore gamers who bought all three systems.

But I don't think even installed base plays the big role. I think its all about game quantity, many would argue Nintendo has always had the best first party titles, yet it still failed with 64 and GameCube. It was quantity that won the PS2's battle and now with Wii it isn't the high quality first party software winning the war alone. It's the quantity of party games shovel ware and innovative software.

It's quantity that wins console wars unfortunetly!

OMG BLAST PROCESSING!!!

Really, this is an argument that I do not want to have.

well SNES was the most powerful in its gen....so your wrong there

As it was already pointed out, the Genesis was more powerful spec wise. The games that people point at Like StarFox for example had cartridge enhancements to enhance the Super Nintendo's hardware performance, like the N64 had its own pack to enhance its performance. That did not mean the Super Nintendo was most powerful, because in the end it wasn't.

The argument could go on but as I showed, even if you believe the SNES was more powerful you still have the other 5-generations in which the more powerful console wasn't the victor. You'd think Sony and Microsoft would study the industries history and realize that super power isn't always the way to go. Before producing 600$ machines which also as history has taught us don't sell all that well either. 3DO anyone!

You are forgetting that the ps2 had to due many more things that that its gpu wasn't capable of which loses the advantage of a faster cpu examples being texture compression, and being able to do make effects on a polygon in 1 go rather than 8 which the ps2 had to. This means it had to compensate with using the cpu to do these things. Also the gamecube was capable of alot more things because of the TeV units. So yes the gamecube was considerabely more powerful than the ps2. YOu see this in multiplat games like Re4. I would say that the gamecube did everything the xbox could, but couldn't produce as much polygons because of it's limited ram compared to the xbox.

I have to disagree with the cross-platform comparisons -- the GC was considerably easier to develop for than the PS2, and thus most cross-platform games were shorted on the PS2, because the developer iterated faster by developing on the GC/XBox primarily. If you want to compare two consoles via software, the best way to do it, is to compare exclusives -- where the developer had to focus on the console at hand. Cross-platform games *always* have a console bias, due to the fact that its just plain easier for a dev studio to support one platform of development (from every standpoint, but especially IT, meaning having every engineer/artist/designer have the same kind of devkit, dev software, and working build) as a primary, and assign a small team to ensure that their engine ports to the other platforms throughout development.

RE4 was built primarily on the GC, by a Japanese development studio that favored Nintendo development over Microsoft development. You can compare it to an exclusive, like God of War, but comparing it to its PS2 counterpart is actually a bit unfair.

As I said, the PS2 and GC exclusives are actually quite similar, graphically, in my opinion. You could argue that, despite "real" hardware performance being similar, that the PS2s much greater learning curve effectively lowered its games' performance over the console's lifetime. I would definately say that's true... and frankly, that's what matters in the end to the user. In that sense, the only sense that matters, the PS2 was the slowest of its generation.

In the current generation, the same is true of the PS3 vs X360 -- except that the PS3 appears to actually be a bit superior when handled by a talented team, as opposed to "near equal". At this time though, the PS3 and X360 are only just getting to be "on par", from the user's perspective... the PS3 has suffered a bit from its learning curve thusfar (I would say very similar to PS2/GC comparisons, actually), although that trend does appear to be on the downward slope.

The Wii... is unique. It is, effectively, the very first "casual console" -- it almost deserves another comparison catagory, all to itself. Claiming it competes with the PS3 and 360 is actually somewhat of a stretch, in my opinion.  I think you could argue that a large number of Wii owners would never have purchased a PS3 or X360 to begin with.

I disagree, firstly the ps2 was a very casual console. You see this by how many people owned the ps2. There is no way that all of them are hardcore gamers, and if they are that would mean more people would jump to next gen than they have. Then there are many casual games that sold extremely well. I'm not saying it is as casual as the wii, but it is a very casual system and should be classified as one. Secondly the wii isn't only casual at all either. You see this by many games such as The Legend of Zelda, Mario Galaxy, Metroid Prime 3, Resident Evil 4 and Umbrella chronicles, etc selling very well. Also it seems that many ps360 owners also own a wii. Thirdly if the wii didn't compete with the other consoles then  they are sellin poorly compared to previous generations and the market is shrinking. Also you see the wii taking many exclusives from these consoles such as Monster Hunter 3, and many potential exclusives such as Fatal Frame IV. The only reason the ps360 have more games for them is that there is less of a risk, and 3rd party developers didn't prove yet that their high budget games sell good on the wii.

Edit: Also you never replied to my other post.