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The PSVita but I'm a GenZ so I haven't used any hardware before the PS2
The Vita's first-party though are remarkable compared to other stuff releasing, it kinda felt like everyone wanted to port PS3 games and forgot to make games targeting the handheld itself, the community is making a great job though, you can run CUPHEAD AND HOLLOW KNIGHT on that tiny beast
I am old and agree with you. The touch backplate was a little gimmicky but over all an amazing handheld
The Dreamcast never really got given a chance. They killed it so fast, and even in its short lifespan it had a great library. It might have even been able to keep up with the PS2, at least for the first year or two with what I've seen of porting projects where people got shit like GTA3 running on it.
For such a short lifespan the Dreamcast had an abundance of peripherals too which were underutilized. Some of them were ahead of its time but you have to admire the passion!
Personally I think it would have done better against the PS2 in its later life, once the DVD craze died down. One of the reasons why the PS2 did so well was because it was a killer deal in the era of $1000 DVD players being the norm. But prices fell quick, and near the end of its life just about every home could afford a dedicated player.
I think the DC had the technical strength to go up against the PS2, not just early on, but for quite a while. The PS2 is incredibly flexible in theory, but looking at its library it seems like most developers just used Sony's default rendering setups. If you ignore the quickie PS1-to-DC ports and only compare titles which got equal effort from developers, it can be hard to tell the difference, and in some cases I'd even say the DC version looks a little nicer.
In this alternate universe where the DC didn't get killed off prematurely, what might've eventually turned the tide for the PS2 would be having between 1.5 and 2 times as much RAM (depending on how you account for different distribution), although that advantage may not have existed if it weren't for the large gap between their release dates.
But Sony could afford to delay for two years; consumers waited for them. Sega couldn't sustain launch-pitch marketing for that long, especially with an actual console on store shelves that people could experience firsthand, as opposed to teaser videos of what the console "might" be capable of. Few publishers or consumers wanted to invest in a console before the clear winner of the previous generation had entered the market.
All that being said, I don't know that the DC was really under-utilized, in technical terms. I feel like a good proportion of the games in its library are using almost all of the power it had under the hood. Perhaps Sega's management and engineers had learned their lesson from the Saturn, because the DC seems very straightforward from a programming perspective. It's almost ironic that it lost to the PS2, which took flexibility and parallelism to heart at least as much as the Saturn did, if not more.
Sega was so drained after the very distracted years of juggling the SegaCD/32X/Saturn and people were sooo pissed how the Saturn went that even hardcore Sega fans were annoyed when the Dreamcast came out, wondering if it would have a short and frustrating lifetime like the Saturn did. Sega just had so much ADD in regards to their planning and strategy everyone was kind of doing a "wait and see". Meanwhile, Sony threw the full might into the Playstation, had a great run there and then even the whispers of PS2 was enough to make everyone hyped. The other factor here is that the PS2 could also play DVDs and the Dreamcast could not. That doesn't seem like a big deal now, but back then there was no online streaming and DVD players were really expensive. Some people bought the PS2 primarily because of the DVD support and the games were almost an afterthought.
It's all a shame, because the Dreamcast was actually really strong technically. In a vacuum it probably would have done better, but alas, it was not in a vacuum and Sony was able to easily grab up all the market share with the PS2.
My votes go for the Amiga and the PC Engine.
The Amiga was tricky to develop for, particularly if you wanted to use all its custom chips to their full potential. So many Amiga games are just questionable ports of Atari ST or even 8-bit home micro games.
The PC Engine was really ahead of its time, but it's now kind of an obscure little thing, and a bit quaint when put up against the SNES and Mega Drive.
PC Engine was huge in Japan if I recall correctly
It was pretty big, and I believe it was Nintendo's main competitor for a while. Just didn't quite break out to the rest of the world, and it never got a proper followup
Honestly everything sega.
The master system had a built in maze game which was incredible to me as a kid. The Genesis/Mega Drive was fantastic but its add ons sega Cd and 32x were barely utilized. Saturn and Dreamcast both abandoned far too quickly.
I recently played my first Saturn game and honestly had my mind blown knowing what the competition was doing at the time.
Gamegear was dope too when you compared it to its contemporary.
Gamegear was crippled by abysmal battery life. If you took the lithium battery technology of today and warped it back to where the Gamegear was, it would have made a huge difference. Gamegear fans loved to dunk on the Gameboy, but you could get a decent playtime out of it, whereas the Gamegear sucked down batteries like nobody's business.
I had the wall power adapters as a kid so battery life rarely kept me down. But yeah you’re right.
This. Aside from the Genesis and its mega success, Sega's hardware was woefully underused. It's a shame, too, because they were at the forefront of experimentation back in the day.
If anything, this experimentation was the problem. Look back to when the SegaCD/32X/Saturn were all around. No one knew what to buy and Sega didn't make it very clear either. They were split waaaay too much.
That's fair but what I mean is that Sega wasn't afraid to try new things and attempt to push the boundaries. Nowadays, everyone plays it too safe.
They pushed em all right. It was too many different things in too short of a period. SEGA is now a shell of its former self, mostly chucking the name on things for some cash.
The DS 3D was pretty weak, though. Don't get me wrong, great games like The Force Unleashed and Assassin's Creed: Altaïr's Chronicles are amazing games but the 3D in both was almost worse than PS1/Saturn 3D. Loved my NDS but I get why games tended to go for 2D.
As for my opinion on the subject matter, the aforementioned Sega Saturn is my pick. The potential that console had could have delivered truly incredible games and memories but Sega made one too many stupid business decisions.
GoldenEye on the N64 was the only game I'm aware of to have a control layout where you could use the left and centre prongs to get a proto-dual-stick experience
The WiiU's second screen is great for asymmetric multiplayer or an auxiliary screen for things like inventories, most games just duplicated what was on the main screen
Perfect Dark (spiritual successor to GoldenEye) iterated on that. You can use two N64 controllers, one in each hand, to get a true dual stick experience
GoldenEye has the dual controller schemes too. A bit awkward in that you still have to be able to access the A & B buttons from the center grip; "2.1 Plenty" and switch the camera control off of inverted, personally. Hold the right controller at a slight angle to reach A & B and it's not horrible... 😅
Can you tell my family's been getting back into N64 lately? Some are experiencing the turn-of-the-century gaming for the first time. Although I'm spoiled from playing the recompiled Perfect Dark on Steam Deck and having total "control of the controls" including gyro aim.
As far as hardware gimmicks go, I agree that the WiiU's gamepad could've done so much more, I can think of so many different unique ways a game could've made use of it, like having two different perspectives or mini games like in GTA Chinatown wars.
The Wii U tried to bring the DS to console, but there was one major limitation that kept it from being used the way the DS was: human eyes cannot focus on screens at different distances from the eyes. The DS only worked because both screens were right next to each other.
The one thing the Gamepad could do that worked quite well and deserved to be explored more was asymmetric multiplayer. But at the same time, it felt like it was an era too late to be a big deal - giving players separate screens is something we can already do via online multiplayer.
I remember reading this comic back in the day, don't remember playing anything like it other than Nintendo Land
Nintendo really had their thinking-caps on tight when they decided that a third of the N64 controller was always inaccessible
The n64 controller is a very cautious design.
they were not sure if people(players and devs) would utilize the analogstick and chose to design the controller in a way that it could be used in the same way established controllers were used, the n64 predates the dualshock by a whole year afterall.
Nintendo's way is to get last-gen hardware and add some kind of tweak to it and then just have a solid game library. They are almost never cutting edge. Even the new Switch2 is not a cutting edge SOC.
Commodore CD32
I think the PlayStation 3 is old enough now that some people consider it to be "retro" (ugh 😩). But the PS3 was notoriously difficult to develop game for, thanks to it's unique architecture. This meant that games that were on multiple platforms looked worse and ran terribly on the PS3 since the devs didn't have the time or resources to optimize their games on the system. Even first party devs took nearly the entire consoles life span to properly utilize the hardware with Naughty Dog's The Last of Us, and maybe Guerilla Games' Killzone 3. Overall, it's really disappointing that Sony made such a powerful console that was such a pain in the ass to dev for that no one really took advantage of all that power
Atari Lynx. Remarkably powerful handheld for coming out two months after the Game Boy, but no truly memorable games that aren't ports (which could be said about all of Atari's non-2600 consoles tbf.)
Atari Jaguar just had Amiga/ST ports, hardly any used the GPU.
Also, most PS5 games are just reconfigured PS4 games.
To be fair to the DS, playing 3D platformers with a d-pad isn't great lol so I can see why developers mostly stuck to 2D games
The Atari Lynx had the graphics to blow the Game Boy out of the water. Unfortunately most of the games sucked so it died quickly.
Also, the battery life was hideously short. It would suck down a set of 6 AAs in less than 3 hours. I suspect that the CCFL backlight on the LCD screen was the culprit. And the console was huge. I have the official belt pouch and as a teen it reached most of the way down to my knee. The redesign was a bit smaller, but not much.
A lot of the games sucked, but there were some pretty good ones too. Just not enough games overall, I think.
despite my love for the Saturn, there's no denying that between it's bizzaro architecture and short lifespan to make way for the Dreamcast, it ended up leaving a lot on the table. thankfully the homebrew community is picking up more and more speed
if you'll stretch the definition of console to include computers, the MSX Turbo-R is another example. it was an 8-bitter but with a souped-up, faster z80 meant to at least give it a fighting chance against the onalaught of 16-bitters, but the few games it's known for are all RPGs that look great but don't exactly flex the speed of the new processor. and while the MSX homebrew scene is massive and still pumping out games by the dozen, the Turbo-R is a rare target for new games with it still commanding 1000+ USD prices. someday!
you would assume it wouldn't have taken the industry so long to learn from consoles like this, but they repeated it again with the ps3, and probably other consoles im not aware of.
Possibly the Amiga CD32, the akiko chip wasn't really used for anything graphics based that it could have done. Someone with a more technical mind would probably know how that could have been better used.
The Sega Mega CD and the 32x were genuinely great pieces of hardware...but nearly all the games were awful. I love the Mega CD in particular, and I say that as a Nintendo kid.
Lunar 1&2 were originally released on the Sega CD, as was shining force CD.
There were a few decent games on it, but agreed, not many.
I often wonder if mobile gaming wouldn't be in the current freemium hellscape if the N-Gage had a better launch library. We knew even back then that everyone was going to have a phone, so it was a natural evolution. Unfortunately, the games weren't very good, and they also weren't again when Square Enix tried up-front pricing a little while later with Final Fantasy Dimensions and The After Years, for example.
Now I don't know if single-price games are ever going to have a chance in the mobile market.
I feel like 3do never quite got the success that it deserved. At the time it was pretty advanced, one of my buddies had one but there weren't a lot of games available
Lack of advertising and its business model of the hardware basically being produced by licensees tacked on to other electronics products of the time ended up crippling consumer awareness, and the price point was the big nail in the coffin, at roughly $700 in the early 90s you really had to commit to wanting one. Unlike most other console companies, 3DO couldn't afford to sell the hardware at a loss because they didn't have much, if anything, for first party games to make up for it. It had some games that look like they'd be decent, at least a better quality library overall than arguably the Jaguar and definitely the CDi, but it's that tough cycle in gaming where you need good games to sell consoles (especially at $700, in any time) but third party devs won't make good games for consoles that don't sell.
Ouya
Original PlayStation for not shipping with dual analog sticks from the start. Almost all games had to be playable with non-analog controllers. As a result, dual shock support was mostly an afterthought. Especially FPS games were awful to play.
Imagine the games that could’ve been possible if all games were designed with two analog sticks in mind. We would certainly have fewer games with tank controls.
I think this is also the main reason why it didn’t take until PlayStation 2 for developers to realize that the second analog stick is awesome for camera movement (instead of awkwardly mapping camera motion to the shoulder buttons).
This was actually a major gripe I had when playing Jersey Devil on my PS1, once I found out about emulators I created a custom controller config for it that made it much more playable though.
Plenty of DS games did use 3D graphics though? Like lots of them did? The system's flagship launch title was a remake of Super Mario 64, and launch units included a demo of Metroid Prime Hunters.
But those kinds of 3D games often looked pretty bad on the DS, to the point where lists of the most fondly-remembered DS games will be dominated by the much more beautiful spritework the system was capable of. Or titles that deliberately limited their use of 3D to the point where you're maybe forgetting about them as such.
Just off the top of my head, some titles that did have good looking 3D on the system:
Animal Crossing: Wild World - Heavily stylized in ways that cover the system's limitations. Low poly looks good here, and flat textures are better than bad textures.
Rhythm Heaven - Like ACWW, the minigames that use 3D are heavily stylized. And these are mixed in with lots of 2D minigames in the same package, so it doesn't feel like a low-poly game.
Etrian Odyssey - A good example of limited 3D, only used for the maze exploration. No models, just walls. Combat transitions back to a 2D screen, so that you're focused on the spritework.
Rune Factory - Like Etrian Odyssey, you're looking at the large 2D portraits accompanying every dialogue box more than you're looking at the 3D. Keeping the farming and combat at a zoomed out and fixed camera angle actually helps to kinda cover it up.
I could name plenty more games that tried to make 3D more of a focal point with detailed models and textures, games that tried to look more like console games, but the point is that the games that did so rarely looked good. Lots more of those existed than I think you remember.
Pilotwings Resort had good-looking 3D that was practically required, as it gave you the depth perception you needed to locate and fly into faraway objects.
Metroid Prime Hunters is a fully fledged 3d, fps and platformer type game on the nintendo DS.
Metroid Prime Hunters and Moon are both great examples of what the DS is capable of, but they both struggle to be fun as videogames because of the stylish camera controls, what I mean by under-utilized is that a significant portion of the DS library Is 2d pixel art graphics, in games that would have benefited a lot from 3d, even within the same franchise. like super princess peach having essentially GBA graphics when New Super Mario Bros had fancy rendering and 3d assets for many aspects of the game.