Oh man… I had an NES and a Colecovision with Atari 2600 attachment. I still have SNES, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance SP, DS Slim, N64, Gamecube, Wii, Sega Genesis, Dreamcast, Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, PSP, Xbox (died just outside of the warranty window, plan on fixing it one day), Xbox 360 Elite (same deal as the Xbox; it’s almost like Microsoft does this shit on purpose).
Games are far too many to list, but my absolute favourite game of all time is Vagrant Story for the Playstation.
I hate that your definition of retro includes n64-xbox 360.
I’m not arguing it, I just hate it Next you’re going to tell me Foo Fighters are classic rock.
rogue squadron on N64 might be my favorite game of all time. Really any game I ever played on N64 was great. Mine is still at my parents’ house, I have been known to play it when I go visit.
I said that in jest, because classic rock stations have in fact begun playing them.
To me “retro” and “classic” are a style defined by a particular older era, not just a certain number of years old. For video games, that basically means pre-3d when I think of “retro”. I’m too young to be this old. (I’m 36)
I was never much of a console gamer but I do still have my x360 from way back. Most of my console nostalgia comes from the days before we had a pc at home, playing on the nintendo and super nintendo, and sega megadrive at various friends houses.
I do own an original xbox as well, and have bought some games for it too. The issue with it, and any cd based console, is that over time either the cd’s or the drive will give out, and all that data will be lost.
At some point I would like to modify my xbox to be able to just use images from a hard drive.
I also have a sega saturn with an optical drive emulator, so I can just play the games from an SD card.
Then I have a megadrive clone console that can play japanese and usa cartridges that came with an everdrive type cartridge that you can use to play games from an sd card. It also has hdmi for convenience.
I would like to get a gamecube some day, with some modification again to get around the disc issue.
Other than that I have always been a pc gamer at heart and have multiple retro pc’s to play older games on, from a lowely pentium 2 up to a phenom II that I am trying to use as my main retro pc right now with access to steam and gog games on a modern operating system, running wine and various source ports.
While I have bought quite a few old games as big box copies and otherwise, again that issue of cd decay is always looming in the background. I especially hate the various DRM schemes that have plagued the pc gaming world over time, and I have been hunting down no-cd patches or just straight up “unofficial” copies of games just to get around this issue. I am so happy that gog exists, I just wish they could release every single game that is over 20 years old. Nevertheless, they are doing amazing work over there, as well are all the developers working on some of the amazing remakes of old games that we have seen released on gog and steam over the years, making it possible to enjoy some of the most amazing games in all their glory, DRM free.
Not to forget all the amazing people who work on all the amazing source ports that allow us to play many games on modern systems and natively on the operating system of our choice.
My first memories of a console is “Sega mega Drive II”, but it was not the real thing. In eastern Europe and Asia there was a time in the 1990s when bootleg consoles were widespread. They would put them in chassis that resembled modern consoles, but they were basically NES/Famicom clones that took yellow bootleg cartridges.
Fun thing about that is that you have a lot of adults in eastern Europe who think Super Mario Bros was a “Sega Mega” game.
Next up was PlayStation PS One version, and some of my favorites were Crash Bandicoot games, Warcraft 2, Syphon Filter, Tomb Raider, Twisted Metal… but that’s probably just nostalgia talking, a lot of those are probably bad.
After that, I played maybe 3 games on modern-ish consoles, PC is my platform of choice since early 2000s.
1st and last console I personally owned was Pong in 76-77. It was pong and “tennis” 1 or 2 players. Novel but limited fun. After that friends had 2600s and we played Circus Atari to Pitfall to Adventure on those over the years. In that time my fam started w an Apple][ and stayed on home computers. Eventually played some full day bracket tourneys of Techmo Bowl on NES and coined the phrase Nintendo No-Friendo for game days on console -or for someone that just wanted to stay home and game. PS1 I remember nostalgically Nitrous Oxide and Krazy Ivan fun. PS2 was FIFA dominated. More Nintendo No-Friendo style daylong soccer tournaments were fun and competitive. Arguably this was before the enshitification of FIFA began as an online game. Ive had stuffy cocktail parties turn hilarious w stupid wii bowling.
Never played a PS game after 2 and never once an Xbox game because around PS2, PC was surpassing console so I was K/M on PC exclusively. I played a lot of games w a lot of fun memories but it was always an engagement. It was never a routine as in every day.
My first memory was literally playing Re-Volt on the dreamcast being displayed by a projector. Later played NES and SNES games from time to time, but then my cousing showed me the OG Xbox and Halo CE and its story/music/sound design and visuals made me fall in love with gaming. My brother had PC games like Need for Speed III: HP and I later got Battleship: Surface Thunder and Roller Coaster Tycoon from cereal boxes so that and the typical windows game list from XP are what I grew up on. Also have a love for arcade games from my dad who liked Pong and Pac-Man and Asteroids, played a few cabinets back then.
For the consoles you mentioned, game prices from least to most expensive: XBOX/360 > Genesis > N64 > Gamecube. Gamecube saw a huge price increase for many 1st party games which is a shame, definitely start with the old Xbox but you may have to spend a little more effort in cleaning them, a repaste of the CPU cooler would definitely be in order, as well as recapping the OG xbox which the 2001-2003 models are notorious for having clock capacitor leaks.
Aaaaactually… the local classic rock station plays 90’s rock now.
I believe for a car in the United States to be able to be legally registered as a “classic” is 20 years, so yeah, anything over 20 years old is “retro” or “classic”.
I have been seriously looking into getting an arcade cabinet as my two year old absolutely loves arcades anytime we’re out. There’s a surprisingly huge community around arcade cabinets and emulating “old” games, I’m thinking of repurposing my desktop after I upgrade later this year to emulate all the things, from atari to ps3/4
Emulation Wiki will help a lot with choosing the right emulators and what not.
Edit: If you want to do a Windows based arcade cabinet computer, take a look at LaunchBox for a cohesive front-end. Over the past several years they’ve made it a lot easier to set up individual emulators (personally I’ve always found RetroArch and Libretro cores lacking in performance, but they’re also not meant for actual emulation, but fast and loose playability).