@ronster

no-one is a "REAL" Gaming company

thats like fanboys saying "Wii doesn't have REAL GAMES"

Nintendo was a card company before it was a "Gaming" company

your posts reek of fanboyism so badly

Pretty good list when all was said and done. I disagree with xbox 1 being over ps1, but that's about it

Since the atari 2600 owned basically all of the gaming industry in it's time, and it helped create the industry, it deserved to be high up. The NES shot everything into the stratosphere and helped create many franchises which are iconic and still going strong. Perfect reasoning.

You still don't get it do you?

Sega and Nintendo already had in house developers when they launched their consoles thus making them REAL gaming companies.

Sony did not even like videogames (looked down upon the business) to begin with and only launched the playstation due to Ken Kutaragis powers of persuasion.

Sony got by for the first few years on the back of 3rd party moneyhatting and buying any development company that would take their "corporate money".

Sony's entry in to the world of videogames will always be seen as seedy, hence videogames lost their soul when ps1 launched.

And as for my posts, they are no worse than any of the pro sony rubbish that i have seen you spew over the last 18 months.

Both of you need to cool down a bit, not that you've stepped on any toes yet just a warning before the flames fly.

About the Sonic & Kuckles thing with sonic 1, 2, and 3, very few people didn't have a copy of those games that owned a SEGA Gen back in the day.  The exras weren't that great, you could play as Knuckles in levels that were not designed for him, whoopie, they didn't force anyone to do anything, and the way S&K worked is you instert the cart on top it basically fed the data from that cart to the other that dumped the levels into S&K and then you could play with the improvements of S&K. 

Furthermore secret levels were all the craze back in the day hell SMB3 has more secrets then you can shake a stick at, then you had add-ons you could use Nintendo didn't force you, it's not like DLC at all.  The DLC is mostly already on the disc but now instead of doing some code to unlock it you pay 5 dollars to play with it.

As far as soul leaving the industry?  I still see plenty as long as creative minds like Tim Shafer, Miyamoto, Shigesato Itoi, etc still make games the soul isnt leaving, on the console side of things it has become serious business, but this also isnt the 1970s where every electronics company with a little bit of money tried their hands at making consoles, PS1 just ushered in a new era of making gaming mainstream, something that is very HARD to do without corporate involvement. 

Now I will say the pattern that consoles are becoming high powered media centers that cost assloads of money is a pattern that lacks the ability to innovate and is the reason for the Wii this generation corporations are typically hard at making anything new and inventive they're good at copying the inventive ideas and marketing them to more people.

^ I agree with most of what you said. There is still "soul" left in video games due to the fact that all of the the console companies aren't just subsidiaries of huge conglomerations and that there are people like those you mentioned.

But you can already now see that the industry is becoming more ... well soulless. Just look at Blizzard. They rewrote the original Starcraft from the ground up just because fans complained about it. Now they laugh at those same fans when they complain about LAN being removed from SC2.

Another way you can notice it is with all this DLC stuff, or with companies trying ridiculous DRM stuff like in Spore. Big companies are good at marketing stuff for the mainstream, but they are also good at milking consoumers.

So although there is still plenty of "soul" left, it is dissapearing, at least as it looks now. I still have hope that the trend will change towards gaming being more "soulful" again though.

Oh I totally agree, though the thing about LANs is they're becoming more and more useless, I still love having the LAN ability but it's not like the days of 56k where you can't have 8 people connect to the net and play in the same room that way, honestly it's better since a group of friends can play in one room still and you've got a friend that can't make it to the LAN they can hop online and still join in.  So far I'm 100% satisfied with what I see of SC2.

As for the soul leaving, that has a lot to do with less innovation in gaming as there were back 2 and 3 generations ago, all companies experimented, new genres were born all the time, now there's almost a set you can fit ANYTHING into.  Also you must factor in the costs of developing games, no one would in their right mind make something completely out there and throw millions at it hoping it will sell well. 

It's a sad state of affairs, but maybe with the Wii catching Sony and MS off guard they'll try to make something new and different next gen, and try to make it affordable for developers to do what they do best, and they can afford to make something new and different a lot of that "soul" would return.