Best and Worst Console you've owned

For me I would say the N64 was the worse console I owned. Apart from Goldeneye and Mario 3D is had a vast array of shitty games. Plus it used cartridges at a time when CD's were the norm. Probably the reason I never bought a Gamecube.

 

Worst - Xbox 360 - Didn't really like the exclusives
Best - Atari 2600 - It was my first console

Honourable mentions - PS3 for the godsend of a game that was MGS4 and PS4 for it's library of fantastic exclusives

 

Worst: SEGA Saturn (I owned one for about two months before trading it in for a PlayStation and a copy of WipEout and Tekken). It had some okay games but even back then it was clearly struggling to do 3D graphics as well as the PS. Overall, it was a disappointing console, which bring me onto...

Best: Dreamcast. Everything the SEGA Saturn wasn't. Had plenty of amazing games (especially compared to the N64 and late era PS games as the Dreamcast came out about a year or so before the PS2 in the UK). A very underrated console IMO and definitely one of my favourites.

Honourable mentions: Commodore 64 and Amiga. Technically not consoles but these two machines hold a special place in my gaming heart. The 64 was my first games machine, a reward for passing my GCE 'O' levels at school, and the Amiga was the machine that replaced it after a brief spell with the Atari ST (like the SEGA Saturn, I seem to have a knack of knowing when a machine is going to flop and ditch it for the increasingly popular new one!).

To be honest, with the exception of the SEGA Saturn, I've enjoyed owning all the consoles I've had from the import SEGA Genesis (which I bought specially to play Super Hang-On and Ghosts 'n' Goblins on ahead of the UK launch of the Megadrive).

I've owned PSone (twice as the original second-hand one would no longer play discs upside down!), PS2 (always hated the graphics on this machine though; they look extremely aliased and suffered from huge PAL borders in many games), PS3 (late era games really showed how powerful the hardware was, despite its complexity) and the PS4 and now PS4 Pro, which is a great machine if a little disappointingly supported by Sony outside of the first party games.

I've also owned an N64 (my first Nintendo console), a GameBoy Color (which was pretty rubbish IMO), GameCube, Wii, Wii U and now the Switch, which is great but perhaps not as powerful hardware-wise as I would have liked personally.

Oh and less we forget, I bought the original Xbox on the back of a GAME store demo of Halo and really loved that machine. In many ways it felt like a spiritual successor to the Dreamcast, with a similar controller (albeit with two analogue sticks) and was well supported by SEGA in the early days. I then went on to a 360, which ushered in the era of HD TVs, but that machine just felt like Microsoft going through the motions. I also foolishly bought the Xbox One at launch, knowing full well that Kinect's day were numbered and that the price of £425 would give Sony's PS4 the sales advantage. I now own the Xbox One X, the machine that the Xbox One should have been, but Microsoft's first support for the game continues to be poor so there isn't really a whole to play on the machine that I can't play on my PC at better framerates anyway. Xbox One X got Sea of Thieves, a multiplayer-only disappointment, whereas the PS4 got Ni no Kuni II, Yakuza 6 and God of War. Now you tell me which console has the better exclusives...?

 

Atari st didn't flop you Amiga fanboy on a side note the first console I had was before the Atari 2600 it was a binatone

 

I think pong was the first game I ever played. I remember enjoying it, but it gets boring pretty fast and is easily forgetable.

 

Worst: Philips CD-I

Nothing good I can really say about this device other than it's pretty rare​

Best: Sega Saturn

I loved 2d fighting games and if you were willing to do imports this system was by far the best at it.​

 

Best close between N64 and PS1, cant choose. Maybe ps1, had more games. but all 12 n64 i owned were pretty good.

Worst Probably Master System. It wasnt terrible but it seemed terrible whever id take a look at whatever new nintendo game my neighbor would be playing, with pretty much no exception.

 

Best - PS3 it was light years ahead in gaming graphics for its time and so many awesome games it was a great system. Honorable - PS4 - another great selection of games for it and the pro is the cream de crop for 4k tv owners. Yes they could do better with implementing it in older games but its sony.
Worst - xbox360 - so many issues with damn thing overheating and red ring of death. Games were nothing great for it and online while it was better then psn was nothing great. Dishonorable - xbox 1 - another system with potential but games were very lacking compared to sony.

Overall i still play more games on my pc then any console i have owned or still own.(ps4 pro)

 

Not going to start a Atari ST vs Amiga war or anything and not really sure if the Atari ST were a flop or not but I do know that the Amiga had WAY more games than the ST so I'm sure that is worth something.

 

I was going to put Saturn as my best as I loved the fighting games it had (SFZ,SFZ2,KOF95/97.XMVSF,ASTRA SUPERSTARS,SamSho,VF2 etc.) way above PSX thanks to the hardware and extra RAM but I had to go with the playstation just because of Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII and Gran Turismo 2 which back then were like whoaa this is what 32bit is about.

 

Best: SNES / PS1

I've never been able to 'prefer' or determine which one of the two was the best. In my mind, both the SNES and the PS1 were essentially perfect consoles. I would say, however, that the SNES was far ahead of its time. The SNES, along with the NES and the PS1 have what I would consider to be an unparalleled games library. Also, the SNES explored 2.5D / 3D console gaming pretty early on with the SuperFX chip. And the original PlayStation is arguably (barely) the most important video game console of all time (maybe just right next to the legendary NES; for obvious reasons) for the gaming industry (at least when it comes to home consoles; outside of PC gaming).

The PS1 was THE major, main platform chosen by the vast majority of games developers for the very crucial-for-the-industry transition period during which gaming was going away from purely 2D (excluding the earlier "3D" console games 'experiments' with the likes of the SuperFX chip) to 3D. A console like the PS1 was essentially needed for such a transition to occur in mass. The Saturn was too difficult to program for, most developers were themselves new to the very concept of 3D (even 2.5D) and it got released too soon after the failures that were the Sega Genesis addons (32X, which itself barely went away from 2D) and the Sega / Mega CD. There had been 'samples', tries, experiments before the PS1 for 3D gaming on previous systems and addons (32X, Saturn), of course, but ultimately the PS1 simply was the 'chosen one' of the mid-to-late 1990s that catapulted gaming into 3D.

Worst: PlayStation 2

Outside of being pretty much the first 'full' Multimedia console (Dreamcast was a good glimpse of that, but couldn't play movies; in terms of Multimedia capabilities the PS2 just went a Tier beyond), I never for the life of me found the PS2 as good as the general consensus about it seems to be (and is, pretty much). It is often considered as the greatest console of all time. It IS the best selling console of all time (apparently unequaled in sales to this day). But it looks like a lot of people never mention that the fact that it was also a DVD player must have significantly contributed to that total sales number over its many years of service (also one of, if not the longest-lasting active life span for any console ever made).

Well, good for those who believe it was the absolute best for them. I won't remove that from their head. But for me the PS2 was just 'too much' beyond a gaming console. It truly was the beginning of Multimedia on gaming systems. It just kept on going beyond that point post-PS2; where only the GameCube dared staying purely a console about and for video games. I never asked for nor needed the ability to play DVD movies, not even at the time (back when DVD was a big deal... and also very expensive). It cost us the Dreamcast, or... more accurately, it cost us SEGA at the price of Multimedia. I'm not sure if that was worth it, really. Obviously, saying this today in 2018 seems absurd, maybe. But that's just because we've been conditioned to take consoles doing everything for granted by now, since the collective gaming industry departure from pure gaming happened too long ago at this point. The only company that still tries to stay focused on the roots of video gaming on home consoles is... lo and behold, our good ol' Nintendo (and I applaud them for daring to do that to this day).

All I wanted (and all that was needed) was a more capable PS1 with great original games and the continuation of beloved franchises that made their debut on the PS1. Well, some of that did happen. I'm not saying that the PS2 is the "worst" as in "It was absolutely horrible!!!". Not at all. The main reason for that is simply because it DID play video games anyway and a bunch of them were good, indeed. I actually did enjoy some of the games I bought for it (going by memory here would be: Metal Gear Solid 2, Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, Soulcalibur 2, Silent Hill 2 and Devil May Cry). However, I do consider the PS2 here as the 'Worst' more in line with being simply exaggeratedly over-rated. It was a far cry from total joy and bliss that the SNES and PS1 gave me. More accurately, it came down to the total number of games I enjoyed on the PS2 Versus that same statistic on other consoles. I ended up playing, enjoying, renting and buying more games on the SNES, PS1, Dreamcast and also N64 by comparison.

And, yes, the PS2 was the major, final (although not the only one) nail in the coffin for the Sega Dreamcast (to this day I still associate the PS2 with the death of the Dreamcast as it is simply what happened and not just a manner of speech) which in my opinion WAS a superior console overall (I just really, really disliked the Dreamcast's controller, however; the PS2's Dual Shock is much better it's not even funny). The Dreamcast had a significantly better games library (for me... of course this is an opinion), better games online with their surprisingly good Sega.net service at the time (even with the default 56K modem), and just was a plain and simple fun video games system overall. Plus, I loved its design and its name.