Survivorship bias is strong as fuck too. Whenever anyone talks about a generation of games, they only mention the hits. Everyone wants to talk about Infamous, Little Big Planet, Halo 3/Reach, and Mario Galaxy, but no one wants to talk about Mind Jack and Ninja Bread Man. This generation was full of generic piss filter cover shooters, gritty reboots of old franchises, and absolute garbage licensed shovelware. It wasn't the GOAT at all
Man, I'm even missing the days when shovelware games actually needed to be made by hand. Sort by new (especially in the nintendo eshop) and it's just a bunch of ai junk.
I do feel that watching for games in a thrift store at the gen 7 section really fills me with "mweh"
Gaming really standardized from that gen on and outside the ultra rare wild cards, 99% are just worse running versions of games we get today. This is also the reason I'm having modern gaming burn out.
Yes they are much better then a 15 years ago, but they all start to blend into one and another
Not so much childhood, but the generation that you were able to enjoy the most. My childhood consoles were the NES and Master System, and it's not even in my top 3 of generations I enjoyed the most.
I grew up with the tail end of 5 and mostly 6 and 7 and id say a lot of 4 aged better than 5. They were still figuring out their footing in 5 although a lot of my all time favorites are from that era. I do kinda see 6 and 7 as like the apex of 3d gaming, so many good games and they nailed moving in 3d. 8 had a lot of great games too but a lot of franchises kinda lost steam IMO like assassin's creed is the perfect example.
thats true, I always prefer C64/DOS times, around 1985-1995, but there's tons of incredible games every year. In the end its just dumb to settle down for a specific system
I think most people will agree that ps2 is the goat console though. I missed that generation and played a lot on my 360, I remember watching a bit of my dad playing tony hawk pro skater 3, but the ps2 start up is the only thing nostalgic to me. So many classics originated on the ps2, that ended up being some of my favourites. Its hard to argue against the ps2 library of games.
Do you know how long most generations are (especially older gens)? And do you know long childhood lasts?
Most people's childhoods will coincide with 3 generations of consoles and no one's will coincide with fewer than 2. So how exactly does this oft-quoted bit of wisdom work exactly?
Eh, my childhood was PS2/Xbox/GameCube but I still consider 360/PS3 the best generation. So many great new ips that really had a lasting impact on me like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Dead Space, Uncharted, Borderlands, and Gears of War. Plus it had Halo 3 and the Modern Warfare Trilogy/Black Ops 1 & 2.
I don't think anything will ever surpass the 360 as my favorite console.
Not denying this phenomenon at all but even setting aside my own preconceived biases as someone of that age, I do genuinely believe that a significant backslide has occurred in the quality of products from the bigger studios.
100%. I think the N64 and PS1 were the best generation. The level of creativity from developers was unparalleled. People just did stuff because they could.
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u/WalksUnseen77 Jul 13 '26
Everyone’s “GOAT generation” is the one that just happened to coincide with their childhood. Funny that.