What are your favorite systems of all-time?

[Bean]

Goodness knows there have been a lot of them over the years. I figure I'll go over some of mine and see if anyone wants to join in.

1) The Super Nintendo is the one that has the most nostalgic value for me. It was the go-to platform for platformers like Mario, Yoshi's Island, and the Donkey Kong Country & Mega Man X trilogies. It's also where I started to get into RPGs, albeit late in the console's life, thanks to games like Mario RPG and then going back to get Final Fantasy II and III as well as Breath of Fire 1 and 2 before FFVII came out. It's one that I still pull out to play 25 years later now from time to time as a result.

2 & 3) The 3DS and DS. This shouldn't be a surprise since I mentioned how much I enjoy the SNES because these two systems in many ways are like a handheld version of that console. The touch gimmick with the stylus made for some really neat games like Kirby: Canvas Curse, but it was again the place to be for platformers (Sonic Rush, Castlevania games, Mario 3D Land) and RPGs (Mario & Luigi, Final Fantasy DS remakes). The 3DS' digital library of cheaper to purchase but still awesome to play titles is what makes it my favorite handheld even though the DS was a beast.

I also didn't mention it in the SNES section, but A Link to the Past was my favorite game on it. Then the 3DS goes back to that well and creates my all-time favorite game period in A Link Between Worlds. That game has me hyped for that Breath of the Wild one. I'm just glad to see the old mixing with the new again in a positive way because that's not always the case nowadays.

4) The Playstation 1 is the only non-Nintendo console I liked more than the actual Nintendo one of its time (The N64 in this case). Obviously helped by many Japanese companies jumping ship from Nintendo to Sony helped. The Final Fantasies were great, Capcom's sprite work created a ton of classics and a couple of cult favorites, too. One of those was kind of legendary for many on here, I think. I also thought it was where Sony was at their most diverse in terms of their portfolio instead of just trying to hype up Naughty Dog stuff all the time and leave the other companies to fend for themselves. Kind of funny to look back and know that the only two series still running from the PS1 days for them are Hot Shots and Gran Turismo, but Sony and third-parties created one heck of a machine here.

5) This is probably a weird pick to round out the top five, and it may eventually be replaced by the Wii since there are quite a few games I missed on it, but I'm giving it to the Gamecube. It has one of the weirder Mario games and one of my least favorite Zelda ones, too, but it made up for it with all the mid-tier stuff and other classics. It has one of the best Smash Bros. games in Melee, favorite F-Zero in GX, one of the best Metroid games in a reinvention of the series, the birth of Animal Crossing. It also saw some companies return from their exodus to Sony as well as the introduction of Sega after their first-party days met their end to give the system some much needed life. Gamecube's one of those underrated machines because of the PS2, but I'll always view that one as the downfall of console-based RPGs as so many companies fell apart on that system. Nintendo's Gamecube didn't, yo.

Anyway, there's my top five in a longer post than I expected. If you just want to do a list, go for it. I'm curious as to your favorites though!

[Rockman Striker]

I'll say my favorite console is the PSone, I've spent my childhood playing tons of great games like the Megaman series, Gran Turismo, Need for Speed, FFVII and so many more, most of them I still play to this day.
Second place has to be the PS2, it has again a huge library of great games like FFX-2, DB Budokai Tenkaichi, Tenchu and Metal Gear Solid!
Third place is the GameBoy Advance, again with a vast library of games.

[Dashe]

My favorite console was the N64. The first time I played one it completely blew me away because until then, I'd only ever played 2D games on a PC. Plus it was loaded with Collect-a-thon platformers, which I've always liked, and plenty of open worlds to explore. The N64 and the Game Boy Advance were hands down the only ones I ever really anticipated owning with any real kind of enthusiasm, too. The GBA was this huge step up from the GBC. I was incredibly impressed.

[Mikéy]

I've played the NES, SNES, N64, PS1, and PS2 so many times that I couldn't tell you which one I ultimately ended up playing the most. Once the internet really took off, I stopped playing games on consoles so much after that. PS2 had a lot of neat games that I had fun going back to, especially with two players. N64, despite having clear multi-controller support, seemingly lacked games that made very great use of it. I also lacked people to play with, so that game system reminds me of lonelier days.

The SNES was amazing and undoubtedly had some of the best RPGs of all time, even though I never got to official own them. The games I played the most on SNES were Mario Kart, Tetris Attack, and Killer Instinct. The only NES game I remember enjoying that wasn't completely mainstream was the port of the arcade game TMNT. Never officially beat it cuz going through the game solo proved to be nearly impossible, and I still found it impossible to find a good second player in those days.

For handhelds, the Game Boy Advance won hands-down, especially its SP upgrade, which was the first experimentation with chargeable batteries and backlit screens that Nintendo distributed. Although people around here may disagree, I found the third generation of Pokemon to be utterly amazing, both in Hoenn and in Kanto, and I played through each of the respective Pokemon Games multiple times each, often trading with myself across cartridges. Talk about a lonely life. I also did this to a lesser extent with generation I Pokemon, but not nearly as much since save-file battery expiration scarred me for life. At least with generation III when that happened, your clock events got screwed up; it didn't render the games completely unplayable.

I guess my post was primarily one of reminiscing, but undoubtedly the consoles I mentioned did something right, since they were able to retain my attention much longer than even my 3DS can manage these days. It probably helped that Game Boy Advances were cheap enough to buy multiples of, since my sister got one as well from my parents that I ended up abusing to the fullest to trade Pokemon across cartridges. Perhaps it's the lack of system updates, and the fact that you don't have to download huge patches for your games for any of the aforementioned systems, since I've heard horror stories from certain modern sony products from Trege . There's my two cents, at least.

[Fatman X. Jones]

Well, for starters, I'm a bit unconventional, as I don't stop at number-one spots, I go a step further and have a number-zero spot for my favorite systems of all time. In this case, my number zero, absolute favorite video game system of all time is the Playstation 2.

I say this because the Playstation 2 is, by far and away, one fucking hell of a console, if I may say so a bit bluntly. For starters, it was the collective efforts of my favorite video game company of all time, Sony, who certainly proved with it that they were fully capable of making video games an important and vital part of their electronics offerings. The Playstation 2 was easy to develop for and took advantage of a lot of unconventional things that had not been tried in a video game console before, like incorporating and using DVDs as a major format for game media. Not only could you buy a Playstation 2 to play your favorite games, you could use it to watch movies, saving you at the time a lot of money that you could then turn around and use to purchase games to play on the device. The controller was a tried-and-true improvement on the Playstation's easy-to-use control scheme, which ended up so popular that Sony still hasn't changed it very much to this day. Some of my favorite games on the Playstation 2 took full advantage of the hardware to create immersive environments, rocket-fast gameplay and silky smooth animation; I like to look at the mainline Ratchet & Clank series games as a perfect example of what the system is capable of, as their wide-open environments gave a sense of feeling and depth, like you were actually traipsing about on worlds far from here. I don't know if I can really express my love for this system any more than anyone else already has.

[UltraViolet64]

I definitely have to say that the N64 is my favorite console. I've had my N64 since I was 8 or 9 and she still works like a charm. Many of my favorite games of all time are on it, including Banjo-Kazooie, Super Mario 64, Kirby 64, and Conker's Bad Fur Day. I used to spend hours in front of the garbage CRT TV my mom got before I was even born with the N64 and became adept with it. I even love the controller - something not many people would probably say today. I've 100%'d Mario 64 countless times, played dozens of hours of Heist in CBFD with my friends, and...am still working on beating Pokemon Stadium. (I haven't bothered getting a usable team for Poke Cup yet.) It's my go-to console when I just want to kill time and definitely my favorite to play on.

[Bean]

These results aren't that surprising to me. It looks like the system that we played the most of as kids/teens, for the most part, is the one we enjoy the most. I think only Fatman bucked the trend with his pick on the PS2, but I don't know how old you are to know for sure.

Nothing wrong with any of those picks.

[Rockman Striker]

Definitely. In my case, my first console was the NES, but I only had access to super Mario/Duck Hunt and Top Gun, psone games were more common and accessible so I played a lot of them. I still sometimes play the original Super Mario via emulation and I would love to buy a NES mini just because of nostalgia but it isn't one of my favorite consoles.