Eaaaaasily the Dreamcast, even though I think I was the only person I knew that had one. I think I had:
- Shenmue
- Power Stone
- Soulcalibur
- Quake III Arena
- Skies of Arcadia
- Capcom vs SNK
- Timestalkers
- Sonic Adventure
- Phantasy Star Online
Stellar lineup. I also loved my PlayStation.
Oh yeah the Dreamcast! Never saw a console with such a quirky lineup. My favorites were
- Rez
- Tokyo Xtreme Racer
- Cosmic Smash
- Crazy Taxi
- House of the Dead
- Space Channel 5 (right left chu chu chu!)
My Pentium 120 MhZ playing Duke Nukem, Quake, Diablo, Red Alert. All my friends had 133 MhZ so was the underdog at LAN meetups 🙂
Probably NES. I had Atari, Sega Genesis, and PC, then later Sega Game Great, GB Advance, and XBox, but NES was the most fun imo. I mostly only played Street Fighter on Genesis.
For my kids, it’ll probably be PC. They love Minecraft, and haven’t played on our Switch a ton.
OG Xbox. Fuck playing Halo in Split screen was fun.
And of course PC. Settlers 3, Counter Strike 1.6. amazing games all around
Master System because I’m special
Commodore 64, as was style at the time. I have 4 different versions in my collection, and I still use them few times a week.
Personal Computer (80-90s)
Doom 2 - Spent my childhood on dial up playing other friends over the modem. Up all hours of the night using chainsaws and rockets. Late 90s when Duke Nukem came out, It was the first game I drove immediately to the store and purchased. Back in the day when you bought the box and had to take it home and install it. Thought it was leading edge and funny as hell. To be fair it was at the time. Today that information is tracked. I’d like to know how many thousands of hours I spent on this game. But it was hilarious and late fun filled nights.
Today I buy 2-3 games per decade. But still game for a majority of my entertainment. One of the benefits of being an old gamer is that if you build a new system today it can play everything from the 70s to 2023 at a minimal. Toss in Emulation for other consoles in there you really have a plethora of choices, 4 decades worth to be specific. All of which contain no tracking, no always online, no micro-transactions. As gaming was intended! Really hard to find something that checks those boxes, about 2-3 titles per decade worth purchasing.
N64. Apart from the usual suspects (Mario 64, Wave Race, Pilot Wings, Golden Eye, Dark Project), Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon still feels like I fever dreamed that crazy ass game up. It also had the only wrestling game I ever liked, but forgot the name.
I always was a PC gamer, but I loved the PSP, it was insane how good the PSP was back then. Now I have a Steam Deck and it’s the best of both worlds, I would’ve loved having that kind of thing when I was a kid.
PC. Still my favorite now.
PC was all I had. Commander Keen and Duke Nukem (original, not 2 or 3D) were my go-to games for a long while.
MSDOS
I remember being like 5 years old and my grandfather (who built the PC for us and would later take me to computer shows) made a “cheat sheet” for me telling me how to “cd” etc in order to find and run my games
I had a copy of DOS for Dummies. super helpful, the official manual for MSDOS 5.0 was really dry/uninteresting
PS2… even though, during its last days, I had to stack half a set of encyclopedias on top to get it to run a game 😭
