Yay for the Sega Megadrive!
I wish I still had my Megadrive, just so I could play the original bomberman, it doesn't feel the same playing it on emulator
I know I should mention Macintosh, but I simply know too little about it. But I believe it was a far better system for games than IBM-PC was, in the 80s and 90s.
That was interesting to read. I remember hearing about some of IBM/PC history. Though not this much because I wasn't into PC gaming.My memory goes back to late 80s, anything before that is not first-hand experience, it is knowledge from reading and education.
The worst era was around 1983-84, the market got saturated with low quality games. Some games were good but they were few. It resulted in a collapse in the game market (I think it was 1984) and a huge number of computer platforms disappeared (it was common for large electronics companies to make computers as well as other products, and usually their computers was its own platform incompatible with anything else). At the time the IBM (International Business Machines) platform (what we call "PC" today) was not a gaming platform, most computers on the IBM platform did not have a graphics card or a sound card.
As most computer brands/platforms disappeared around 1984, Commodore and Atari totally dominated the home-computer market. They were called PCs too, everything for the home market was PC (Personal Computer), and the IBM platform was primarily a business platform. But for the sake of avoiding confusion I'll not call any of them PC now.
Game quality got better from 1985 and onwards, and I believe it has gotten gradually better year by year until now. There has been some downs along the way. In my opinion, 1992-96 was a big down because the IBM platform totally took over the home-market and it was not ready for games. I can''t say for sure if it was due to hardware limitations or bad coding, but my guess is both. In many cases porting was the issue.
As gaming platform MS-DOS (the OS) sucked, and I believe the early Windows versions was not much better. You could spend 18 hours installing a game before you kicked the computer out the door. Or with some luck you could have it installed after 30 minutes.
Late 90s: I have some few games for the Windows platform from this era, they are technically (graphics and sound) much better than the early 90s DOS games and somewhat better than early 90s Amiga games.
My favorite era is 1987-95 and that is limited to the Amiga platform, especially the 32-bit Amigas from 1992. Forget about the rubbish released on DOS/early Windows.
Nothing beats modern PC games, but today is not my favorite era. I do not admire and respect modern games as much, because it's so easy to make good games on modern hardware resources. But I guess I can say that games from the Windows XP era and later is my second favorite era.
@Meg:
Not to mention maintaining PC's can be very expensive to keep updated for gaming. That's great you got a PS2. You have one of the best consoles ever made.
The business and "quick profit" is nothing new, that was what caused the crash around 1983-84.
I don't think we will see another crash like that, because even if games today are very commercial and perhaps crappy, they are often well made crap. And when they do have serious bugs, patches are offered for free download. In the 80s you could not download a fix from the Internet.
Today's gaming era is not what's bad...It's the "gamers"...The ones that sit around ONLY playing CoD and it's rip-offs and call themselves "gamers"...When the higher ups see that's what's selling to the larger crowd of wannabe gamers, that's what they want to make more of...Something that will sell...My favorite Gen would have been the mid 90s with the PS1 and PC (I had a Sega Mega drive then but it was really old and didnt last long) To me that was the greatest era ever when games were made by gamers and gaming was nothing more than a fun hobby. We had epic FPS's like Doom, Quake and Duke 3D, The incredible Survival Horror Resident Evil, the iconic Tomb Raider franchise and such
My most hated Gaming era is today, games are made by businessmen for profit, not fun, also once great game series are being destroyed in favor of "wider audiences", Gaming is no longer a hobby, its a full out business venture (It's turned into Hollywood), Fully finished games are cut in half and sold at full price while the rest of the game is sold as DLC, Company's release "Me Too" games every year in the pathetic hopes of grabbing CoD's audience and more reasons I cant be bothered listing......but yeah.....this generation of gaming is one me and my girlfriend have vowed to protect our future children from.
Highly restricted is a good way to put it...And I hope people here see these comments and think long and hard about their past complaints lol...