Since the topic floodgates were fully opened for this second week of Listmas 2020, I’ve decided to run through my five all-time favorite game consoles! After all, what better time to update the ranking than the dawn of a new hardware generation? If you’ve been reading our stuff for awhile, then you can probably guess my list…but then again, perhaps I can still manage a surprise or two. 😀

Super Nintendo

Super Nintendo was the very first console I ever played on, and it also happens to be home to the very first video games I ever saw as a kid. My dad picked it up one day on a whim, thinking us kids would be interested in it. Well, he was right! I’m told that my brother and I absolutely loved watching him play The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and we were eventually encouraged to play it ourselves. I’d say the rest is history, but I’m actually not sure if full blown love for gaming started there or not. Zelda, Mario and others were my first games though, earning the Super Nintendo a permanent spot in my Top 5.

Xbox 360

I remember being very wary about getting an Xbox 360 back in 2007. I was already in high school at the time, but I still hadn’t moved onto the “mature” games a lot of my friends were already playing. I was hesitant to try out games like Halo 3, Mass Effect and BioShock. I suppose I was afraid I’d wind up getting warped by them in some way (hopefully that didn’t happen, but who knows?)

Anyway, for me, Xbox 360 represents a change in my life. It was the time when I graduated from playing exclusively “kiddie” games to the “real” stuff that makes up much of my library today. Add into that fantastic games like those above, along with Dragon Age: Origins, The Orange Box, XCOM Skyrim and days filled with online multiplayer fun, and you’ve got a system I’ll probably never forget.

Nintendo 64

I don’t really remember being all that excited for the Nintendo 64 as a kid. In fact, I don’t think I knew it existed until after it was already out and I saw it at my cousin’s house. This was the “friend” console for me. I’d play the likes of Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and Yoshi’s Story on my own, but my strongest memories of the console in its prime are those days when my friends would stay over and we’d play Mario Party and Mario Tennis all night long! This was also the golden age of renting games at Blockbuster too. I distinctly remember getting super excited when I found a copy of Pokemon Snap! available to rent at our local store. Ah…good times! 🙂

Nintendo GameCube

I pretty sure the Gamecube era was the one in which I became a full-blown “gamer”. I remember being incredibly excited for this one, freaking out when it showed up at Christmas and blasting through most of Luigi’s Mansion in one night! My brother and I had small dispute over it the first week, sending the thing crashing to the floor and getting it sent to Nintendo for repairs. (We also earned ourselves a good scolding and extra chores for a month!) This was the Gamecube though, so we probably never learned our lesson (even though we were careful not to break it again.)

I remember spending whole weekends with my buddies powering through games like Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, Super Mario Sunshine, and The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker. We even had a good 6 month period where we were all playing Animal Crossing and trying to put together the best house. Between all this and drinking in the game news via magazines, the internet and G4TV, life as a gamer was sweet indeed!

PlayStation 4

I almost didn’t put the PlayStation 4 on here in favor of the PlayStation 2, since the latter is arguably more of a landmark console. However, PS2 and GameCube represent more or less the same thing to me, so I don’t have all that many interesting things to say about it at the moment. As for the PlayStation 4 however, well it just feels fitting to end it here.

Just like the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 before it, PlayStation 4 represents a time of great change in my life. It’s the years I spent trying out careers after college. It’s the period of changing jobs, addresses and even states and countries! It’s the time when I both became most active in the gaming world and came dangerously close to leaving it behind altogether. PlayStation 4 was there through it all though, and the games I played on it helped me figure out what gaming has become to me.

It’s not the craze it once was, but it is still something important. If it wasn’t, then Destiny, God of War, Persona 5, Transistor and all the rest wouldn’t feel all that interesting anymore. They still do though and I think that’s important. Thanks to PS4 (and working on this site) I can say for certain that I’ll still be gaming for a good while yet!

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What are you favorite consoles? What do they represent to you?

Screenshot by Flickr User: nixinStudio