before this is over I will be making some Fanboys mad and I'm going to start
with a shot at Big Daddy red You could argue that Nintendo is the most
important console maker of all time originally a trading card and toy
company they found some initial success in gaming in the Midway space but it was
the 1 million units of their first Home console the color TV series that locked
in their Destiny too bad the thing a d
and look I'm sorry but first generation consoles really don't hold up and while
our ranking system will account for the lower expectations that Gamers would
have had at the time kind of an opinions adjusted for inflation if you will at
the end of the day a major consideration has to be historical importance aside
how fun are the games today and the good news is that when we reach Nintendo's
thirdd generation offering the answer becomes very in large part thanks to the
inclusion of Hardware scrolling backgrounds look I know that doesn't
sound like a huge deal but this is what
platforming looks like on the competition start on the left jump over
obstacle reach the right side of the screen rinse and repeat woohoo meanwhile
on the nest look at him go woohoo and
upgraded cartridges would push its capabilities even further changing video
games forever the famicom or family computer as it was known in Japan
quickly took the crown for the bestselling console in in history and
thanks to Nintendo's Savvy thirdparty publishing negotiations living room
friendly branding and focus on content quality they would continue that success
in the challenging North American Market in our minds the NES marks the end of
console Gaming's infancy and the beginning of its childhood years it was
the start of huge franchises like Final Fantasy The Legend of Zelda Metroid
Mario and more and it was also affordable it's an A and the only reason
is that as Innovative as they were most of its best games are essentially
obsolete every franchise that I just mentioned got a bigger sequel on
Nintendo's very next console that was better in almost every way and we're
going to get to that after this quick message from our sponsor Ridge hey is
that a boring old bfold wallet in your pocket are you just happy to see the
alternative ridges sleek and highquality
wallets well in any case go to the link below and use code lineus to save 10%
off your purchase and get free shipping the Super Nintendo
Entertainment System didn't change the formula much but its more refined
technology gave developers a platform to focus on what's most important making
great Gams and this was clear right out of the gate with F0 a flashy look at the
future using the 3D power of mode 7 and
Super Mario World which is still the best 2D Mario game and the hits just
kept coming with a lot library of games that ranges from still playable to
contenders for best ever in the RPG and
2D platforming genres there were some turds too of course but Super Nintendo
is our first s tier and uh unfortunately
Nintendo's last for a while with competition ramping up on all sides and
pirate flags flying high Nintendo doubled down on their wal Garden
philosophy leading to the big error that
along with several others would tank this generation for them choosing
proprietary cartridges over CDs I get it Nintendo's lucrative
licensing agreements were easier to control when they ran the production
line but cartridges cost many times as
much and hold only a fraction of the amount of data this resulted in
developers making serious compromises to run on Nintendo's 64-bit machine which
is a shame because the raw performance of the N64 was actually at the top of it
generation it just wouldn't be fully unlocked until decades later by
Community modders sometimes limitations breed creativity though and the N64
ended up with a very strong library at least if you focus on its goats oakarina
of time and Mario 64 still come up in those conversations and most first party
titles on the system are or at least were outstanding even if Yoshi got done
kind of dirty the problem is that the good third party games for the console
were rare get it and we'd need to see a
deeper library for a higher placement it's going to be a b the good news is
that Nintendo learned for the GameCube they worked on their relationships
ensuring that it was easy to develop for and they even chose Optical media albeit
at a silly smaller size so the old purple lunchbox would end up with a more
complete library with some entries in Long running franchise even considered
their best like smash melee Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4 okay the
controller sucked Donkey Kong for pretty much any game that wasn't specifically
designed for it but at least it wasn't as alien or flaccid as its older sibling
B it's a b it's just too bad that nobody
cared at the time leading Nintendo to a major shift in strategy that persists
today to avoid competing head-to-head with Microsoft and Sony's HD systems
Nintendo basically repackaged the cube into an overclock rectangle with some
extra RAM and launched it alongside a motion controller that by the way also
was originally designed for the GameCube
at the time the Wii felt a little bit disappointing considering its revolution
code name but if you felt that way you were probably a real gamer because for
everyone else it was something else it was fun it would be easy to dismiss the
console based on the mountain of wiggle wiggle shovelware that was published for
for it but it was Nintendo's first backwards compatible home system and its
early lead in sales incentivized thirdparty developers to put in the work
to build out its Library even if the ports weren't the best ones available
now sadly for emulation and eShop enthusiasts many of its most interesting
titles are trapped there because of the novel control scheme but we are still
putting the Wii on the a tier for all the retirement homes that are still
bowling and golfing unfortunately like the people in those
homes the wi gimmicks did get kind of old and its successor was probably
Nintendo's lowest point it had more
power than the Aging 7th gen Hardware that Nintendo launched it against but it
also had confusing branding and a quasi
portable controller screen gimmick that
most games completely failed to take advantage of not helping matters new
first party games were slow to show up due to a focus on HD remastered
which led to slow sales which led to poor thirdparty support again it did get
some unironically great games including kicking off Mario Kart 8's decade of
Nintendo refusing to give us another Mario Kart but today there are fewer and
fewer reasons to leave an unmodded Wii U plugged in other than its ability to
Output older Wii games via HDMI we're
going to give it a c luckily the switch
immediately switched up the conversation
delivering on the hybrid handheld Promises of the Wii U and putting
Nintendo back on top it launched with
what is arguably the best game from one of the strongest gaming franchises ever
and has followed it up with Banger after Banger after Banger the enormous install
base has prompted developers to move Heaven and Earth to shrink their games
to work on it resulting in sometimes a pretty good experience
especially if you consider that the console is little more than an NVIDIA
Shield tablet with custom firmware and controllers it is underpowered compared
to the machines of today and even the machines of its time but it is a great
way to pack Mario and the Gang into the screen safe slot of your LTT backpack
LTT Store.com we are giving the switch our second s for revitalizing the
handheld gaming Market as for the future it remains to be seen whether Nintendo
can retain the switch's momentum against the rise of PC handhelds and the rumors
of Sony's return not to mention Microsoft's entry but I'm hopeful surely
the good bad good bad pattern can't continue speaking of things that
couldn't continue Sega and oh boy do
they ever have weirder Origins than I realized the Japanese giant was founded
by Americans who sold slot machines to
US Army bases which is why they were at one point called s irvis
g weird forado by the way but okay
sega's first Home console like Nintendo's was designed to play stripped
down arcade ports and the sg1000 was in that sense better than the color TV with
interchangeable cartridges and a fair bit more power which is neat but the MK3
or as you might know it in the west the Master System is where sega's sales went
parabolic we are giving the sg1000 a d
which won't surprise anyone and we're giving the Master System a c which will
surprise folks in the regions where it would go on to have an exceptionally
long life with some kind of impressive
peripherals everywhere else though it suffered from its focus on arcade style
games and sega's notoriously bad habit of supplanting their systems a little
too quickly just 3 years after the
Master System Sega launched the mega drive or Genesis for us yanker Doodles
powered by the Motorola 68,000 a familiar 16-bit chip that powered
countless other arcade games and home computers Sega brought blast processing
to the party which is a real thing we think no one is 100% sure what it was
but most likely it referred to dma or the ability to directly drive a CRT
through Brute Force regardless of the vdps pallet limitations it also had a
more powerful CPU than the Super Nintendo which arrived two whole years
later and thanks to some clever design choices it even had backwards
compatibility with Master System games not that it needed it the Genesis has a
phenomenal library that is undeniably sega's best even beyond the Blue Blur
there's a huge variety of games designed to appeal to a slightly more mature
audience thanks to sega's looser thirdparty ecosystem and many Genesis
games just straight up play better than their SNES competition even if they
usually look a little worse I wanted so
badly to put it in the S tier but before we can rank it we need to talk about
some of the truly baffling moves that Sega made late on in its life cycle
first they launched a CD add-on that was actually a mild success allowing its
aging 80s Hardware to push past the newer SNES in some key ways like
improved Sprite scaling as well as CD quality audio and the ability to play
interactive FMV video games if you're into those but then as this sort of
nextg stop Gap Sega designed and
launched the 32 X add-on around the same
time that their completely nextg full
32-bit console the Saturn would launch
in Japan making matters much worse Sega
surprise launched the console 4 months early in North America only for Sony to
immediately counter by announcing the PlayStation would be just
299999 so if you're confused trying to follow exactly what I'm talking about
here imagine how consumers felt at the time what did did I just buy and what is
this new thing Sega in one stroke burnt
the Goodwill that they had fought so hard to claim from Nintendo and suddenly
they were behind by a lot Genesis a as
for the Saturn it was a complete bust everywhere but Japan which I guess is
what happens when you go from we're going to make the best darn 2D system
for True arcade 2 oh my God here comes
Sony and they've got 3D now in hindsight the Saturn has a
pretty incredible library of hidden gems that I would highly recommend that you
check out but in the 9s when 3D was the new hotness developers just couldn't be
ared to learn its eccentric for chip architecture and sega's penultimate
effort would pave the way for the company's overall exit from the console
Hardware space we're giving it a c for
come on it at least deserved a chance the Saturn is the most under ated system
that Sega has ever made maybe even by us
and I'm saying that knowing that most people would think that award goes to
sega's final effort the Dreamcast with a modem for Network play built right in
and a highquality VGA capable output it
was truly ahead of its time and between
great ports to the system not to mention a slew of phenomenal new games the
Dreamcast would get off to the strongest start yet NVIDIA game history that is
until a big old black DVD player that
we're going to get to in a bit don't worry arrived holding its pink slip Less
Than 3 years after its launch Sega announced that Not only was the
Dreamcast headed out behind the barn their entire console business was going
with it Sega we salute you for your
service and we're giving the Dreamcast a strong B for being something that is
still worth dusting off to this day the good news is that in the same year that
Sega admitted defeat a new Contender would pick up their torch Microsoft was
looking to make a little gaming machine of their own and what's cool is you can
still see some of that Sega DNA in the original Windows 2000 light machine six
face buttons a focus on network play and even rumored Dreamcast compatibility
though that never came to fruition in spite of the fact that it used similar
Windows CE and directex development tools I mean sure the Xbox compared to
the full custom chips that the competition was using was basically a
glorified Pentium 3 computer with a big controller like what were they thinking
big but it was the most powerful system
of its time meaning that it often had the best version of multiplatform titles
not to mention a solid library of
exclusives this is before Microsoft settled into their safe spaces of Halo
gears and Forza and they pushed weird
character Platformers and Epic RPGs that competing machines just couldn't even
hope to run the Xbox was off to a
rocking start a tier and that was just
the beginning Just 4 years later came the Xbox 2 sorry 360 with easily the
best online service and Games Delivery of that generation a modest entry price
and developer friendly Hardware the 360 was a noons gaming machine for gamers
where pretty much any mult platform title would arrive either first or
better or both even franchises that had
been Sony exclusive started uh showing up on the Microsoft machine I mean sure
it doesn't have a huge list of its own exclusives but there are some doozies in
there and Microsoft's big push in Japan gave the 360 the best Japanese library
of any Xbox system can someone please
remaster Lost Odyssey For Crying Out Loud reliability issues aside the three
360 is Microsoft's finest and is an easy
s for the countless nights of Halo 3 that kept Millions from proper rest
sadly though Microsoft would pull a big dumb and try to make their nextg Xbox
one the one device for everything it had
HDMI input for cable box pass through
mandatory connect integration for voice and motion controls and worst of all
they angered Gamers right out of the gate by simultaneously announcing an
always online DRM scheme that in
hindsight seems pretty similar to where we ended up but I guess people weren't
ready to hear it this poor messaging combined with underpowered hardware and
a higher price contributed to a major
loss to the PS4 which had outsold it 2
to one by the end of 2017 and with Sony
on solid footing again after their early PS3 symbols PlayStation exclusives
started taking a laps around Microsoft's struggling Xbox franchises to
Microsoft's credit the Xbox team started dialing back the cable box connect of
the machine and did a much better job of supporting their Windows friends but
outside of gears and Forza it was kind
of a wasteland Microsoft clearly understood their advantage though in
building cloud and data center services and followed up their successful Xbox
Live subscription with game pass an all you can eat gaming subscription that
frankly Just Smokes the competition for
Value unfortunately this was too late in the cycle and they knew it the one gets
a c for I wish I was playing as Master
Chief not Jameson lock which brings us
to the ninth generation Xbox or boxes
for the first time we got two versions with wildly different performance
characteristics and for the second time we got to focus on Services rather than
games the series is continue Microsoft's
trend of crossplatform play and backwards compatibility which is great
but also continue Microsoft's trend of especially the latter being kind of
spotty Microsoft has gone on an aggressive game Studio gobling spree
which theoretically should lead to some really exciting box mover titles but
we're kind of still waiting to see them and apparently so are Microsoft's
customers with combined sales of the two Xbox serieses falling well behind the
PS5 now it's still a bit early to give the Xbox series a definitive rank but in
spite of its poor sales we're actually leaning towards a B for best darn gaming
PC that you can buy for 300 or 500 bucks
or sometimes even less on sale we'll have links below for the serieses and
the other consoles that you can still buy but before we rank the rest of those
I want to go back in time to some things that you can't buy in 1977 Nolan
Bushnell started Chuck E cheeses that
franchise gets an F for its crappy pizza and its creepy rat I promise I'm going
somewhere with this 5 years earlier he
also co-founded Atari maker of pong C
and the VCS or as many Now call it the
2600 it was one of the most important
machines for getting games into people's homes even if the software feels
painfully primitive now we almost gave it an a for arguably most important
console of all time but we're going with a B for best not play this unless you
have an academic interest as for the 5200 it came 5 years later with barely
any Tech Improvement and a non-existent game Library meaning that we've got our
first F tier here folks quite you as for
the 7800 it gets a c and that's thanks only to its backwards compatibility with
the 2600 as for the Jaguar hard to
program for expens Ive and once again no game Library that's another F and that
was the end of their console making days sorry Atari I'll see you later now for
some of atari's competitors like the channel f is it for fun or is it for its
ranking it was the first proper Home console with a real processor and ROM
carts but other than that there's not much else to say about it we're going to
go with a d Magnavox Odyssey that thing came out in 1972 good Lord that's 5
years before the 26 for that alone it gets a c most Odyssey
2 games have exclamation points in their titles so d uh the intellivision
Mattel's only console other than one built around scanning rfad cards we're
going to give that one a c and uh the Connecticut leather company yes that is
what kico stands for kico vision was a
technical Juggernaut compared to its contemporaries and uh it gets a c as
well enough of that though let's jump forward a decade the PC engine SLT Turbo
Graphics 16 was mostly ignored in the west but in Japan outsold the Mega Drive
and had a robust library of games that make good use of the CD add-on we're
giving it a b the Neo Geo was super cool
it literally brought an arcade machines power into your house and all it cost
you was nearly the same as an arcade
machine be anyway as for the Philips CDI
that cost over $2,000 in today's money it's yours my
friend as long as you have enough rubies
f f f f f f f after for the Amiga
cd32 this one I don't know it's possible
it's amazing but at these kinds of prices for working units I'm just never
going to know um f for get collectors
finally rounding out our others list we've got the 3dio and it's going to
crawl into a d for having a few decent games and ports even though it was a
huge uge waste of money for both consumers and for its creators talk
about PlayStation all right I was almost
there anyway pcfx D there the origin of the PlayStation is truly a wild tale of
corporate backstabber and poor business sense through its early years Sony was a
big player in electronics and music and had become one of Japan's biggest
exporters their collaboration with Phillips on the invention of the compact
disc was revolutionizing the media world but it would take Maverick engineer Ken
karagi to finally turn its R&D engine toward video gaming by forging a
backroom deal to manufacture the super Nintendo's sound chip this sound chip
led to a second much more important deal with Nintendo one for Sony to produce a
cdrom version of the super famicom called the PlayStation now as you may
already know that deal did not go as planned and depending on who you ask
you'll get a very different answer to the question of who screwed over who on
the one hand Sony was the bigger company and had been using its muscle to impose
very unfavorable contract terms including sole International rights to
every game developed for the system and full control of Licensing for every
music and film deal on the other hand Nintendo had a history of tight and
exclusive control over their consoles they were worried about Sony using them
as the stepping stone to a dominant position NVIDIA games so they secretly
sent emissaries to negotiate a more favorable Arrangement elsewhere one
single day then after Sony publicly announced their joint console at CES
1991 Nintendo slapped them in the face
by abandoning both the contract and the years of co-development they announced a
partnership with Sony's collaborator on the CD format Phillips and Sony was
split on what to do next some of the old guard were looking for an excuse to
retreat from the video game Space anyway While others favored just bending the
knee to Nintendo and trying to salvage something from the original deal there
were even talks with Sega of America about developing a console together with
them but that idea was killed when the CEO of Sega apparently said that's a
stupid idea Sony doesn't know how to make Hardware they don't know how to
make software either why would we want to do this hindsight really is a hell of
a drug folks as for karagi I think we
all know where he stood on this he was still seeing red from his fresh
embarrassment at CES and wanted to build it himself importantly he had a key Ally
the president of Sony partially obfuscated what he was doing from the
Sony board by moving his team from headquarters to Sony Music Entertainment
Japan and while they worked some key things happened the success of Virtua
Fighter confirmed that 3D Graphics was the way forward and the failure of the
3D and the Jaguar proved that their console would either live or die by
third- Party Support so a team from Sony's record label was sent to hundreds
of Studios to Garner support and their pitch it was simple but it was effective
they promised easy development and fair promotion of first party and thirdparty
games over 250 teams showed interest and
the rest is history
just 2 days after their North American launch Sony had outsold the Sega
Saturn's entire 5mon run in the UK it
out sold sega's console 3 to one and by the end of their first year Sony had
taken a whopping 20% of the American
video game Market they were selling so many games that they co-inventor of the
CD needed to build new CD printing facilities to keep up with the
outrageous demand and even when Nintendo's fifth gen competitor showed
up 2 years later powered by Superior 3D horsepower not to mention iconic IPS the
Playstation only picked up more steam by
the end of its life in 2006 the PlayStation had sold over 102 million
units more than double the sales of the N64 and the Saturn combined and a huge
part of that success is its enormous library of games it's got more games
than any console that came before or any console that came since reaching a final
count of 7,918 titles and it wasn't just quantity
either I mean it's easy to find knocks against the PS1 like the atrocious
loading times but what you cannot argue with is the depth of its Library not to
mention its appeal to Gamers who were some of them growing out of Nintendo's
stubbornly familyfriendly approach it's an S tier for two reasons one because we
didn't have a higher rank and two two because if we ranked anything else I
would first be murdered by my staff and then dragged through the street by the
rest of you now Sony knew the secret to the ps2's early success was going to be
its Great Value it offered backwards compatibility with the PS1 thanks to
using its older brother's CPU as an IO controller and more importantly it was
one of the cheapest DVD players available so even though the ps2's
library might have taken a few years to fill out due to its somewhat EX exotic
architecture there were strong reasons to buy it from day one and buy it we did
the PS2 sales almost immediately choked out the Dreamcast and would come close
to tripling the sales of sega's machine the GameCube and the original Xbox
combined the PS2 is still the most selling EST game console of all time
though the switch is nipping at its heels and by the end of its decade plus
of support it had over 2500 games to
play with more in the goat conversation than probably any other machine the PS2
is an easy s tier and based on our rating system is the number one console
of all time oh so that means it's downhill from here then right that's
right here comes Sony's first speed bump
in their efforts to replicate the ps2's success by making it once again a trojan
horse for the latest Optical media and fullon backwards compatibility by
stuffing a PS2 into it not to mention the fact that they used a hard to
develop for supercomputer chip the PS3's
initial asking price ended up being a major friction point for consumers
making matters worse the launch title lineup was weak and ports to the system
were generally inferior to those on the Xbox 360 so for years the PS3 looked
like it was the clear loser of the Seventh Generation a first for Sony
however eventually Sony Studios would figure out how to max maximize the
performance of its unusual cell processor and would produce some
impressive exclusives helping to undo at least some of that damage actually a lot
of it I mean if I was told that I could never play a video game again unless it
was on a PS3 I would still have plenty to play much of which is pretty goated
but it can't be an S let's call it an a
luckily though Sony would learn from some of its mistakes and the PS4 would
be a non-nonsense gaming first Oasis in
Microsoft's weird always watching cable
TV World Sony Studios immediately got to
work and there wasn't a year in maybe
2013 and 2019 that didn't have several games that made Gamers sit up and go
shoot I'm going to need a PS4 now eventually we got a lot of those titles
on PC but if N64 is a b and PS3 is an a
PS4 has got to be an S and this is a
special highlighted by the perception or maybe it's just us that Sony's 9th gen
white monolith feels more like a PS4
more prer I mean it's a more powerful
but still x86 gaming focused computer it's got full compatibility with PS4
games which is great and we're only in year four with a pretty strong library
of titles but we can't help feeling a
little desperate for some risk taking here instead of just more rehashing of
the working formulas I also don't love the direction they've taken their
subscription Services backwards compatibility not only is severely
lacking but it's locked behind reoccurring payments and Cloud saves
really you guys who do you think you are Nintendo you wish a tier that is unless
something big changes like if I stopped doing Segways to sponsors Squarespace
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squarespace.com SL LT and get 10% off today now we know
you guys are going to have different opinions of the best consoles and games
so we want to know what your favorites are in the comments and if you like tier
lists hey why don't you go check out the one where we ranked every generation of
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