Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Sony PlayStation 2. There’s probably nothing I can say about the system that you don’t already know, it broke records even beyond that of its widely successful predecessor, it was the perfect followup to a perfect system with perfect games. Metal Gear Solid was at is peak here, with 2 and 3 being perfect in every sense of the word, and I still remember the countless hours I’ve spent on this great machine.
But it wasn’t the only great system of this generation.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Disaster after disaster, Sega had its hands tied up to make a great gaming system if they wanted to stay in the market, and they did! The Sega Dreamcast was a great system with lots of excellent and innovative titles. The company invested most of its money in opening small game studios to develop for the system, giving them free to play around with it and come up with interesting and fun concepts and third party support wasn’t lacking at all, as well as big games like Sonic. To this day you can randomly pick any Dreamcast game and there’s a pretty high chance that it’ll be good.
Aside from the great deal of games, the console also innovated in several other aspects, such as online gameplay, which became popular with it, and the VMU, which we’ll later see being developed deeper with the Wii U. The Dreamcast hardware is easily the weakest of this generation, although it still has really nice graphics, but take into consideration that this console launched a year before the PS2 and about 3 years before the GameCube and Xbox.
Sadly, although the Dreamcast wasn’t doing that bad, the unveil of the PS2, which sported DVD-ROM technology and far superior capabilities, as well as backwards compatibility, drop the sales of the system, and Sega couldn’t afford this, they really needed a top-selling dominating console, and the Dreamcast wasn’t up to it, so it got discontinued in 2001.
Overall this console was great, had awesome games and lots of hidden jewels for any retro gamer to investigate. If you like retro gaming, or gaming systems from this era, I strongly recommend you get your hands on this system.
Nintendo on the other hand had learned from their mistake with the N64 and decided this time to move onto with optical media instead of cartridges. They created a proprietary disc media based on the DVD standard. These discs resembled 8cm mini-DVDs in every aspect, but were unreadable by conventional DVD readers. With time this technology was cracked, and burned DVDs and mini-DVDs were playable on the system.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Nintendo GameCube is often considered an underrated jewel of a console, where most games on the system, even first party Nintendo titles, were highly innovative in gameplay and presentation. Super Mario Sunshine, Luigi’s Mansion, Metroid Prime and Legend of Zelda The Windwaker are just examples of recycling older franchises, but with new and interesting gameplay elements that make them look fresh new.
Much like the Dreamcast, there is not much to say about the GameCube other that it was much powerful than the PS2, had less loading times on the discs, and it had a great catalogue of games, but was still outshined by the huge hype and demand for the PS2 system. Again, I recommend anyone interested in retro consoles or consoles from this era to pick one up.
The last major competitor in this generation came as a big surprised, when Microsoft announced the Xbox as a home console to rival the PS2 and GameCube (at this point the Dreamcast already died).
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
The Xbox console came as a big surprise to everyone, there are many theories on why Microsoft entered the console business, the most famous one is that Sega sold their original designs and specs for the Dreamcast 2 to Microsoft when they dropped out of the console business. This theory makes sense in that Sega and Microsoft were really tied in the development of the Dreamcast, with Microsoft providing the software on which the system runs. There’s also many similarities between the two consoles, the Xbox controller upon further inspection is strikingly similar to the Dreamcast’s, even the way it inserts the memory cards. Personally I just like to think they were looking for markets to enter to prevent from being sued by the government for monopolistic practices.
There’s not much to say about this console, it was criticized for its size and its even bigger controller.
It had some epic games like Halo and Fable, but those were also available on PC. This console really felt like a weaker PC rather than a more powerful console, it had intel CPU, 3.5 inch HDD and DVD drive exactly like the ones you’d find on any standard PC of the time, even the games were the same, so if you passed on this system in favor of either the PS2 or PC gaming then you really didn’t loose much.
All this was probably the reason this console didn’t sell all that well and wasn’t able to catch up with the PS2.
We’ve reviewed all the direct competitors of the PS2 at this point, and while it’s clear why the Xbox couldn’t beat it (lack of exclusives, really huge size, etc), we’ve still haven’t covered why the Dreamcast died even before the PS2 got released and why Nintendo fell to Sony’s dominance for two generations in a row.
To understand all of this we need to understand what the PS2 had to offer. Right when revealed, the PS2 was marketed as having a DVD-ROM drive and being able to playback DVD movies like a standard DVD player. Right there you’re not only telling people that the game media will be much better than the previous console, but that they will be able to use the console for other entertaining purposes that, at the time, were becoming all the rage. Aside from this, the PS2 sports a coprocessor named the IOP (Input-Output Processor), this coprocessor is nothing more than the main CPU found on the PS1, under normal circumstances this chip is used for managing external devices like the memory card, USB ports, and other peripherals, but when a PS1 disc is inserted on the console, the chip is used to provide backwards compatibility with most PS1 titles. So right off the bat PS1 users knew that they could upgrade to the new PS2 console and keep all their PS1 games, and it gave the console a nice catalog of games at launch until the PS2 library became decent, not to mention huge games like GTA 3 that were announced for the system. All this gave gamers a reason to hold on to their money and instead of buying a Dreamcast, wait until the PS2 was released, which wasn’t that much of a wait. As for the GameCube, the 8cm DVDs didn’t give that much room for developers to work with, the system didn’t offer anything outside of gaming, and the PS2 was already really hyped up and established by the time of its release, to the point were it almost went unnoticed.
Sony continued to blow away gamers when they announced the much smaller, much slimmer PS2 console, which gave the system new life. Great games from a vast variety of categories were released for the system and it went on to become the highest selling console of all time, with only the Nintendo DS coming close, but not getting quite there. The console was also the first to be widely supported on two generations, as the system didn’t see a drop of support until early 2013, well into the end of the 7th generation, which we’ll talk about in the upcoming post.