CurseoftheGods said:
In that case, I guess I'll just list how they all went versus my expectations.
To preface this, I primarily play games on the PC, so my perspectives will be heavily colored by exclusives, as they're the only things I buy on these platforms.
With the Xbox 360 and PS3, they kind of became mirrors of each other. Before the generation started, I was really negative on the 360 and positive on the PS3 due to their previous platforms, but when I started to look at the first games available, I noticed that the 360's library seemed vastly better to me. I went out and bought the 360 along with Gears of War in 2006 and felt that the platform served me very well through 2008. The earlier years of XBLA were a very large part of shaping this, filling in unique genres that were no longer viable at retail. However, as the years waned on, the 360's line-up consisted less and less of great core and XBLA games I wanted, while Sony's first party line-up impressed me more and more. At this point, I find myself wanting several PS3 games a year and next to none for the 360.
The Wii I was expecting to like very little, and in terms of the motion controls and pointer controls (I normally use a mouse), that definitely held true. However, I did find myself buying a robust line-up of Wii games simply because they actually offered different experiences compared to what I could find on other platforms. A lot of these experiences weren't super impressive to me, but I still quite enjoyed them because they added much needed variety to a generation defined by its risk aversion. Having local co-op games was also frequently a highly useful feature for me, but the lack of quality online kind of canceled this out.
The handhelds are the platforms that impressed me the most. My last handheld before the DS/PSP was the original Gameboy, so I went into both of them with very low expectations, but what I found was that both offered me novel experiences I couldn't find elsewhere, and that often I enjoyed playing games on the platforms as much as I enjoyed games on consoles or my PC. The DS managed to have a robust line-up of games I wanted for almost the entire generation, and that holds true even today, and by the time I bought a PSP, I had a very similar experience as well. Both platforms are now facing localization problems, but given that they have been out for seven years and are now in their deathbeds, I'm not going to hold this against them.
So overall, I found the DS and PSP to be the systems that both exceeded my expectations and satisfied me the most, and I hope Nintendo and Sony keep in mind this generation that for many people, it's the games that offer something new and different that make handhelds valuable as opposed to the games that clone consoles. I certainly am looking forward to several console like experiences on handhelds, but I still want them to be console like experiences that are no longer (or rarely) explored on the other platforms I own. If they can do that, the 3DS and Vita will likely end up being the platforms that impress me the most next gen as well.
