I was rockin’ the C-64 and Amiga 500 up until 1989, when I finally bought the NES. A year and a half later I moved on from the NES to the Genesis.

Console gaming has been trending to be like pop or country music for awhile now. Its mostly superfluous shallow half assery than. Taking a product and reducing tis quality to sell to more people is never a good thing and frankly the game price point is laughable if its over 20 its likely to not be worth wasting time on.

Also it costs roughly a grand to a grand and a half every five’ish years to have a solid enough foundation to chose the best games on. Its just not worth fooling with half the time for the price.They need to aim their hardware specs lower and build games that cost 30$ of which the Oyua and valves set top box might just destroy he current console war landscape.

Consoles have only been the dominant entertainment form factor on my shores since the PS1. Before that, the strongest heritage of gaming can be traced back through the 8-16-32 bit eras from Spectrum/C64 to Amiga/AtariST and finally to ‘PC’. (Of course, the latter always existed, but only became a viable gaming platform in the early 90s when the necessary graphics (VGA) and audio (Soundblaster) technologies converged.)

No retro reviewer worth his salt can ignore these systems as they are where the overwhelming majority of today’s industry leaders honed their skills, where many of today’s development / publishing houses were formed, and where today’s genres were born and refined.

The problem with Nintendo was, and still is, that they are/were a closed shop – a single publishing house, with strict quality controls enforcing a top-down culture of innovation rather than being a bottom-up breeding ground – hence limited to a very small selection of albeit, high quality, titles.

Compare and contrast to the diversity of classics on the ‘non-consoles’ that are far too many to mention. Jet Set Willy, Chuckie Egg, Knight Lore, Spy Hunter, Elite moving onto the likes of Bards Tale, Speedball 2, Pinball Dreams, Populous, Beneath a Steel Sky and then on the early PC, X-Wing, System Shock, Civilisation, SimCity, Monkey Island etc etc

The point I’m trying to make is that, non-console based gaming was probably more influential on the gaming industry than consoles ever were prior to the PS1. The sheer volume and diversity of games on systems outside of the consoles back then speaks for itself, and if you’re going to go retro, you absolutely need to have an appreciation of this.

Retro gaming is more, much much more, than just Zelda, Mario and Megaman!

In my family as a youth, money could be tight, so my first console was bought by myself when I got out of college, and that was a SNES. Since then I’ve bought nearly console that came out up to this generation. I thought myself never to be painfully loyal to any particular brand of console; I preferred the cherry-picking approach (e.g., buy both the PS1 and N64, and buy the best, most unique game exclusive to each (although in this day and age of coss-platform games, this approach is not very practical).

My love of consoles was very strong, and only seemed to fade as more adult responsibilities came along (well…not so much as fade, as much as less free time..), and my kids, who once would watch in awe of my video game prowess, now complete a game 2/3 quicker than I can (when I have the time to play games).

Up through the PS2/XBOX era, gaming was exclusively a solo experience for me, and not until this generation did online console gaming (in my opinion only) really come into play.

This is where my love for console has significantly dropped; don’t get me wrong, I still love the games, and even occassionally get to do some online, but I have definitely lost the “gotta have it now” mantra when it comes to games and consoles…and also because my kids have gotten dependent on Daddy to get the latest games, even if it takes me weeks/months before I have the chance to sit down and play for more than 30 minutes (which is why mobile gaming has come on so strong for me).

But I digress…..and here are my top five consoles:
5 – SNES: It was my introduction to video games, and i got to meet Zelda for the 1st time.

4 – Sega CD: Go ahead and laugh! While there were very few good games (Snatcher, anyone?!), this is the console that made me look at the technology being used, and guided me towards the path of engineering.

3 – PS1: Metal Gear, Warhawk, Parasite Eve, Resident Evil. Vast new horizons with the graphical capabilities I envisioned since the SNES days. Was I Red E? You betcha!

2- XBOX: The brash young upstart to Sony and Nintendo. I really like the exclusive, lesser known games this console would get (Panzer Dragoon Orta, Gun Valkyrie).

1- XBOX360: 4 main reasons why: (1) Filling up a 60GB hard drive with Game Installs got real old, real quick, (2) You could easily upgrade the original XBOX360 console to WLAN capability, whereas I could not with the PS3 original model, (3) Superior (in my opinion) controller design, and (4)How quickly I could play a game once inserting the disk (see (1) above).

If nothing else, when your #1 console becomes moreso about ease of use, as compared to the fun times in playing the game, maybe it is time to stop playing.