I've been playing video games for... well, about 30 years. For a long time my experience was with consoles owned by friends. Most people I knew had a Master System or a Commodore 64 during the late 1980s. Later, Megadrives and Amigas became popular.
My first console was a Gameboy back in the early 1990s (it came with Tetris), closely followed by a SNES Super Mario All Stars pack. As a boy at this time in a not-wealthy family I had to make do with the pack in games, saving my pocket money at a rate of £1 a week to buy any new games. We're looking at a rate of one game per year, but I sure got to learn the few games I had to some great depth.
The following generation I left the Nintendo camp temporarily and got a PlayStation. I had a paper round at this point and remember my boss excitedly rambling about the new Sony console and how everyone should have one. It was the first console I ever bought for myself. I never owned a Nintendo 64 (at the time), though I have many happy memories of playing it with friends.
From the sixth generation on I was working full time so with each subsequent generation I basically had everything. My PS2 sat alongside a GameCube, Dreamcast and Xbox. My PS3 sits on top of my Xbox 360, while my Wii sits in the living room under the family TV. Don't even get me started on my (mostly Nintendo) handheld collection.
I decided a few years ago I was sick of consoles and their iterative upgrades every few years. Microsoft really dropped the ball with their ridiculous statements regarding always-on Kinect and blocking of pre-owned games. I foresee a future where digital content (something that makes me very sad) becomes the norm and disc drives are gone. This all conspired to making my decision to leave console gaming and focus on my Steam library. Yeah... somehow I feel different about digital game libraries on PC. I'll write about that another day.
Anyway. One day a couple of months ago I was browsing the local game shop, having saved about a quarter of what I wanted to spend on a decent gaming PC to last some years. I impulse purchased a Wii U. Truth is I've always had a soft spot for Nintendo's first party efforts, and almost without exception enjoy every new version of Super Mario or Legend of Zelda. What could I do then but purchase the only machine (forgetting for now Super Mario Run) that would let me play them?
I fell in love with the Wii U in an instant. Gorgeous graphics, some fantastic games (see my previous entry) and a nice controller in the Pro version reminded me why new console generations are so exciting.
Even as I quickly built my Wii U library I continued to save for my new PC. Then I had an urge to try the PlayStation 4. There was no spark in me for the Xbox One - thanks to Microsoft's dumb ideas in its development and thanks to the fact that PS3 had quickly replaced my 360 when I received it three years after I'd bought the Microsoft beast.
I've had the PS4 for about two months now and I am very glad I bought it. Clearly a step up from its forebear in terms of graphical power, it's also the little flourishes that excite me - such as more realistic character movements and the superb detail in character models and the considerably smoother framerates. Two generations ago you rarely saw a character with separate fingers - GTA San Andreas I'm looking at you!
Now there are limitations with modern consoles and their internal storage. Wii U's mere 32gb of flash storage is tons for save games, but cab quickly fill up if you frequent the E Shop. Nintendo classics are small, but Wii games can easily touch 8gb. It's a good thing the console plays Wii discs then, and that most Wii games are inexpensive and easy to find.
PlayStation 4 comes with a far heftier 512gb hard drive installed (1tb in later models). Unfortunately however the console requires you to install every single game into the hard drive before you can play. For some games this isn't such a problem - many indie games are quite small indeed. However many AAA titles are around the 50gb mark - and that's before game updates and DLC are installed. I'm sure a lot of that is lazy programming - GTA5 after all ran just fine on Xbox 360 from two DVDs (one installed, one used to run the game) and I don't believe the improved textures and extra songs in the PS4 version would use up an extra 35ish gb of space - or simply using numbers to impress people into making a purchase. I found that 7 disc games and 2 downloads (a PS Plus benefit) was enough to give me a full disc warning. Compared those 9 games to the 40+ PS3 discs (most of which of course aren't installed to the HDD), 53 PS3 games and 12 PS1 games installed with space remaining on that console's 500GB drive and you see we have a problem. I've since installed a 2TB drive, which is about half full with my now 22 disc and ~15 downloaded games - why oh why don't Sony offer a bigger drive as an option!?
As for the future... I don't doubt that Microsoft, and maybe their competitors, will try again later to remove the pre-owned market. A big part of my argument against digital content concerns the inability to sell on or lend your content. That and the fact that it can be taken away at any time - but more on that later. I can't say with certainty that I won't buy into the next generation of consoles (I can guarantee I will at some point invest in the Nintendo NX), but as soon as physical media becomes a thing of history, I will not be buying consoles any more.
It does sit a little uncomfortably with me that gaming has become such big business. Whilst there are many great games being made today (Doom, The Last of Us, Witcher for three examples of awesome recent games and series) there are also a lot of games made by men in suits to make money (in the interest of avoiding a flame war I'll refrain from naming any games I feel fall into this camp). The creation and enjoyment of games is a creative process, and unfortunately this has been sullied more and more as years go on. There's plenty still to enjoy if you can find it though - and I am as guilty of promoting this model as anyone else who has bought Super Mario Bros on every Nintendo console on which it's existed to download.
Thankfully I have a library of around 3000 games across many gaming systems from the past 3 decades to keep me occupied in my free time - that and a Steam library of 330 games that I will regain access to if I ever stop buying games for long enough to save for that PC. So if I ever do drop away from new systems in the future, I will be perfectly happy to enjoy what I have.
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