Game Console Tier List

before this is over I will be making some Fanboys mad and I'm going to start with a shot at Big Daddy red You could argue that Nintendo is the most important console maker of all time originally a trading card and toy company they found some initial success in gaming in the Midway space but it was the 1 million units of their first Home console the color TV series that locked in their Destiny too bad the thing a d and look I'm sorry but first generation consoles really don't hold up and while our ranking system will account for the lower expectations that Gamers would have had at the time kind of an opinions adjusted for inflation if you will at the end of the day a major consideration has to be historical importance aside how fun are the games today and the good news is that when we reach Nintendo's thirdd generation offering the answer becomes very in large part thanks to the inclusion of Hardware scrolling backgrounds look I know that doesn't sound like a huge deal but this is what platforming looks like on the competition start on the left jump over obstacle reach the right side of the screen rinse and repeat woohoo meanwhile on the nest look at him go wooohoo and upgraded cartridges would push its capabilities even further changing video games forever the famicom or family computer as it was known in Japan quickly took the crown for the bestselling console in in history and thanks to Nintendo's Savvy thirdparty publishing negotiations living room friendly branding and focus on content quality they would continue that success in the challenging North American Market in our minds the NES marks the end of console Gaming's infancy and the beginning of its childhood years it was the start of huge franchises like Final Fantasy The Legend of Zelda Metroid Mario and more and it was also affordable it's an A and the only reason is that as Innovative as they were most of its best games are essentially obsolete every franchise that I just mentioned got a bigger sequel on Nintendo's very next console that was better in almost every way and we're going to get to that after this quick message from our sponsor Ridge hey is that a boring old bfold wallet in your pocket are you just happy to see the alternative ridges sleek and highquality wallets well in any case go to the link below and use code lineus to save 10% off your purchase and get free shipping the Super Nintendo Entertainment System didn't change the formula much but its more refined technology gave developers a platform to focus on what's most important making great Gams and this was clear right out of the gate with F0 a flashy look at the future using the 3D power of mode 7 and Super Mario World which is still the best 2D Mario game and the hits just kept coming with a lot library of games that ranges from still playable to contenders for best ever in the RPG and 2D platforming genres there were some turds too of course but Super Nintendo is our first s tier and uh unfortunately Nintendo's last for a while with competition ramping up on all sides and pirate flags flying high Nintendo doubled down on their wal Garden philosophy leading to the big error that along with several others would tank this generation for them choosing proprietary cartridges over CDs I get it Nintendo's lucrative licensing agreements were easier to control when they ran the production line but cartridges cost many times as much and hold only a fraction of the amount of data this resulted in developers making serious compromises to run on Nintendo's 64-bit machine which is a shame because the raw performance of the N64 was actually at the top of its generation it just wouldn't be fully unlocked until decades later by Community modders sometimes limitations breed creativity though and the N64 ended up with a very strong library at least if you focus on its goats okarina of time and Mario 64 still come up in those conversations and most first party titles on the system are or at least were outstanding even if Yoshi got done kind of dirty the problem is that the good third party games for the console were rare get it and we'd need to see a deeper library for a higher placement it's going to be a b the good news is that Nintendo learned for the GameCube they worked on their relationships ensuring that it was easy to develop for and they even chose Optical media albeit at a silly smaller size so the old purple lunchbox would end up with a more complete library with some entries in Long running franchise even considered their best like smash melee Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4 okay the controller sucked Donkey Kong for pretty much any game that wasn't specifically designed for it but at least it wasn't as alien or flaccid as its older sibling B it's a b it's just too bad that nobody cared at the time leading Nintendo to a major shift in strategy that persists today to avoid competing head-to-head with Microsoft and Sony's HD systems Nintendo basically repackaged the cube into an overclock rectangle with some extra RAM and launched it alongside a motion controller that by the way also was originally designed for the GameCube at the time the Wii felt a little bit disappointing considering its revolution code name but if you felt that way you were probably a real gamer because for everyone else it was something else it was fun it would be easy to dismiss the console based on the mountain of wiggle wiggle shovelware that was published for for it but it was Nintendo's first backwards compatible home system and its early lead in sales incentivized thirdparty developers to put in the work to build out its Library even if the ports weren't the best ones available now sadly for emulation and eShop enthusiasts many of its most interesting titles are trapped there because of the novel control scheme but we are still putting the Wii on the a tier for all the retirement homes that are still bowling and golfing unfortunately like the people in those homes the wi gimmicks did get kind of old and its successor was probably Nintendo's lowest point it had more power than the Aging 7th gen Hardware that Nintendo launched it against but it also had confusing branding and a quasi portable controller screen gimmick that most games completely failed to take advantage of not helping matters new first party games were slow to show up due to a focus on HD remastered which led to slow sales which led to poor thirdparty support again it did get some unironically great games including kicking off Mario Kart 8's decade of Nintendo refusing to give us another Mario Kart but today there are fewer and fewer reasons to leave an unmodded Wii U plugged in other than its ability to Output older Wii games via HDMI we're going to give it a c luckily the switch immediately switched up the conversation delivering on the hybrid handheld Promises of the Wii U and putting Nintendo back on top it launched with what is arguably the best game from one of the strongest gaming franchises ever and has followed it up with Banger after Banger after Banger the enormous install base has prompted developers to move Heaven and Earth to shrink their games to work on it resulting in sometimes a pretty good experience especially if you consider that the console is little more than an Nvidia Shield tablet with custom firmware and controllers it is underpowered compared to the machines of today and even the machines of its time but it is a great way to pack Mario and the Gang into the screen safe slot of your LTT backpack LTT store.com we are giving the switch our second s for revitalizing the handheld gaming Market as for the future it remains to be seen whether Nintendo can retain the switch's momentum against the rise of PC handhelds and the rumors of Sony's return not to mention Microsoft's entry but I'm hopeful surely the good bad good bad pattern can't continue speaking of things that couldn't continue Sega and oh boy do they ever have weirder Origins than I realized the Japanese giant was founded by Americans who sold slot machines to US Army bases which is why they were at one point called s Iris GS weird forado by the way but okay sega's first Home console like Nintendo's was designed to play stripped down arcade ports and the sg1000 was in that sense better than the color TV with interchangeable cartridges and a fair bit more power which is neat but the MK3 or as you might know it in the west the Master System is where sega's sales went parabolic we are giving the sg1000 a d which won't surprise anyone and we're giving the Master System a c which will surprise folks in the regions where it would go on to have an exceptionally long life with some kind of impressive peripherals everywhere else though it suffered from its focus on arcade style games and sega's notoriously bad habit of supplanting their systems a little too quickly just 3 years after the Master System Sega launched the mega drive or Genesis for us yanker Doodles powered by the Motorola 68,000 a familiar 16-bit chip that powered countless other arcade games and home computers Sega brought blast processing to the party which is a real thing we think no one is 100% sure what it was but most likely it referred to dma or the ability to directly drive a CRT through Brute Force regardless of the vdps pallet limitations it also had a more powerful CPU than the Super Nintendo which arrived two whole years later and thanks to some clever design choices it even had backwards compatibility with Master System games not that it needed it the Genesis has a phenomenal library that is undeniably sega's best even beyond the Blue Blur there's a huge variety of games designed to appeal to a slightly more mature audience thanks to sega's looser thirdparty ecosystem and many Genesis games just straight up play better than their SNES competition even if they usually look a little worse I wanted so badly to put it in the S tier but before we can rank it we need to talk about some of the truly baffling moves that Sega made late on in its life cycle first they launched a CD add-on that was actually a mild success allowing its aging 80s Hardware to push past the newer SNES in some key ways like improved Sprite scaling as well as CD quality audio and the ability to play interactive FMV video games if you're into those but then as this sort of nextg stop Gap Sega designed and launched the 32 X add-on around the same time that their completely nextg full 32-bit console the Saturn would launch in Japan making matters much worse Sega surprise launched the console 4 months early in North America only for Sony to immediately counter by announcing the PlayStation would be just 299999 so if you're confused trying to follow exactly what I'm talking about here imagine how consumers felt at the time what did did I just buy and what is this new thing Sega in one stroke burnt the Goodwill that they had fought so hard to claim from Nintendo and suddenly they were behind by a lot Genesis a as for the Saturn it was a complete bust everywhere but Japan which I guess is what happens when you go from we're going to make the best darn 2D system for True arcade 2 oh my God here comes Sony and they've got 3D now in hindsight the Saturn has a pretty incredible library of hidden gems that I would highly recommend that you check out but in the 9s when 3D was the new hotness developers just couldn't be ared to learn its eccentric for chip architecture and sega's penultimate effort would pave the way for the company's overall exit from the console Hardware space we're giving it a c for come on it at least deserved a chance the Saturn is the most under ated system that Sega has ever made maybe even by us and I'm saying that knowing that most people would think that award goes to sega's final effort the Dreamcast with a modem for Network play built right in and a highquality VGA capable output it was truly ahead of its time and between great ports to the system not to mention a slew of phenomenal new games the Dreamcast would get off to the strongest start yet in video game history that is until a big old black DVD player that we're going to get to in a bit don't worry arrived holding its pink slip Less Than 3 years after its launch Sega announced that Not only was the Dreamcast headed out behind the barn their entire console business was going with it Sega we salute you for your service and we're giving the Dreamcast a strong B for being something that is still worth dusting off to this day the good news is that in the same year that Sega admitted defeat a new Contender would pick up their torch Microsoft was looking to make a little gaming machine of their own and what's cool is you can still see some of that Sega DNA in the original Windows 2000 light machine six face buttons a focus on network play and even rumored Dreamcast compatibility though that never came to fruition in spite of the fact that it used similar Windows CE and directex development tools I mean sure the Xbox compared to the full custom chips that the competition was using was basically a glorified Pentium 3 computer with a big controller like what were they thinking big but it was the most powerful system of its time meaning that it often had the best version of multiplatform titles not to mention a solid library of exclusives this is before Microsoft settled into their safe spaces of Halo gears and Forza and they pushed weird character Platformers and Epic RPGs that competing machines just couldn't even hope to run the Xbox was off to a rocking start a tier and that was just the beginning Just 4 years later came the Xbox 2 sorry 360 with easily the best online service and Games Delivery of that generation a modest entry price and developer friendly Hardware the 360 was a noons gaming machine for gamers where pretty much any mult platform title would arrive either first or better or both even franchises that had been Sony exclusive started uh showing up on the Microsoft machine I mean sure it doesn't have a huge list of its own exclusives but there are some doozies in there and Microsoft's big push in Japan gave the 360 the best Japanese library of any Xbox system can someone please remaster Lost Odyssey For Crying Out Loud reliability issues aside the three 360 is Microsoft's finest and is an easy s for the countless nights of Halo 3 that kept Millions from proper rest sadly though Microsoft would pull a big dumb and try to make their nextg Xbox one the one device for everything it had HDMI input for cable box pass through mandatory connect integration for voice and motion controls and worst of all they angered Gamers right out of the gate by simultaneously announcing an always online DRM scheme that in hindsight seems pretty similar to where we ended up but I guess people weren't ready to hear it this poor messaging combined with underpowered hardware and a higher price contributed to a major loss to the PS4 which had outsold it 2 to one by the end of 2017 and with Sony on solid footing again after their early PS3 symbols PlayStation exclusives started taking a laps around Microsoft's struggling Xbox franchises to Microsoft's credit the Xbox team started dialing back the cable box connect of the machine and did a much better job of supporting their Windows friends but outside of gears and Forza it was kind of a wasteland Microsoft clearly understood their advantage though in building cloud and data center services and followed up their successful Xbox Live subscription with game pass an all you can eat gaming subscription that frankly Just Smokes the competition for Value unfortunately this was too late in the cycle and they knew it the one gets a c for I wish I was playing as Master Chief not Jameson lock which brings us to the ninth generation Xbox or boxes for the first time we got two versions with wildly different performance characteristics and for the second time we got to focus on Services rather than games the series is continue Microsoft's trend of crossplatform play and backwards compatibility which is great but also continue Microsoft's trend of especially the latter being kind of spotty Microsoft has gone on an aggressive game Studio gobling spree which theoretically should lead to some really exciting box mover titles but we're kind of still waiting to see them and apparently so are Microsoft's customers with combined sales of the two Xbox serieses falling well behind the PS5 now it's still a bit early to give the Xbox series a definitive rank but in spite of its poor sales we're actually leaning towards a B for best darn gaming PC that you can buy for 300 or 500 bucks or sometimes even less on sale we'll have links below for the serieses and the other consoles that you can still buy but before we rank the rest of those I want to go back in time to some things that you can't buy in 1977 Nolan Bushnell started Chuck E cheeses that franchise gets an F for its crappy pizza and its creepy rat I promise I'm going somewhere with this 5 years earlier he also co-founded Atari maker of pong C and the VCS or as many Now call it the 2600 it was one of the most important machines for getting games into people's homes even if the software feels painfully primitive now we almost gave it an a for arguably most important console of all time but we're going with a B for best not play this unless you have an academic interest as for the 5200 it came 5 years later with barely any Tech Improvement and a non-existent game Library meaning that we've got our first F tier here folks quite you as for the 7800 it gets a c and that's thanks only to its backwards compatibility with the 2600 as for the Jaguar hard to program for expens Ive and once again no game Library that's another F and that was the end of their console making days sorry Atari I'll see you later now for some of atari's competitors like the channel f is it for fun or is it for its ranking it was the first proper Home console with a real processor and ROM carts but other than that there's not much else to say about it we're going to go with a d Magnavox Odyssey that thing came out in 1972 good Lord that's 5 years before the 26 for that alone it gets a c most Odyssey 2 games have exclamation points in their titles so d uh the intellivision Mattel's only console other than one built around scanning rfad cards we're going to give that one a c and uh the Connecticut leather company yes that is what kico stands for kico vision was a technical Juggernaut compared to its contemporaries and uh it gets a c as well enough of that though let's jump forward a decade the PC engine SLT Turbo Graphics 16 was mostly ignored in the west but in Japan outsold the Mega Drive and had a robust library of games that make good use of the CD add-on we're giving it a b the Neo Geo was super cool it literally brought an arcade machines power into your house and all it cost you was nearly the same as an arcade machine be anyway as for the Philips CDI that cost over $2,000 in today's money it's yours my friend as long as you have enough rubies f f f f f f f after for the Amiga cd32 this one I don't know it's possible it's amazing but at these kinds of prices for working units I'm just never going to know um f for get collectors finally rounding out our others list we've got the 3dio and it's going to crawl into a d for having a few decent games and ports even though it was a huge uge waste of money for both consumers and for its creators talk about PlayStation all right I was almost there anyway pcfx D there the origin of the PlayStation is truly a wild tale of corporate backstabber and poor business sense through its early years Sony was a big player in electronics and music and had become one of Japan's biggest exporters their collaboration with Phillips on the invention of the compact disc was revolutionizing the media world but it would take Maverick engineer Ken karagi to finally turn its R&D engine toward video gaming by forging a backroom deal to manufacture the super Nintendo's sound chip this sound chip led to a second much more important deal with Nintendo one for Sony to produce a cdrom version of the super famicom called the PlayStation now as you may already know that deal did not go as planned and depending on who you ask you'll get a very different answer to the question of who screwed over who on the one hand Sony was the bigger company and had been using its muscle to impose very unfavorable contract terms including sole International rights to every game developed for the system and full control of Licensing for every music and film deal on the other hand Nintendo had a history of tight and exclusive control over their consoles they were worried about Sony using them as the stepping stone to a dominant position in video games so they secretly sent emissaries to negotiate a more favorable Arrangement elsewhere one single day then after Sony publicly announced their joint console at CES 1991 Nintendo slapped them in the face by abandoning both the contract and the years of co-development they announced a partnership with Sony's collaborator on the CD format Phillips and Sony was split on what to do next some of the old guard were looking for an excuse to retreat from the video game Space anyway While others favored just bending the knee to Nintendo and trying to salvage something from the original deal there were even talks with Sega of America about developing a console together with them but that idea was killed when the CEO of Sega apparently said that's a stupid idea Sony doesn't know how to make Hardware they don't know how to make software either why would we want to do this hindsight really is a hell of a drug folks as for karagi I think we all know where he stood on this he was still seeing red from his fresh embarrassment at CES and wanted to build it himself importantly he had a key Ally the president of Sony partially obfuscated what he was doing from the Sony board by moving his team from headquarters to Sony Music Entertainment Japan and while they worked some key things happened the success of Virtua Fighter confirmed that 3D Graphics was the way forward and the failure of the 3D and the Jaguar proved that their console would either live or die by third- Party Support so a team from Sony's record label was sent to hundreds of Studios to Garner support and their pitch it was simple but it was effective they promised easy development and fair promotion of first party and thirdparty games over 250 teams showed interest and the rest is history just 2 days after their North American launch Sony had outsold the Sega Saturn's entire 5mon run in the UK it out sold sega's console 3 to one and by the end of their first year Sony had taken a whopping 20% of the American video game Market they were selling so many games that they co-inventor of the CD needed to build new CD printing facilities to keep up with the outrageous demand and even when Nintendo's fifth gen competitor showed up 2 years later powered by Superior 3D horsepower not to mention iconic IPS the Playstation only picked up more steam by the end of its life in 2006 the PlayStation had sold over 102 million units more than double the sales of the N64 and the Saturn combined and a huge part of that success is its enormous library of games it's got more games than any console that came before or any console that came since reaching a final count of 7,918 titles and it wasn't just quantity either I mean it's easy to find knocks against the PS1 like the atrocious loading times but what you cannot argue with is the depth of its Library not to mention its appeal to Gamers who were some of them growing out of Nintendo's stubbornly familyfriendly approach it's an S tier for two reasons one because we didn't have a higher rank and two two because if we ranked anything else I would first be murdered by my staff and then dragged through the street by the rest of you now Sony knew the secret to the ps2's early success was going to be its Great Value it offered backwards compatibility with the PS1 thanks to using its older brother's CPU as an IO controller and more importantly it was one of the cheapest DVD players available so even though the ps2's library might have taken a few years to fill out due to its somewhat exotic architecture there were strong reasons to buy it from day one and buy it we did the PS2 sales almost immediately choked out the Dreamcast and would come close to tripling the sales of sega's machine the GameCube and the original Xbox combined the PS2 is still the most selling EST game console of all time though the switch is nipping at its heels and by the end of its decade plus of support it had over 2500 games to play with more in the goat conversation than probably any other machine the PS2 is an easy s tier and based on our rating system is the number one console of all time oh so that means it's downhill from here then right that's right here comes Sony's first speed bump in their efforts to replicate the ps2's success by making it once again a trojan horse for the latest Optical media and fullon backwards compatibility by stuffing a PS2 into it not to mention the fact that they used hard to develop for supercomputer chip the PS3's initial asking price ended up being a major friction point for consumers making matters worse the launch title lineup was weak and ports to the system were generally inferior to those on the Xbox 360 so for years the PS3 looked like it was the clear loser of the Seventh Generation a first for Sony however eventually Sony Studios would figure out how to max maximize the performance of its unusual cell processor and would produce some impressive exclusives helping to undo at least some of that damage actually a lot of it I mean if I was told that I could never play a video game again unless it was on a PS3 I would still have plenty to play much of which is pretty goated but it can't be an S let's call it an a luckily though Sony would learn from some of its mistakes and the PS4 would be a non-nonsense gaming first Oasis in Microsoft's weird always watching cable TV World Sony Studios immediately got to work and there wasn't a year maybe 2013 and 2019 that didn't have several games that made Gamers sit up and go shoot I'm going to need a PS4 now eventually we got a lot of those titles on PC but if N64 is a b and PS3 is an a PS4 has got to be an S and this is a special highlighted by the perception or maybe it's just us that Sony's 9th gen white monolith feels more like a PS4 more prer I mean it's a more powerful but still x86 gaming focused computer it's got full compatibility with PS4 games which is great and we're only in year four with a pretty strong library of titles but we can't help feeling a little desperate for some risk taking here instead of just more rehashing of the working formulas I also don't love the direction they've taken their subscription Services backwards compatibility not only is severely lacking but it's locked behind reoccurring payments and Cloud saves really you guys who do you think you are Nintendo you wish a tier that is unless something big changes like if I stopped doing Segways to sponsors Squarespace creating your own website doesn't have to be difficult luckily with Squarespace it isn't they're Allin one platform makes it easy to get your website up and running quickly designing with her fluid engine site Builder is easy also start with a template and customize every detail imaginable with drag and drop technology for desktop or mobile you can also use their asset library to manage all your files from one Central Hub and use them across the Squarespace platform with squarespace's analytic insights you can see what's working well and What needs a little TLC and if you need help Squarespace has got your back with helpful guides and a 24-hour support team 7 days a week head to squarespace.com SL LT and get 10% off today now we know you guys are going to have different opinions of the best consoles and games so we want to know what your favorites are in the comments and if you like tier lists hey why don't you go check out the one where we ranked every generation of Nvidia gpus

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,623,738

Keywords: gaming, teir list, tear list, gaming tier list, console tier list, best gaming console, ps5, ps4, playstation 2, plyastation, xbox, xbone, xbox one, nintnedo, nintendo 64, best ninento console, best nintendo console, worst console of all timek, worst gaming console, best video game console, best xbox ever

Id: SKIXCPn2xB0

Length: 31min 45sec (1905 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024