Games still came on disk so there wasn’t the madness of endless buggy updates (disks had one opportunity to be bug free so quality was at a higher standard) and internet connectivity was not guaranteed, so there was no way for micro transactions.
However, internet connectivity was available, so things like optional online play were still possible, as well as some basic user generated content.
Once PS3 and Xbox 360 came in picture, things changed slightly since they relied more heavily on their network services… albeit, PSN back then was free for online gameplay. These were on the same generation as Wii, but Wii was a winner for casual playing.
Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Gran Turismo, and GTA.
I'm guessing you mean GTA 3, but then we also had GTA Vice City... and GTA San Andreas. Which are all three in the top 5 selling games for the PS2.
That being said I recently got the Analog 3d with 4 controllers and theres something amazing about the speed at which u can boot and get into a 4 player game.
Six hardware threads, so the thread per subsystem model didn't really work. Instead you got the best results from a DAG of tasks submitted to a job stealing scheduler running on most of the CPU resources. But beside that, no little DSPs that you had to separate work out onto other than the GPU.
And it had the first consumer GPU to incorporate unified shaders (so vertex and pixel shaders ran on the same cores, dynamically scheduled to improve utilization).
They had SMT, but unlike every other implementation of SMT I’m aware of, memory stalls on one thread would stall both threads… which kind of defeats the primary purpose of SMT.
At least with the PS3’s Cell, the SPUs were designed to be esoteric on purpose. It seems like Xenon kind of just ended up being esoteric by accident. (Or maybe they ended up like that because Microsoft were cheating off Sony’s homework)
You've got the option of OG authenticity with CRT emulation (although I use a shader emulating a high-end analog RGB CRT so the effect is more subtle) or you can 'upgrade' games to looking and feeling quite modern yet without the modern cruft. Also want to give a nod to PS3 / X360 emulation as both have come a long way in the last ~18 months and I'm really enjoying working my way through a backlog of titles I never played back in the day.
Mind you, I broke my video game addiction shortly after that time-period - my last console was an Xbox 360 - and haven't got a firm grasp on what's come since.
everyone says that about their childhood :)
(And if I were to make an argument about a childhood console being peak, for me it'd be the 64 or GameCube!)
But I think the Wii was a singularly unique console because it brought a particular kind of casual gaming to the masses that no console before or after has been able to do. Looking back, it's wild that people wanted to buy a bunch of custom hardware to play Rock Band! And the Wiimotes are probably the best TV controllers ever made.
So, a ridiculous statement. :)
Games I currently play: SupermegaBaseball, Assetto Corsa (with wheel), Dirt series on gaming PC. Also various Mario etc games on Wii U.
Everyone says that about their childhood too :)
Sorry to disappoint, but I don't even know what a Wii looks like. I've always been using my computer to play games on.
The games were cool too.
These days, probably you could feed a video into Claude Code and have it spit out one which is pretty decent.
It removes the region lock and you can set the system language to english. The eShop was shutdown already so that doesn’t matter
Outside of a handful pf motionplus compatible games, there was no gyroscope. Everything relied on a 3axis accelerometer.
sonic_boom.jpeg.gif
The custom mkwii wiki has 17,000 articles https://www.mkwiiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
Eek my son is not gonna be happy about that