The Worst Thing About Every Console Generation
From RAM expansions to crappy arcade ports, I list my least favourite trends from every generation of gaming
The online gaming space, especially the retro one, has a loud and particularly annoying minority of gamers.
Every now and then you’ll come across people writing long, whiny paragraphs about how games when they were growing up were so much better, or how 15 years ago nothing ever released broken and was practically heaving with content and joy.
A grain of truth, mixed with nostalgia and just a dash of neuroticism spiralling into delusion.
I’m deep into this online space, hell with Scanlines’ Journal, I’m contributing to that discourse more than most ever will and at this point in my retro gaming journey, I’ve experienced enough of every generation to form my own opinions on what really was better and worse back in the day.
So, from modern consoles going backwards I’m going to be ripping off the rose-tinted glasses and casting aside my usual relative optimism. This is my list of the worst things about every generation.
Current Day - Homogeneity
I imagine this isn’t the point you expected but let’s get that out of the way too: yes, unfinished games, MTX and high prices are bad but two of these have been omnipresent throughout the history of the medium; gaming has never been cheap and shitty, broken games have always existed.
What I really dislike about modern gaming is just how samey it all is.
I swear, 90% of games released on Steam now are a rogue-like/rogue-lite with some kind of aesthetic to try and trick you into not realising it’s the same bloody game again, also under this banner are the endless parade of games with open world survival and crafting. Remember around 2009-2014 when every single mid-budget game had the Batman: Arkham Asylum combat system? Well, that’s the Dark Souls combat system now, everyone’s copying From Software’s homework.
Genre oversaturation is nothing new but what I find sad about modern day gaming is how many genres simply just don’t get new games anymore. Shmups, 3D fighting games (that aren’t Tekken) RTS games that aren’t Total War, arcade racers, racing games that aren’t Gran Turismo or Forza (and even then Forza Motorpsort has reportedly been canned) light-gun/on-rails shooters, mecha/vehicular combat games, score-based pick up and play titles, new puzzle games, stealth games, you just don’t see this stuff at all these days and when you do, it’s a 20 year old IP that’s been exhumed.
There are maybe 10 genres left in gaming today and some of those are a shadow of what they once were.
I could go on, like about how much I hate every FPS trying to be Destiny 2, how people are constantly looking for something to get outraged about and how the indie gaming sphere has become just as creatively bankrupt as the Triple-A space but I’ll leave it here, we’ve got lots to cover.
The 8th Generation - Everything But Games
I’ve made it clear in the past that the 8th generation of consoles was/is my least favourite of them all and a big part of that is how far we seemed to stray from the most important thing: the games.
Suddenly, everything was multimedia, games were becoming unplayable offline and everyone had their own superfluous services and accounts. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to be able to stick an episode of Deep Space 9 on with my controller before bed but things got out of hand.
Everyone remembers the infamous Xbox One reveal…
Adverts all over the dashboard, Bing, Netflix, Skype messages popping up when I was playing games, U-Play crap when I was playing anything Ubisoft, I truly detest the Xbox One.
But Sony and Nintendo get off too light, they were balls deep into this stuff too.
Loads of in-game collectibles being tied to Miiverse, name dropping Miiverse in games, the TV remote option for the Wii-U gamepad, the awful 3DS web browser; Nintendo designed an entire (now defunct) social network but couldn’t give Switch users a party chat system for 8 years; I’m sorry, I know a lot of people collect them and love them but at 25 years old, I just don’t have the confidence to display Amiibo in my adult room and even if I did own any, scanning Amiibo to get loads of free stuff and make the games easier is scrub behaviour.
My experience with PlayStation 4 was the same.
Spotify adverts, Spotify app, track pad gimmicks that weren’t used in any game post-2015, the light that always reflected off my TV, the PS4 was the least egregious with this stuff and I’m convinced that’s why they won so handily despite the console and its exclusives having all the charisma of a petrol station coffee machine.
From 2013 to about 2017, the gaming world seemed to enter a paranoid schizophrenia where mobile gaming was going to wipe out all our consoles, we had to become multimedia, it wasn’t enough just to give people awesome games anymore.
The 7th Generation - Casualisation And Waggle Controls
Sony’s stumbling launch and later stunning recovery, the brilliance of the Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s masterful Blue Ocean Strategy combined with a golden age of Triple-A development led to one of the most well-balanced and entertaining generations in gaming’s history: my favourite ever… with a few issues.
Motion controls, easy games and family-friendly motion-slop.
It took root with the Wii craze and by 2011, both Microsoft and Sony had released their own tat like the Kinect and PlayStation Move, I’ll never forget watching E3 when Don Mattrick was speaking about the controller being a barrier... never in my life has any non-gamer told me the controller was why they don’t play games.
I distinctly remember getting to the 3rd obnoxious valve turning sequence in Killzone 2 and that being the moment I realised this was all motion controls on the PS3 were going to be. I immediately turned off Sixaxis motion in the options and never went back, it just adds nothing to the majority of games.
If you’re a newer gamer or missed this moment in gaming culture, then a huge reason Dark Souls took off in such a big way at the end of this generation is that every game seemed to be 6 hours long and completely devoid of any challenge by 2011, it had been year after year of dude-bro FPS games, avatar nonsense and waggle wank. We were all tired of it.
I got the Force Unleashed 2 Special Edition when I was 11, finished the game in about 4 hours and again in about 6 on the highest difficulty, I’ll never forget it.
The 6th Generation - Between New And Old
The worst part of this generation (other than the obvious: RIP Dreamcast) is that it’s so thoroughly in-between; games in this generation are of very inconsistent budget and design competency. You can really tell who was behind the times and who wasn’t, this extends through graphics, design, controls, everything.
You can go from one PS2 game to another and switch from bright, arcadey graphics with simple controls to brown-grey mid-2000’s hideousness, some games have modern save systems while others have the most hideous checkpoints you’ve ever seen, some games have modern controls and others will have a PS1-level camera, the examples are endless.
Part of this issue is that the PlayStation 2: the technologically weakest machine of the generation (apart from the Dreamcast) won the entire thing, so the latest games were restricted by its aging architecture from about 2004-onwards.
From the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 to the PlayStation 2 and Xbox, gaming technology seemed to advance about 20 years but the design philosophy by most developers was still quite backwards.
A lot of PS2 and Gamecube games still feel like pretty PS1 and Dreamcast games, it’s really uncanny.
The 5th Generation - Awful FPS, Fog and Accessories
Most people find early 3D gaming very hard to return to and it’s easy to see why.
The 5th generation consoles (besides the Nintendo 64) were the first to natively use disc-based video games, the advantage of this being the massive amounts of storage on a disc; a PlayStation disc could hold 660MB of data while the cartridges for the N64 could hold just 64MB, even today, a Switch 2 cartridge can hold 64GB while a 4K Blu-Ray can hold up to 100GB, even more if it’s a quad layered one.
This massive increase in storage allowed higher quality sound, textures, full-motion video and bigger games but the graphics technology was still quite limited.
The result? A lot of games targeted 30FPS but the average was usually somewhere in the low 20’s and in order to keep performance to an acceptable level games of this era are steeped in a distinctive fog.
The notion of controlling characters in a 3D space was a new one and by the mid-generation it became clear that the analogue stick was the correct answer. The Nintendo 64 controller, as gross as it was, did come with a stick by default but the PlayStation 1 and Saturn pads did not, meaning that to play the entire library for these consoles you needed to buy a second, analogue-equipped controller.
The Nintendo 64 and Saturn also saw the launch of RAM expansions which was just another annoying accessory that barely any games used but were needed to play the whole library.
I could go on forever about how crap the Nintendo 64’s many controller accessories were, the point is that this generation had too much extra tat.
The 4th Generation - Terrible Ports
This one was really difficult.
I think each individual console had its issues in this generation: the Mega Drive made fart sounds and got a life-support machine, the SNES went on slightly too long without a replacement, the Philips CD-i… existed but if I had to pick one issue they all share it’s that there were many terrible, terrible ports from arcade and PC; the NeoGeo’s whole gimmick was that it was the arcade games… but not awful!
Every classic console has these bad ports but the 16-Bit era seems to have a greater quantity.
If you’ve never heard just how awful the Sega 32x version of Doom sounds then you need to experience it right now, it’s so bad I physically could not stop myself from laughing when I first heard it. This is only scratching the surface, this version is actually good for the standards of the time, that’s how bad the other console ports were.
“But Scanlines!” You might protest, with a lisp akin to Professor Fink from the Simpsons “The 32x was an add-on!” Okay, let me find an example from a base model console then.
Doom also made it onto the SNES in an admittedly sexy looking, bright red cartridge… and it looks and runs as horrible as you imagine. It’s an impressive port but there’s zero reason to play this version today.
I don’t want to turn this section into a big video dump but you get the idea. This was a time in gaming where technology was starting to advance quite rapidly, PC games were really coming into their own and it was becoming clear that the SNES and the Mega Drive would be the last of the pure 2D machines.
The 3rd Generation - Boundless Shovelware
The 3rd Generation of consoles, at least in my opinion, is where gaming in the home began to take on its own identity.
Atari games were mostly pared down arcade games or quick little time wasters but many games on the NES, Master System and other, lesser known 8-Bit machines had some heft to them and weren’t designed in the same way; can you imagine standing at a cabinet for hours to play Phantasy Star? Or Final Fantasy?
Unfortunately though, these consoles were filled to the brim with horrendous games.
There’s a reason the AVGN built his character and career off the NES and to a lesser degree the Master System, there were so many crap games to choose from and a whole generation scarred by wasted weekends where they rented an absolute dud.
What makes the shitty games suck ass especially bad, what really turns up the diarrhoea dial is that a lot of them were purpose built for accessories, sometimes, the only games compatible with those accessories, so you’d dump a load of cash just to play games that were less than spectacular with an overpriced piece of e-waste.
The 2nd Generation - Completely Obsolete
At this point, we reach the 2 console generations I don’t own or plan to own and there’s a big reason for that: unless you grew up in the 70’s or 80’s and have some nostalgia, or you want to preserve these machines for the future, there’s no reason to go back this far into gaming’s history.
The Atari 2600 is mostly remembered for Pac Man, which was a horrible version of the arcade original and E.T: the most infamous bad game ever made; the other consoles like the Coleco Vision in all honesty are barely remembered at all but their libraries suffer a similar fate.
As far back as the Master System, Atari games have been released looking and running better in compilations, so if you want to play these classics, on a CRT, on a modern Atari with HD, on a handheld, even on a bloody keychain, you will find options out there.
I don’t mean to disrespect this pretty iconic part of gaming history but those are my honest thoughts.
The 1st Generation - “It belongs in a museum!”
The Magnavox Odyssey and the numerous Pong consoles were the very beginning of gaming in the home, it’s difficult and expensive to find working models, a real pain in the ass to hook these 50+ year old machines up to any TV, let alone a CRT and even if you do? These weren’t really video games as we know them.
In my opinion, if you somehow manage to get your hands on an Odyssey, you should be displaying it, restoring it, or handing it to someone who can do either of these things; the Odyssey didn’t sell well, there are very much a finite, relatively small number left.
The AVGN’s Magnavox Odyssey review is classic but if you just want to see pure gameplay, I found this playlist. Essentially? The Magnavox Odyssey was an accompaniment to board games and featured no real graphics, only plastic covers for your screen.
There’s no video in my video game!
Thank you very much for making it to the end of today’s post.
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This really took me back to the 7th generation. I remember chatting with my coworkers about how the gaming industry was hitting hit its peak and it would be difficult to evolve from there.
These days, we're in the 9th generation, yet it feels like we're still stuck in the previous one. And that old debate we had about how tough will be to evolve seems to hold water after all.
I like how you went backwards. The further back in time you went, the more interesting and varied the consoles were, each one having a more unique identity. I honestly couldn't tell you what an Xbox is for today as a result.
Great post!