So, I decided to look up what other people thought about console generations after I gave my opinion, and there are some divergences I'm seeing online. A lot of people insist REALLY STRONGLY that gen 6 is like the best era for gaming ever.
Honestly, this comes off as pure nostalgia for me. I admit I kind of underrated gen 6 when it happened at the time, but the best ever? I can't really justify it being higher than say, 3rd.
In my actual ranking, i gave it 4th. part of me feels like my actual #3 choice, gen 4, was too generous. But here's why i ranked gen 4 so highly. It was the peak of the 2D era. It didnt have the most games or the best games, but it was the most definitive era for what it did. It was the most mature 2D generation before moving to the 3D era for good, and I wanted to recognize its accomplishments in that regard. You could argue that in terms of the number of games both gen 5 and gen 6 were better. However, I'd be hard pressed to say gens 5 and 6 were the best gens at anything. They were the first 2 3D gens, and I found both awkward. Gen 5 had that nostalgia factor for me, but forcing myself to be objective, I actually think gen 5 was kind of weak. It was weak because the games aged poorly. The graphics look poor in the modern era, and it's made even worse by the fact that on native hardware they run at extremely low resolutions and framerates that make them unpleasant to play today, and they also have awkward control schemes that make you go what the heck were they thinking.
So at the time, yeah, gen 5 seemed great when it happened, it just aged really badly. Gen 6, for me at least, was the opposite. I was old enough at the time where i didnt have as strong of a feeling of nostalgia for the era. Much like today, at the time, I didn't think the early 2000s were a great time. 9/11 happened in the real world, and it seemed like after how magical the 90s were the whole world went to crap. Gaming also just felt kind of awkward to me as it transitioned to gen 6. After the dreamcast, I was just meh on gaming for a while. The PS2 didnt grab me, and i bought it out of peer pressure. I admit part of me was just "doing it wrong", and there were tons of games. GBA really carried it for me, and gamecube and xbox actually had more titles at the time that i would have liked over the PS2.
Still, it wasn't just the games. The era also didn't age well, much like gen 5. The games look bad these days. They had better control schemes, but they still ran at low resolutions with poor frame rates, and were a bit awkward to play. The best of the era was great, but much of the era was junk to me. And even then, looking at the nintendo titles....I actually prefer the gen 5 titles I think over the gen 6 ones. Gen 6 was an important evolutionary step similar to 6, but for me, it was gaming's awkward puberty phase. Both 5 and 6 were basically that all things considered, and that's what disqualifies them for me.
I think gaming peaked and matured more with gen 7/8. Late gen 6/early gen 7 was when the modern era really started taking off for me. And the high continued through gen 7, into early gen 8.
If anything, you could in some ways, argue gen 8 was better than gen 7. But idk, for me, I like 7 better. The fact is, early gen 8 was basically a continuation of gen 7, but late gen 8 kind of started getting that fatigue I now have with gen 9. Late gen 8 saw the beginning of the battle royale trend, the whole hyper competitive zoomer twitch streamer trends that changed gaming for the worse, and yeah. Gen 8 was a gen that started out great, but ended poorly.
Gen 7 was great all the way through. Gen 6, in retrospect, started off kind of awkward for me but ended fairly well. Like, again, a lot of the best titles were in the 2004-2006 era when we started going into gen 7. 1999-2001 was good but in retrospect it felt more like gen 5 to me. And 2002-2003 were the middle of it and just felt awkward in general. Again this is just a me thing, but yeah.
Gen 6....I think people love it because of nostalgia. And it was good. It just wasn't the best. The games in gen 7 and 8, barring from nintendo's awkward consoles, were the best we had. We got a lot of them, they were fun to play, and it seemed like the fun was never ending. There were always games I wanted to play in gen 7. In gen 6 I found I would buy stuff only to be disappointed and bored with them at the time. Again, partially a me problem, but yeah.
I get it, people have a tendency to say "my childhood was the best". being a 90s kid, I get that obnoxious temptation, but being objective, was it the best? While I love the gen 4 and 5 eras of my elementary school years, hell no. Again, 4 only got rated so highly because it was the last 2D era and kind of perfected that craft. I recognized it so highly more for historical significance than it actually deserving to be that high. In some ways gen 6 and even gen 5 were objectively better. They just werent the best as what they did. I rank them lower because, once again, they represent gaming's awkward transition phase between 2D and 3D and in retrospect, never aged particularly well. Going back to gen 6 games now, i cant say i dont have fun with them. But are they truly better than what came after? Definitely not.
Generally speaking, I do tend to subscribe to the theory of progress that in some ways each generation is better than the last, and builds on the last. The only reason I come down so hard on gen 9 is because of the whole "peak gaming" thing and how few games there actually are worth playing, how many of them are remakes or clones of what came before.
Like, with gen 9, let's be honest, what gen 9 games am I playing lately? Black ops 6, the yearly generic COD game. Delta force is a really awkward feeling chinese battlefield/tarkov knock off. And it's basically owned by tencent so yeah, it feels like a cringey F2P game. It's good, but it's not amazing. You got marvel rivals, which is basically just literally overwatch. The heroes feel like overwatch, the graphics and game play style are identical to overwatch. And speaking of which on the graphics front, like....its 2025. Overwatch came out in 2016. You could have told me this was overwatch and I would've believed you graphically....but it runs like crap and has higher system requirements and lumen ray tracing built into it. You seeing the problem with modern titles? Not that games like battlefield (which hasnt released a sequel to 2042 yet, which is 3+ years old now...), do it better as far as delta force goes. And that's the problem. Like these games are all fine I guess, but they're basically just....clones of games I've already played. And then you got for single player me playing the RE4 remake...you know, the remake of the 2005 gen 6 classic, and yeah.
Again, gaming is just....in a rut. The games feel generic. They're often not optimized. They require tons of resources to run while not looking much better than stuff from...what's going on 10 years ago now...and yeah.
So that's why i rip on gen 9.
Other than that. Yeah....gen 6 is better than gen 5. Gen 7 is better than gen 6. Gen 8 is arguably better in some ways than even gen 7, i just couldnt give it a higher rating overall. And then gen 9 is kinda meh.
One thing I will notice, a lot of people do dunk on gen 9. But with me, I feel like my criticisms are more substantive. Like, i see people admitting, ok, games are unoptimized, there arent that many good ones, they're not overly fun to play, etc., but you wanna know what they're also saying? "it doesnt have muh nostalgia". It doesnt have that chime when the console comes on. it doesnt make me feel like a kid again. People wanna experience their childhoods and maybe even young adult years again. And I admit, I'm not immune to this and this might be one of the reasons i dunk on gen 9 too, but I feel like I rein it in more.
People who think gen 6 is the best are just going full on "my childhood was the best" like we 90s kids often do with gen 5. And you know what? I've seen zoomers even do it with gen 7, even if I'll admit gen 7 was fire. So...again, just because it's your childhood and it gives you a magical feeling you dont experience as an adult doesnt mean it was the best. Sorry, it doesn't.
Again, I feel like Im objective about gen 6. It was strong, stronger than I gave it credit for at the time. But it wasn't the best. It wasn't even close to being as good as 7 and 8. And if I were gonna actually go by nostalgia, I'd actually rank it even lower than I did because I literally have more positive feelings toward 4, 5, 7, and 8. Literally every other gen in my lifetime that I actively experienced other than gen 9 and maybe gen 3 (which i only experienced due to gen 4 portable systems basically being gen 3 game machines). So...again...maybe nostalgia aint that great? Just saying.
But yeah, objectively...it's 3rd or 4th for me. Not the best, definitely not the worst, a strong showing, a stronger showing than i would say it got at the time, but yeah, it's not the best. Not even close.
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