With the next generation about to take over GameCentral readers reminisce about the highlights from the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii era of consoles.
The discussion point for this weekend’s Inbox was suggested by reader Woko, who asked you to name your favourite, and least favourite, moments from the outgoing generation of consoles. We took that to include the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, DS, PSP, and any PC titles released during that same period.
To our surprise the Wii was looked back on more fondly than we expected, with the genuine classics apparently cancelling out the large amount of shovelware. Gears Of War repeatedly came up as an icon of the generation – for better or worst – along with multiple mentions for Call Of Duty and Red Dead Redemption.
Wii had fun
My highlight of this generation was my opening weekend with a Wii back when I was turning 18 in 2007. Booting up Wii Sports and playing golf and bowling with my dad was brilliant and wonderfully novel, and then taking it round to a friend’s and watching and listening everyone react to the madcap antics of WarioWare: Smooth Moves was great fun.
I’ll always remember my dad’s laughter when he saw that mini-game where you have to ‘reach out’ with the remote and catch the falling girl! It was a weekend I’ll never forget and it let me blow off a fair amount of steam having just finished my A-Level exams.
Honourable mentions go to Fallout 3, Demon’s and Dark Souls for consuming an unholy amount of my time without ever boring me and Catherine for getting me thinking more about lifestyle philosophy and being bizarrely compelling in general.
slackster_89 (PSN ID)/Jonobabes13 (Steam ID)
Colourful action
Highlights of this generation for me were Super Mario Galaxy, which is an absolute fun-filled, innovative, colourful and action-packed piece of brilliance from start to finish. A special mention has to go to Super Street Fighter II HD Remix on Xbox Live Arcade, which I thought was one of the best updates ever made to one of the best arcade games ever made, superb.
adams6legend (Nintendo ID)
Indie generation
One of my favourite things to happen his generation was the advancement of Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network games. I’ve played some great retail games over the last few years, some of the best ever, but I’ve got just as much satisfaction from the likes of Braid, Limbo, Shadow Complex, Journey, Flower, Mark Of The Ninja and many more. Hope this continues with the next gen and, judging by the showcase at Sony’s conference, it looks like will. The introduction of PlayStation Plus by Sony was also a great move, and a bargain considering how much free stuff you get!
dyniner(PSN ID)
E-mail your comments to: gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk
Licensed delights
I think my main highlight of this generation has been some truly great games based on some of my favourite things from other media. It’s true that most licensed games are still awful, but this past generation we got a pretty good Ghostbusters game (with all the main movie cast back!), two great Transformers games (based largely on the ‘proper’ Transformers and with the original voice of Optimus Prime!) and two excellent Batman games (with the proper voices of Batman and The Joker!).
Given some of the dross I avoided, or worse was naive enough to buy, during the GameCube and PlayStation 2 generation (I’m looking at you X2: Wolverine’s Revenge, which I even paid full high street retail price for. Sigh) I doubt I would have believed anyone who told me of such delights to come.
This generation is also the first in which I embraced game rental, thanks to the convenience of rental by post services (can I mention LOVEFiLM specifically by name? Because that’s who I mean. The others are all pretty awful). It’s opened up a huge variety of games that I wouldn’t have otherwise bothered with, whether it’s because I wouldn’t have been interested enough to stump up money for them or because I just couldn’t have afforded to.
Not all of them have been good, obviously, and there are quite a few that I’ve sent back the same day I received them (Legendary springs to mind immediately), but there’s been the odd, unexpected gem and a fair few sidestepped disappointments.
Martin Smith
Twin highlights
Highlights this gen, online has to be one, the Dreamcast and original Xbox made huge strides in this area but it really established itself this generation and helped take gaming mainstream in a way that sees it frequently discussed at work. Mostly (not exclusively) related to playing Call Of Duty and FIFA (both very good games) but progress nonetheless in my view.
It also adds huge value to games in terms of longevity and people like me who now have a family and work longer hours it allows great access to opportunistic snippets of gaming that just about keep me ticking over.
Technical gubbins – the dawn of this generation (and we have seen similar already in reference to this) was often claimed to be just a superficial HD lick of paint for gaming and the usual generational question of ‘do we need new consoles yet?’ was voiced – well I doubt you will find many that would give up playing games on big screen HDTVs. Yeah, there can be great games that look a bit low tech but how many big hitters would have been able to match developer ambitions and have the same impact on old hardware – Gears Of War, Fallout, Uncharted, Far Cry 3, Bayonetta and many others besides. The same will be true again I have no doubt.
There are many games from this gen that stick out, but I have two games that hold something for me for very different reasons. Warhawk – visually average but the scale of the maps and fluency with which you could change tactics, vehicles and weapons was so impressive and distinctly ahead of the last gen. For 18 months or so I regularly visited this game and updates were usually well balanced and fun. Jet packing out of a plane loaded with mines heading for an opposition outpost was tricky to pull off but so rewarding. A decent single-player campaign away from being an all-time classic for me.
The other is WipEout HD (and Fury), it represents pure basic gaming to me, stunning neon colour scheme, impossible in real life, really hard to get good at yet you can plug in, pick up and play intuitively from the start. This generation of games seemed to get much more complicated on the whole. WipEout HD is near technical perfection of a basic gaming concept in my view and with F-Zero a no show this gen, it stood alone with nothing like it on offer. Brilliant game and had it been slightly better online would have been a 10/10 for me. If we never see a WipEout game again it will be very sad but I am glad it made it to this gen to be displayed in the glorious HD it deserved.
Albavar (PSN ID)
PS: I know, too long. Sorry.
Happy memories
So many good memories from my old fat 80GB PlayStation 3 from this gen… Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare dropping jaws amongst my mates when it came out, winning a six-hour endurance race by just 12 seconds in Gran Turismo 5, my first taste of online play in Killzone 2, completing Uncharted 2 on hard (I’d never completed a game on hard before), slaughtering the zombie hoards online with my brother in Black Ops Zombies.
My greatest memory from this gen though: the first time I saw the sun set over the canyon in Red Dead Redemption. It still takes my breath away and I’m still known on occasion to load it up and ride out there when I’ve had a hard day and want to find a bit of peace. Hardware, shmardware, it’s things like that which make gaming great and that’s what the next gen will have to live up to.
My one regret: the PlayStation 3 slim came out a month after I got my fat one with more memory for the same price. Never mind though, eh.
ZOMBIE_JAY (PSN ID)
Wii remember
For me, the control that the Wii remote gave me in terms of accuracy, innovation, intuition and immersion was second to none. Every game was a joy to play, pushing my senses and my capabilities from immersive first and third person adventures, racing to very inventive platforming and sports. I know there could have been more games but with my busy schedule I could not have asked for more. There are still some classic role-playing games I need to find the time to play some day. Thank you for the memories.
Leo BFG
Nowhere left
Despite the overabundance of first person shooters and an over reliance on online multiplayer, I think this has been the best ever period for gaming. In many ways it’s been too good actually. Because of the advances made, it’s quite difficult to see what areas some genres have left to go into. But, on the other hand, gaming has matured as a medium. And it’s that, that I thought was gaming’s best feature over the last seven or eight years.
Up until fairly recently I think we could all agree games were, by and large, awful at addressing some of life’s bigger issues. It may be that the technology wasn’t there to convey things with the appropriate level of emotional depth, but this generation has seen gaming take a giant stride forwards. In the past eighteen months alone we’ve had games like Catherine, Ni No Kuni, and The Walking Dead. Games that use their status as games to explore topics that non-interactive mediums would struggle with.
There’s also the improvements in storytelling and characterisation. Whether it’s the involvement of professional writers or just the desire to make better games, these two areas have come on leaps and bounds. Though they borrowed liberally from Indiana Jones and classic westerns respectively, the Uncharted series and Red Dead Redemption were masterpieces not just for their gameplay, but the tale they told, and how told it. Also, the standard of voice acting was magnificent and really gave the characters the depth they needed to make you believe in them.
I also thought the emerging trend of games covering more controversial subjects, as they did with BioShock Infinite and Sweatshop HD, was brilliant. Unlike Apple, I think gaming is the perfect medium for challenging preconceptions. If gameplay has reached its peak (if not it will eventually) then it will be how games tell their stories and what they have to say that will set them apart. When it results in games like The Last Of Us, long may it continue I say.
andy_b720 (PSN ID)
A matter of scale
I think the moment which separated one generation from the other for me was Gears Of War. The incredible visuals, the intense cover-based action was what I had always wanted from my third person action. The generation before just had stiff character models running round soaking up bullets, this actually felt like being in an action movie. The animation and detail on the character models, the crunch of sliding into cover with bullets whizzing around you and the overall high production values were truly heads and shoulders above anything in the previous generation.
When you think about it the cover-based shooter became a genre almost of its own but has never really evolved all that much since. This generation I’d like to see a more up close style of action. Think of all those action and horror movies where the hero only has to take on a handful of adversaries. Having a game where you didn’t take on hordes of cannon fodder and maybe only fired your gun a dozen or so times sounds like it wouldn’t sell but done right it could be the new next best thing.
A Resident Evil set in a single mansion where each single zombie encounter was a hardship or a Bourne type game where each level was based around taking on a single agent culminating in some painful, close up, bone crunching fist fight. So basically scale games down but increase the detail. Make each bad guy/monster like a perfectly structured intelligent boss fight.
Fallout 3 was another revelation for me, the feeling of venturing into the unknown was so addictive. This gen I’d like to see that taken further so instead of reaching 60 hours or so and having the mystery disappear have a world that, using cloud-computing, constantly expands and changes. It’d be great getting past the 100 hour mark and still not knowing was over the next ridge.
@PjDonnelli
Catch up on every previous Games Inbox here
Winners and losers
Ultimately, this has been a great generation, with the highs superseding the lows – not that the lows were insignificant by any means. The first low was Sony. Entering this generation with a ridiculously high price point, the PlayStation 3 took literally years to get off the ground. In contrast, Microsoft truly won the battle for hearts and minds here in the Western territories – good will that even the Red Ring of Death could not eradicate but that has been eradicated all the same at this year’s E3. Here’s my other highs and lows:
The birth of Platinum Games – something to get really excited about when talking about Japanese games development. Bayonetta is easily in my top five games of the generation.
The fall of Capcom. A fall that started with Street Fighter IV and became complete with Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 and Street Fighter X Tekken – their quest to rob consumers of value for money products has cost them dear in the end. Resident Evil 6 was probably the final blow.
The fall of SoulCalibur. This is even more tragic for me. SoulCalibur V, in one game, gutted the entire series leaving behind none of what made this a name as sacred as Street Fighter.
The blossoming of Mortal Kombat and NetherRealm Studios. A studio that knows how to make fighting games for the home market and last longer than a pound of credit would take you in Sega World.
Downloadable content. Both high and low light. For no sooner had we been scandalised by Bethesda’s horse armour debacle they gave us The Shivering Isles – not really essential for those looking to give Oblivion a whirl but truly a must-have for those of us who have fallen in love with Bethesda’s epic.
The total victory for the Western style of role-play gaming. Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fable II and finally Mass Effect 2 proved who had the better way of doing things. This is compounded by my next low…
The defeat of Japanese role-players. Yes, true – this generation has had Dragon Quest IX, Xenoblade Chronicles, and eventually Ni No Kuni – but they were few and far between. The early days were awash with mediocrity and moronic names – does anybody remember Infinite Undiscovery? How exactly do you undiscover something? Did you forget about it, or what?
But more importantly it was Final Fantasy that should have led the charge, paving the way for more niche experiences but did not. Square Enix’s inexplicable approach of milking Final Fantasy XIII – a game that only the most hardcore (read: deluded) fans and apologists of the series can defend – has rendered this series as toxic as Resident Evil and as tired as Silent Hill.
The rise of the military shooter I find personally loathsome and a sure way to make me zone out of a conversation is to start talking about them. That way you’d be able to say literally anything you liked about me and I would never realise it! Seriously!
And finally, Nintendo. They didn’t prove that motion controls were the future. They gave their naysayers all the same old ammunition: they haven’t had an original idea since Pikmin in 2002, they haven’t moved with the times, third party publishers won’t work with them, they don’t make enough games themselves, etcetera. This is all true.
Then I played Super Mario Galaxy 2 and none of those things mattered anymore. I have so far not got round to playing Zelda: Skyward Sword, but if reports are to be believed then quality really does beat quantity every time. Except in the case of long letters such as this where quality and quantity are one and the same. Naturally.
DMR
E-mail your comments to: gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk
The small print
New Inbox updates appear twice daily, every weekday morning and afternoon. Letters are used on merit and may be edited for length.
You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word 4Player viewer features at any time, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot.
If you need quick access to the GameCentral channel page please use: www.metro.co.uk/games