I would say Atari but that’s just low-hanging fruit because it’s a generation I never really got to play as it was before my time. But I am starting to fall out of nostalgia for the NES which is held dearly in a lot of hearts of retro gamers and gamers that have enjoyed what that system had to offer for a few decades.
I know it had offered a lot of classics and gave so many games their start, most of which are still with us today like Final Fantasy for example.
The best guess I can give about why I don’t care as much about that generation is because it is very oversaturated when you start entering the world of retro gaming. For retro gaming I prefer SNES and Genesis, because I technically did start playing those when I was born and they were first released. So I have more favorability towards those than the NES and generations before and during it.
I would say Atari but that’s just low-hanging fruit because it’s a generation I never really got to play as it was before my time.
Is there a word for imagined nostalgia? You could play them today, but I think you’d discover that not many Atari 2600 games were actually good.
PS3 era, though that’s pretty much on the edge of what retro gaming would be.
My PS3 mostly became a Rock Band machine, so I didn’t play most of the other big games of the generation. I also associate the console with the poorest reliability of any console I’d ever had, the longest loading times, and the longest startup times. (Needing to download updates before you could play your game)
I had tons of great gaming memories with the console, even outside of Rock Band, but I just don’t have nostalgia for the era (outside of the golden era of Western-developed Rhythm games).
Games getting bigger and bigger in gigabytes, but still hampered by slow optical disks and slow hard drives. It was good tat the time, but I have more fondness for the cartridges which came before, whose immediacy felt like magic.
The 1994-2006 era, roughly the time between the release of Transport Tycoon and Civilization IV
7th Generation of consoles (PS3, X360, Wii) was pretty meh. The Wii was cool for a time, but it soon became flooded with shovelware and finding a good game was a chore. The PS3 was lackluster at launch and only got its footing at the tail end of the generation. The X360 had very few exclusives because most of their stuff was available on Windows.
This was also a time when apparently every dev, publisher and their mom operated under the presumption that “brown filter = rEaLiSm”. That, and bloom. Lots and lots of bloom. Good riddance.
Everything that came before the Gameboy and most consoles. My parents had an weird arbitrary rule about my sister and me not being allowed to have consoles but Gameboy or later Nintendo DS were fine. And as a kid I wasn’t really aware of the existence of PS Vita or PSP so those I’m also not really nostalgic for.
