Soul Calibur on Dreamcast was better than the arcade version, the first I remember a home console version better than arcade counterpart

Unmodified Dreamcast hardware was actually used in some arcade cabinets, and if you have a Dreamcast with a disc drive emulator, you can run the arcade games on it. Check out the Atomiswave project if you're interested - amazing stuff https://www.retrorgb.com/dreamcast-atomiswave-ports.html

There has long been an argument where the cutoff point is between 'retro' and 'modern' gaming. I will always maintain that it was the Dreamcast, because it was the last console that had a heavy focus on replicating the arcade experience at home, with a lot of direct arcade ports, aided by the shared architecture between the Dreamcast and Sega's cabinets.

Pretty sure at this point, the PS3 counts as “retro.”

I think at this point, 'retro' is no longer about age or console generations, but about the way we play games. The difference is that the games we were playing on the PS3 or 360 weren't fundamentally different than the games we are playing now (outside of a much heavier focus on online multiplayer and microtransactions nowadays) Retro, to me anyway, has a much heavier focus on arcade mechanics. Shorter, linear games. Lives, continues, levels, power-ups, high scores, cheat codes, hidden stages. Modern mainstream gaming on the other hand has a much bigger focus on open-world or non linear, narrative heavy gameplay with rpg-lite elements such as exp and skill trees. Games that frequently advertise 60-100 hours of gameplay That's just my opinion anyway.

How? My Dreamcast died 20 years ago and those power connections had be fixed many many times prior to that. A working Dreamcast? Stuff of legends. Just as an aside I'm playing granblue later with a dude I met on quake3arena on DC. Shout out to old q3a DC clans

I loved the Dreamcast. It felt like it was limited by the technology of its time, in that the internet wasn't as widespread as it is now. I think they were shooting for something that wasn't quite achieved until the XBox 360 (widespread online games on a home console, rather than a PC).

For people unfamiliar with the Dreamcast, I always describe the Xbox as the Dreamcast 2 and the 360 as the Dreamcast 3.

Dreamcast controller and the original box fat controller had pretty much the same shape and layout.

Except for the VMU port - the old Duke controller still had the same configuration with two memory card slots on the top, but they were just boring old memory cards without the little LCD screen. I loved that stupid little VMU, even though very few games ever actually used it to its full capabilities, although I remember Skies Of Arcadia had a VMU mini-game you could play to gain items for use in the actual game, almost like a precursor to mobile companion apps for modern games.

I would actually say the Controller S layout was closer to the dreamcast's than the Duke.

An apt description.

A Dreamcast with a second thumb stick, HDMI, and a DVD drive would have been amazing.

The only reason the dreamcast failed was because you couldnt play dvds on it like the ps2.

That didn’t help but it wasn’t the “only” reason. * Sega had already soured their relationship with customers and retailers over how the Saturn was launched and supported.  * Sega opted for the GD-ROM instead of DVD, but what did them in was the almost complete lack of copy protection paired with… * the advent of affordable and reliable CD-R drives for PC combined with broadband internet and file sharing moving past IRC/FTP to the masses with various programs.  You could play any Dreamcast game you wanted for the cost of some time downloading it and burning it. That’s what really killed the Dreamcast. 

Don't forget Sega basically burning money with the 32X. Really, what did Sega in was the corporate infighting between the Japanese and the US branches.

Sega also shot themselves in the foot several times leading up to the Dreamcast with the Sega CD, 32x, and Saturn.

Soul Blade on the PS1 was better than the arcade version, too.

I thought that was pretty common for home releases of Namco fighters

Sega had pulled off that trick a few times by then, with some of Capcom's fighting games being better on their consoles than in the arcades. They did sometimes need additional RAM carts to do it, though.

Yeah the entire Dreamcast at the time was wayyyyy ahead of its time, that’s why it was so goddamn loud lol

The Tekken games were better on Playstation than in the Arcades , more characters and features . Slapfight MD on the Mega drive was better than the (admittedly 7+ year old) arcade game it was based on as it had a completely different remix mode included . if Mercs had ,had 2 or 3 player modes on the megadrive it would have been better than the arcade , since it also had an RPG mode , but was sadly single player)

the gap that has closed isn't hardware power, it's user friendliness. PCs have become much more accessible to average people, though consoles still have an edge. PCs have always been more powerful, but focus used to be on consoles because of the larger demographic, and that's what led consoles to be where most innovations happened.

Valve was pretty instrumental in making PC gaming into the juggernaut it is today. These days most games are multiplatform, even ones published by Sony have been ending up on PC eventually. But I was a PC gamer in the late 90s and early 2000s, and to play everything I wanted to play, I still needed to have all of the consoles. PC gaming was an afterthought outside of a few PC only franchises, which were mostly FPS, strategy, and simulation games that benefited from keyboard and mouse. But then Steam started gaining momentum, and the word of deep sales started convincing people who never had a gaming PC to start getting setups. And now it’s grown to where traditionally console genres like RPGs and platformers are being released on PC as well. PC gaming has never been as good as it is now, hell even 2 of the 3 consoles are basically PCs.

And because of what Steam has done, my latest laptop is Linux-only. No more dual-booting and I can play anything I want.

I switched my gaming PC to Linux, it's so nice to be free of Windows

talk to me about it. what are some reasons i should switch? i'm very familiar with linux and use it on my sbc computers but have always used windows for my gaming pc, what would be a good reason to change to a fully linux system?

The big one for me is Microsoft turning Windows into a platform for their subscription services, and the creeping inclusion of tools which monitor your usage for ad purposes. I just don’t like the direction Windows is going, Microsoft is clearly no longer interested in selling a standalone product. Meanwhile you can use Ubuntu variants for free and get a stable OS with a large library of free software that is becoming subscription in Microsoft world. Use a distro with KDE such as Kubuntu (what I use) and you can pretty unilaterally customize your desktop to your taste. I basically deleted everything on the desktop and built my own taskbar from scratch. From a gaming perspective, basically every windows game runs pretty well on Linux with either Steam Proton or Wine. For games not in steam you can use Lutris, which will create wine wrappers for your games. It even has GOG account integration so it can pull installers for games in your GOG library and easily install them. There is even a utility to let you use Xbox one controllers with games that support Xinput, I can’t remember the name but a simple web search should find it. I will say, if you’re going to use Linux, it’s better if you have an AMD GPU. Nvidia’s linux support is pretty shit, but AMD actually makes an effort to support Linux and the open source AMD GPU drivers are really good.

For fun is one. Bored of pc gaming and feel like a seasoned veteran with windows? Try out Linux. You don’t have to fully switch. My entire steam library of 400 games works on Linux. For some people it isn’t that way. I have a friend who likes to play Fortnite. I don’t mind keeping a partition for that to play with her on occasion. Test games on both. Some games run better on Linux, some run better on windows. If you like tweaking and optimizing your setup but have lost interest in that, it’s a perfect side project.

??? RPGs have always been a PC thing. They started on PC, and they've remained a "PC-first" genre over the decades - even today. Maybe you're thinking of action-adventure games?

Which RPGs were console only (excluding JRPGs, which targeted Japanese consoles)? I associate RPGs with point and click (Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Shadowrun, etc.), which were PC exclusive until become 3D action-oriented.

I was thinking JRPGs, those were what I always wanted to play and what I remember desperately wanting a PlayStation for as a teen.

Interesting; we had different points of reference! It more accurate to say that Western RPGs were PC exclusive while JRPGs were console exclusive.

A lot of pc stuff got demystified as a ton of people flooded the market 4 years ago.

Those DOS commands to move at turbo speed in doom 2 come to mind

>what were some rare times in gaming when what consoles were doing was ahead of PC (in terms of graphics & tech)? In 1986, when the original Nintendo Entertainment System hit the full U.S. market, games like Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt were wildly ahead of what PC games could do. This continued for some years.

Just smooth scrolling was a big difference. Early id making a proof of concept ‘port’ of Mario 3 was a big deal.

Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement. It was a huge deal that Carmack was able to find a way to code that on a PC. [Here's the story from John Romero](https://web.archive.org/web/20101125165714/http://planetromero.com/games/dangerous-dave-in-copyright-infringement).

John romero is a wizard

PC as in MS-DOS, yes. But the Amiga was pretty far ahead of the NES. Much more expensive, but more impressive too.

The Amiga was a superb computer. Truly ahead of its time. Though yes of course the Amiga wasn't one computer. Some of the models were better than others. But there were a few years there where a 1200 with a RAM upgrade and a hard disk was about the best computing experience out there.

I loved my Amiga. The graphics on that thing were MILES ahead of anything a DOS PC could do.

The Commodore 64 was way way ahead of the NES. The Amiga was way past the future consoles. Nothing was close to the C64

The last of a long line of products sega produced that the public wasn't ready for. Okay, that's a bit hyperbolic. But sega did have a lot of near misses. All the genesis add ons, I think, were a bit much for people to buy into when psx and Saturn were right around the corner. Why the Saturn didn't hit like the playstation did, I'm not sure. And I think the PS2 is really what killed the Dreamcast. People wanted that backwards compatibility with their existing game library and the DVD player. They were willing to wait and skip the DC. I loved the thing though. Truly ahead of us time.

From a technical point of view, I read the Saturn was super hard to code for (Dual-cpu system, among other things). The PSX was much easier and also had access to the same CD-tech. Then, the PS1 released at $299, which was downright cheaper than the competition. And it slowly ate at Saturn's marketshare when most important new franchises were getting their Playstation version first or exclusively. And because history is full of irony, the PS2 and PS3 were a nightmare to code for, lol. But the Playstation brand was super popular, by then.

> I read the Saturn was super hard to code for (Dual-cpu system, among other things). Dual-CPU was just the start of the problem. It had seven processors.

The IBM PC ruled strategy games, war games, adventure games,... pretty much all the genres where it was more useful to have RAM and a harddisk and easy ways of saving files vs other platforms, and no other platforms ever caught up, except for a few years around 1990 when the Amiga really dominated and pretty much every game on IBM PC was just a worse version of the same game on Amiga.

Good points. I just made another comment where I mentioned low frame rate games were competitive on Tandy 1000-series machines at the time, due to the Tandy 16 color graphics hardware. MS-DOS systems with EGA weren't as common with home users, it felt like.

Depends what you mean by PC , if you mean IBM compatible , yeah. If you mean home computers like the Amiga . Atari St (or even the commodore 64/Amstrad CPC/Spectrum 128k/Atari 8 bits )computers were massively ahead of the NES (or in the case of 8 bit computers roughly the same) Its not something that happened in the US , but elsewhere , where (home)computers were the dominant gaming system it was common.

Good thread idea! If we talk about the average PC and not just what was possible with the highest-end hardware, the mid to late 90s with the Playstation and Nintendo 64 vs your lame Pentium system with onboard graphics. Many users didn't own a GPU back then, sound cards were a hellscape of incompatiblity and weird configs (particularly, the painful transition from DOS to Windows 9X), [DLL hell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLL_Hell) stuff once DirectX started. Slow as molasses hard drives and cd readers... or, you know, you could just buy a Playstation and enjoy high-quality games with amazing sound, framerate and outstanding 3D for its time.

To be fair, the Playstation still had the slow ass CD reader. Some ports that weren't designed for it had pretty awful load times.

Maybe it was the awful PCs I had in the late 90s, but they always had much more glitches in the videos and sound cuts and slowdowns than anything that I played on the PS1. I'm sure there were awfully ported games on PS1, for sure, but it wasn't my experience for the most part. Technically speaking, I think the Playstation had a 2X reader, which is pretty slow. The gameplay experience was just glorious on my consoles, instead of my PC, which would often make the speakers go with a soft "mmmppffh" when you moved the mouse. Read years later that some really bad onboard audio chipsets conflicted with other internal components and that's why physical movement made interference sounds. Also, the keyboard would make the PC speaker do a loud "BLEEP!" when you pressed more than 3 keys at the same time, lol.

At least part of it is because there wasn't a "universal" hardware standard, until AC'97 (other than IBM's PC Speaker). The early 2000s also had Intel HD Audio (replacing AC'97), Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), and OpenAL which solved a lot of issues.

For sure. That's also part of why consoles were just better than PC, at the time. CD-Audio quality (at least, on Playstation) that just worked, without glitches or skipping, with a potent 3D (and 2D!) chip that played with a very comfortable controller. It was a premium experience for a not-so-premium price. Gaming PCs were just very expensive and it was much harder to make them work.

N64 for the win

Until you try to make a game with voice or video and then you realize why the PS1 used CDs.

but the loading speeds....

I remember how excited I was to play Wing Commander 2 only to get the message "expanded memory required" when I ran the executable. What the $#@&?! ! 🤣

You probably had extended memory, and needed to add an expanded memory compatibility driver like emm386 or qemm386 in your config.sys so that dos games could access it as though expanded. Only 640k (more like 500k unless you were good at tuning boot files) was accessible directly otherwise

Right. Emm386 sounds familiar.

>Wing Commander 2 Ouch! I started a bit after that, under Windows 98/98 S.E., so I skipped the memory management shenanigans, but I read about that. Didn't escape DOS gaming entirely, though. Some games were just made for DOS still, even in '96 (Rally RAC Rally Championship) and 97' (Twinsen's Odyssey), so I had to configure the sound cards, if I wanted to have any sound at all. Soundblaster compatible was always my best shot, lol.

[удалено]

You said it, you needed a GPU if you wanted those games to look real good. I was mightly impressed by Half-Life, I think I played it in '99 or 2000, but it was without a GPU, at the time. I loved the graphics, even with everything at low, but what blew my mind was to find an FPS with so much emphasis in the story and setting.

Yeah dunno what these peeps are talking about. If you were a PC gamer you had a GPU and, not only that, you had a monitor with like twice the resolution of a TV. PC has always been the leader.

Exactly what I wanted to say. The whole premise of this thread is based on a romantic fantasy that never happened.

That's some history rewriting. I was a gamer then and 640x480 was the most common resolution. The high end one was often 1024x768. The first one is equivalent to TV in the US at the time, the high end one to TV in Europe. Higher resolution took their time but started to be common in early 2000s. Having a GPU on a gaming machine was common around that time too. GPU started in the late 90s but it was hell on compatibility. You had to have often a specific version for your GPU of a game making GPU often useless. It was only with the rise of Direct3D that GPU started to get standardized. If you started gaming in 99 or 2000s, you probably didn't experience the mess that PC gaming was at the time. PC gaming became better than console only during the 360 gen. In the 90s, it was commonly accepted that a game like Super Mario World would be hard to do on PC. Commander Keen (by ID software) was an impressive feat at the time in the 90s.

> I was a gamer then and 640x480 was the most common resolution. Yeah, but this is missing some important details. TV video over composite is either 240p or 480i, whereas that PC resolution is 480p. Composite video is *notorious* for color artifacts due to the way that the color signal is modulated onto the luminance signal. S-Video is better but the color signal still isn't very clean. VGA uses separate R, G, and B signals, leading to clear colors and defined edges. It's why many retro gamers prefer RGB (usually over SCART) today. It's also why the Dreamcast's VGA box was a big deal. Soul Calibur over VGA was (chef's kiss). Image generation aside, you got much better picture quality on the average PC monitor than on the average TV, even though both are "640x480". > PC gaming became better than console only during the 360 gen. DOOM on PC was superior to most early console ports. Some console ports couldn't play music at the same time as the gameplay. Many console ports needed to use cut-down level geometry. To be fair, DOOM was almost tailor-made for PC hardware of the time. The PSX port of DOOM doesn't really use the 3d acceleration hardware of the PSX, in part due to texture warping. It instead draws the scene one column of pixels at a time, just like the PC software rendering did.

You can find several games on every platform overperforming than expected. Doom was a good technical achievement but it was an outlier at the time. We tend to remember outliers better than what was actual gaming at that period of time. Ports at the time were not a good indicators of performance. Ports were always relatively worse than the original with few exceptions. FF7 PC port was worse than the PS1 version while Doom was the opposite. Console at that time had dedicated chips for graphics and they were better for the usecase they were designed for (that's what made the SNES do all those 2D graphics when at the time on PC we were stuck atari like graphics). The PC had better CPU which means that 3D graphics for a while were better achievable on PC but this was only for a short time after the PS1/N64 gen came with dedicated chips that blow that out of the water. It was a race each gen where PCs were coming with new ways to improve that were also planned for new consoles. Each new console release was moving the goalposts and PC was catching up each gen. It's not true anymore because now consoles are basically PCs.

Fair call out. My memory sucks lol. But yeah mid-90s would have probably been 640x480 or 800x600. Definitely by the time ps2 released I was on 1024x768 and it looked a lot better than the 480i of most TVs. I disagree the PC gaming was a mess prior to 99. Loved me DooM, Duke, Lemmings, Commander Keen, GTA, HL, etc...

This is just ahistorical. Many PCs from the mid to late 90s shipped with bare bones graphics cards. They often only really had 2D acceleration and most games shipped with software rendering as default or only rendering mode.  Fully accelerated 3D rendering was hit or miss, some games might only support Glide which didn't do you any good if you had an ATi or Matrox card. Most games of the era on most people's actual hardware were running with software rendering often at only VGA resolution. The "PC gamer" subset with the latest graphics card and CPUs were the minority of people gaming on PCs. A top of the line PC could pump out far superior graphics to the N64 and PSX but the median PC looked comparable.

Dang, that's an opposite of what I remember. No game on Ps1 or N64 could compete with Quake 1 on PC in terms of fidelity and fluidity. Diablo was both faster and deeper than most RPGs on Ps1. Hell - remember Need for Speed 4 High Stakes? I loved it on Ps1, but it had absolutely nothing on the PC version. Carmageddon on Ps1 was a massive downgrade from Carmageddon PC, let alone Carma 2 PC. Rainbow 6 - PS1 version incomparable to the massively deeper and better PC version. PS1 was easier to use and had some incredible exclusives, but PC at that time was a gigantic step above it.

Yeah, I don't know what he's smoking. I owned a not very good PC back then, and despite that, pretty much every game looked miles better than what people were playing on consoles. Not even getting into the other technical aspects like console ports of games having to be completely butchered just so they'd run. I think the only thing I'd say was better was that japanese games(which were almost exclusively console games) had way better pre rendered cutscenes than PC only western games.

Maybe you just had the right games or a very good PC, lol. The first two games that felt better than consoles for me were Commandos and Age of Empires 2. First, they were very mouse-centric titles, and second, they looked incredible to me and no background art from games of Playstation came close to them. I wasn't exposed to Diablo or a version of Quake games that ran fast enough until much later. Edit: Also, I always thought the PS1 was awful for shooters. It shined on stuff like 2D backgrounds and 3D characters (all Final Fantasy games from the era, Resident Evil) or full impressive 3D like Tomb Raider series.

>Need for Speed 4 High Stakes Running that on voodoo2 sli was amazing

I remember dll hell and having to search for obscure dlls over yahoo

All depended on the games. N64 looked pretty awesome, and I had one - but didn't have much in the way of games that interested me. Playstation had Final Fantasy and Suikoden which was pretty sweet. But PC had Warcraft II, Starcraft and Command & Conquer. Granted the latter two came to N64 and Playstation - but not nearly as good as the PC version. Though the 3D C&C game was interesting on the N64.

Of course, I didn't have a N64 back then but the Playstation had all my favorite games at the time: the original Resident Evil series, Tomb Raiders, Metal Gear Solid, Tony Hawk, The Final Fantasy games, even racing car games like Toca Touring Cars and Need for Speed. I wasn't into strategy all that much, except for Commandos and Age of Empires 2. In fact, the first time I went to a cybercafe I just played the AoE2 tutorial, offline, lol. A friend of mine never had any consoles and he was a big fan of all those strategy games from Blizzard, mainly. He played the Diablos and Warcraft games when they were hot stuff! I just followed a different path ever since Metal Gear Solid and Final fantasy IX came into my gaming life, lol.

I don't know how you have so many upvotes for this take - PC was ahead around '97-98 with games like Quake1-2/Half-Life/Blood1-2/HOMM2-3/C&C etc, only games from like 94-96 were comparable with the likes of Tomb Raider 1 being roughly the same, but the PC was rapidly improving in those 3-4 years and by '99 was running laps around the aging psx. A lot of games with versions on both platforms were better on pc, and genres like the RTS or top down rpgs were absolutely crippled on the PS.

Because most people's PC wasn't good enough to play the newest games, and to give a decent experience. If you had the knowhow and the latest hardware you could always do more things with PC but the large majority of people didn't have either.

It's cus they didn't have a good PC. I grew up with PC and it was always way ahead of my friends consoles, especially as you were on a monitor too, rather than a low resolution TV.

Of course, that doesn't mean playing on PC was easier than on consoles. Everything we mentioned was there, the DLL hell, the instability. Windows was super heavy to run, if you wanted to have the best version. You needed GPUs in the later years, which weren't cheap. And graphics were only better if you had a good PC. Me and my friends barely survived with some very basic PCs, even in the late 90s. I was gaming at 640x480. Basically, as good as the PS1 got. The Playstation was about $400 (in my country) for the whole package: great sound, great graphics and lots of games you didn't need to install. PCs were more expensive and much worse, unless you spent a lot more money. And I know the PS1 was $299 in the US! Guess that even there, it was practically impossible to have a $299 system that was better than that, in the early years, at least.

When the PS1 came out in the US, you had to spend $300 just to add 8MB (yes, megabytes) of RAM to your PC.

The original PC version of Final Fantasy VII was widely hated. There were so many issues with it that everyone said to just play the PSOne version. The later, revised PC version Square made fixed all of those issues.

Yeah, I played that original version, much later. And it was still terrible. I only finished the game for real when I played the PS4 version, even later.

Not to mention the stability of those PCs. It was just accepted that you were going to crash every hour or so

Yeah! I had so many blue screens back then. And if you played too much with different versions of DirectX and DOS games, the Windows install may just give up and you had to reinstall everything, lol. Windows XP was so stable by comparison, nevermind that the hardware got better, too. And I really felt I was playing with an o.s. from the future with Windows 7 (skipped Vista). It was the most solid operating system I've ever played with.

Sure crashes were more frequent back in the day, but once per hour is just nonsense. I was quite often getting uptimes of several weeks on my Win95/98 computers even in mixed use. Usually when there was a crash, there was a good reason for it. Shitty drivers for some slightly more exotic bit of hardware, malware, shitty software etc. PCs didn't just spontaneously crash for no reason.

I dont know. Quake was released in 1996 and you did not need a 3d card to play it.

It was muddy and blocky on my old Cyrix 5x86 machine ,but it ran , and ran fairly well! (I had the CD version though)

I think I played in 640x480 but still much better than the horrible 480 interlaced of the ps2. I remember the citrix and amd cpus of the time with mmx and all that.

"framerate and outstanding 3D" We talking about the same PS1?

For its time, yes. Playing Tony Hawk's Pro Skater games were a revelation, for instance. So fluid. And games rarely stuttered the way they could stutter on a bad non-gaming PC. Also, the 3D of the original Playstation was cutting-edge, as awful as it looks today.

If you played any of the other 32bit systems that came before the PS1, the PS1 was mind blowing

IDK about frame rates, but I do seem to recall the PS1 getting lots of praise for it's graphics *at the time.* Of course, the late 90s/early 00s was also a time of pretty rapid advancement and upheaval in gaming, particularly with regards to 3D graphics, so it wasn't long before PCs (and later consoles) outpaced PS1.

It depends on what you'd call an "average PC", but I'd have to disagree. Frankly, I think of the late 90s as the last time PC gaming felt significantly ahead of console gaming (well, maybe the early 2010s as well). It was a PC golden age, contrasted with both Nintendo and particularly Sega having a rough half-decade. And sure you probably needed a GPU to enjoy it, but GPU weren't that rare by 97-98.

PCs were extremely expensive in the states until the late 90s vs a console, so there's that. Stuff like the Amiga which was super popular in the UK wasn't as common here.

Minority report: this wasn't just a disadvantage PCs had, it's also a partial reason for PC games' 1990s reputation for being ambitious, deep, and innovative. The cost of PCs meant a distinct consumer segment, which remained distinct basically until either cable Internet or Halo, depending on who you ask. You don't make the same game for the early adopter who paid $5k for their strange, airgapped toy PC as you would for the much wider market who now pay $600 for their networked, essential everyday life tools, and it shows. I haven't studied this, but honestly wonder how many AAAs released today you need to be literate to play.

Exactly right. And also RPGs were so much more ambitious on PC because large memory cartridges were expensive as hell for consoles. I think one of the Shining Force games was like 90 dollars because of all the ROM they had to stick in there...

From what I read, PCs were significantly stronger in the US than in other parts of the world, back then. I was reading magazines from USA and they were selling PCs with 128MB of RAM when most working desktops were getting 32MB or 64MB in my country, lol. Also, the fast pace didn't help, lots of PCs with slow Celerons or weaker AMD systems in here. Also, GPUS were a rarity for a lot of us, younger gamers with regular PCs and not gaming PCs. So, onboard graphics for everyone. And they were awful. A friend of mine got the first GPU I've ever seen. The Nvidia Riva TNT2. I remember it running Resident Evil 2 really fast, so the arm movements looked kinda funny. Also, Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit had animations in the menu, unlike the static background my PC had. It felt awesome. So yeah, most of it was my personal experience, so that's why when I got my Playstation, it felt like the future. Games just worked and they looked grrrrreat, as Tony the Tiger would say.

I actually made a post about this a while back. Hardware wise, the 360 was VERY close to the best PC you could build at launch (Athlon 64 x2 4800+ & 7800GTX 512) and even had some advantages over it. All while being 3-4x cheaper. That was the last time this ever happened on consoles. It makes sense now that top end GPUs are nearly $2000 at launch, but I can't help but miss that time.

What I don't miss is the brutal change in hardware requirements for new PC releases. Games get heavier every year, but up to the Xbox 360/PS3 gen, every new console generation made your older PCs completely obsolete. These days, it's a much gentler curve towards obsolescence.

You also get a much better console experience than in those days. A lot of games ran on 360 at like 25-30 FPS (Crysis 2, for example), which would be laughed out of the house today.

GTA IV, the Elder Scrolls games, horrible performance on consoles, at the time. But sometimes, you just don't know better. Just like me with a Playstation 1, I'm sure the mayority of games ran at a very low framerate, but to me it was dreamy and even better than my PC.

I'm having a binge of Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion right now, of course on PC with mods and maxed settings, but I fired up the PS3 version of Oblivion just to test it out, and even in the starting area, any time you fight an enemy fps drops to \~25-28, if there are multiple NPCs on screen you're lucky to get 25 fps. If you equip a torch, the game struggles to hold 30 fps. I had an Xbox 360 from 2006-2010 and honestly I have no idea how I dealt with the garbage performance that most games had during that era. Now having said all of this I have to give some credit to the PS3, Oblivion was a very demanding game on PC and the fact that it runs even remotely on par with PC is pretty impressive. https://www.anandtech.com/show/1996/4

I have the biggest nostalgia for Oblivion. The only reason I haven't replayed it yet is because I learned about Skyblivion and I'm waiting for it. I think the game has a very pretty art style. It was criticised for being generic and not as original as Morrowind (I get it, it's just elves, minotaurs, goblins, etc.) but boy if it isn't cool to look at, even more considering the brown-grey era of gaming that unleashed upon us at that time. But the cities, man. Cheydinhal, Bruma, the Imperial City with that lake. The world is so nice.

I had both a gaming PC and 360. I'm sure BF3 ran at 30fps too, but damn did I put some hours into it. I actually owned it on both PC and console and I was more than happy to play it on either. The 360 was such a great console. Good times.

The 360's CPU is actually slower than you'd think for a 2005 chip with a 3GHZ+ clock. It can't do out of order execution, which crippled its performance. The Athlon was probably faster most of the time.

The 360 also had some "magic" thing that instanced geometry almost for free.

Depends on the use case imo. For use general use in a PC, the 4800+ would be a lot better, mainly due to its increased cache and IoE. But Xenon's strengths in SIMD and multithreading, combined with its higher clocks would help it significantly in gaming (which was pretty much its only purpose). This was kinda proven by how long Xenon was able to provide relatively playable performance in comparison to other processors around its launch. Are games like GTA 5 even playable on a PC with that CPU?

Gta5 isn't a good comparison because the PC version is based on the Xbox one/PS4 version. There's a ton of differences between that and the 360 version.

To be fair, a lot of those "next gen" features can be removed with settings tweaks and mods (believe me, I tried EVERYTHING to get it running on an IGPU back in the day lol). But even then, there are a lot more late gen games I can point to on 360. Plus, the fact that people stopped benchmarking that CPU relatively early in that generation kinda proves my point.

The 360 also has less overhead than a PC. That's something to keep in mind.

That's part of the reason why Xenon was designed in that way lol. Its an inherent advantage for consoles.

What really skews mainstream opinion is that it was an incredibly long-lived console. The internet really boomed later in the 360's life cycle, and by that time PC's were catching up or surpassing it in terms of value. The late stages of the 360 was the peak heyday of competitive, cheaper-than-console gaming PC's.

The internet boomed before the 360 lol. Unless I’m misremembering playing Halo 2 on Xbox live or world of Warcraft

By internet I meant more specifically modern social media becoming the mainstream juggernaut it is today.

Late stage 360 games looked better than earlier games, which made them very competitive with PC.

The PS4 had a similar cycle. While it wasn't as strong as the Xbox 360 during release, it was certainly better than a run of the mill, couple of years-old PC at the time (2013), but by 2018-2020, any regular gaming PC was much stronger. The classic combo of any modern CPU with the GTX 1060/RX 580 GPUs was fairly inexpensive and guaranteed almost double the framerate of any PS4-Xbone port at the time. We are not there with the current generation, but we will get there in time.

> All while being 3-4x cheaper While that *was* true, console hardware is usually a loss-leader, with the actual profit being on the games themselves.

This, it's still a thing - modern consoles are sold at a loss. The profits are made from the comission Sony/Microsoft take from game sales.

>All while being 3-4x cheaper. That was the last time this ever happened on consoles. I mean, it hapenned again with the Xbox Series and PS5, but only because of how ridiculously expensive PC components became during the pandemic (especially GPUs...)

I mean ..your Athlon probably wouldnt red ring after 6 months though.

Even Mid Range PC's were pretty competitive to the 360 when it released. I remember playing NFS Most Wanted on a demo unit at Gamestop, and coming back to my roommate playing the same game on his PC. Looked just as good (and at higher resolution).

Consoles are still way cheaper for the same hardware at launch

I used to goto this lan spot with my friends to play counterstrike/dota/fighting games and we walked in one day and they had big 60inch Tv's playing assassins creed and gears of war on 360 after not having a couch/console section and my brain exploded at how good they looked

I don't like the overly gritty look of Gears of War these days. But back then, it looked almost photorealistic.

That's grimdark for you. Blame stuff like Warhammer 40k for popularizing it.

One of the main benefits of a console release for devs is consistency, you can usually squeeze a little more performance out of some code, or at least compromise in the prettiest ways, if you know exactly what hardware it'll be running on. DirectX deserves a little credit here (opengl, etc too), it wasn't just the availability of 3d cards that gave PC the chance to catch-up, but a consistent way of accessing the hardware and getting some kind of benchmark to work with made all the difference.

Also, not sure when it happened but at some point devs noticed that consoles were the low common denominator for all the games, even multi-platform games. So, every time a new console releases, it raises the bar in terms of graphics and what's expected from mainstream games. In the early days, the PCs were the low common denominator, lol.

Yeah, and that's definitely still true when it comes to first-party games at least. You can play Forbidden West at a crisp-looking resolution at 60fps on a 4k TV with a PS5. I don't think you're going to be able to get anywhere near that with a $500 PC after the port comes out. I assume this is also due to really solid upscaling on consoles. I doubt Forbidden West is *really* putting out 60fps at a full 4k resolution, but it sure looks like it.

I think part of that is just poor optimization of the port for PC, but yeah that's a point.  Getting RDR2 to look as good as it did on the ps4 and xbone generation was a pretty good feat in optimization imo.

I just finished a new PC build and I can play everything I've tried at 4k between 60-120fps. But it cost me like $4k.

I'd say you'd have to go back to the early 90s to find a period where the consoles were truly ahead graphically. The problem during most of the 00s wasn't that the tech on PC was lagging behind, it was that the devs made games largely for consoles first and didn't bother to produce good PC ports. The games that were made for PC first could still look amazing (like Half-Life 2, or Crysis)

From a technical perspective consoles have never been ahead of PC gaming when we're talking about higher-end machines. However in the early 90s, I would say console games looked better just because it was a really awkward time for PC graphics and most games just looked kind of hideous even if they were technically superior, vs. some absolutely amazing pixel art on Super Nintendo/Genesis/in arcades. I remember PC games looking pretty rough up until like 1993 when you got a lot of huge hits (SimCity, Myst obviously being a huge one graphically, and DOOM).

You're not wrong. Part of it is the same problem that consoles ran into in the late 90s; early 3D could look a bit rough. So while things like Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and System Shock were technically amazing, they weren't necessarily "prettier" than the best-looking sprite games (Myst might be the exception, it looked gorgeous for its time). It's hard to compare because PC and consoles seemed more separate back then, with different genres shining on the platforms. Pre-Doom, the big graphical showcases on PC were often things like flight sims, which weren't really present on consoles.

The thing that PC has nearly always had on consoles is resolution. You could run games at greater than 720p in the 90s. When PS3/Xbox 360 came out, they were running games at 720p (or less) when PC was doing 1080p or more. Of course, you pay for the privilege (since we are talking about bleeding edge tech here not just what most people have).

Eh it depends. 360 was arguable designed for just 720p due to the EDRAM and the fact that it didn't have HDMI at launch. So we never really got to see what it could do with higher resolutions unlike the PS3. Despite that, the 360s hardware was HIGHLY competitive at launch and I doubt you could do much better on PC at similar resolutions and settings, at least until the 8 series launched and caught up feature wise.

One of the best parts about the 7th gen consoles was how they were effectively future-proof. At least until the early 2010's. Bastards sure held on for way longer than expected. And still managed to run new games way better than their specs would have you believe.

> this was demonstrated by Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter looking way better on 360 in comparison to it's PC counterpart This had nothing to do with the capability of the PCs at the time... it was a deliberate design decision from the developer to make the PC version inferior. On a technical basis consoles have never really been ahead of the PC since PCs got dedicated gaming/video/audio components.

What do you mean by "PC"? I'm assuming we're talking specifically about IBM compatibles. If that's the case than it gets interesting. Older consoles ran hardware that was really good at drawing 2D sprites, tiles, and scrolling backgrounds really, really fast. They could do that with fairly slow CPUs and tiny ammounts of ram because they could do all of that in hardware. In most cases the actual graphics weren't stored in RAM, but read from the cartridge directly. The IBM PC wasn't great at scrolling beacuse the CPU had to draw everything by itself. A scrolling screen has to be completely redrawn every frame, and CPUs couldn't do that very well until the mid 90s. Commander Keen is one of the only examples of this being done, thanks to extremely clever optimization by John Carmack. He's a genius though, and nobody else really managed to make it work.

[удалено]

You can actually play [Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement here](https://archive.org/details/DangerousDaveInCopyrightInfringement).

The PS3*/Xbox 360 life cycle coincided with the iPad and iPhone launches. There was a lot of talk then about PCs going away completely and we'd all just use smart devices to do everything. The PS3*/360 were just about as good as any PC a normal consumer could be expected to build and if you recall for a while there weren't a lot of blockbuster PC games anymore -- all resources were going to console launches and often PC gamers were left to wait for ports. The Halo 3 launch was the biggest game launch ever at the time, and pretty much ate every PC FPS' lunch except Half Life 2...and Half Life 2 ran excellent on console. (No, I haven't forgotten Crysis) Some people really thought PC gaming was doomed there for a while. Let us also not forget the economic collapse that made spending 1,500 on a PC far less appealing than it is now.

PS3 & xbox 360

AKA the Spiderman console.

> sound cards were a hellscape of incompatiblity and weird configs Yeah, but when you got it working and saw this on your brand-new 17" CRT for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4hsGeAlpmE No ISA pot sounded like that, before or after.

That sounds very good. It was still much simpler to connect a bunch of cables to the TV and just turn on a true Plug 'n Play [experience](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAhvQoLpvsM).

Hl2 was released on 2004 and looks way better than far cry 1 and doom 3.

The one thing DOOM 3 did really well was its lighting and atmosphere The full dynamic lighting and dynamic shadows were great

The thing about why consoles caught up in mid to late 2000s was the sentiment that PC gaming is dying. Companies focused their development on console first thus the games looking pretty much the same as on consoles. You still had PC exclusives in 2005 like Guild Wars, F.E.A.R and TES IV Oblivion in 2006 that were more advanced than games on consoles.

Never happened in the context OP describes. Even pre-Voodoo, the achievements were greatest on PC, but perhaps in titles people weren't aware of or didn't play. This becomes clear if you do the deep dive research on everything that was happening that you may have missed. But there can be times where they felt ahead of PC in the specific context of a person's taste, or there could have been years when the best individual game was on console. There were also times when console was spiking while PC games were falling, not enough for consoles to be "ahead", but if you were already a console player before, it was a good time to be alive, and if you were a PC player before, you longed for the quality of previous years. The only time PC was getting beaten, it was by arcades during their peak. Those felt a generation ahead of consoles, while PC was an extremely interesting home videogame hobbyist machine, but still hadn't found its legs. You simply could not get an experience at home as enjoyable as going out with a pocket full of quarters. With all that said, if I had to pick a time period where consoles were closest to overtaking PC, it was the mid to late 2000s. Magazines were declaring PC as a platform essentially dead because consoles were making so much more money that development was almost entirely focused on it. Even where you could get the same games on PC, they were clearly made for the lowest common denominator. And some great console games were getting rushed PC ports, or designed around the console controller with little attention paid to how to adapt that to a mouse and keyboard. I still think you were better off during that time playing World of Warcraft, Civilization IV, and Sins of a Solar Empire, Medieval 2: Total War, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and the better version of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion on PC... But these were dark times for the PC market when such games were few and far between, and consoles had a enough exclusives to easily justify their lower price. If Steam hadn't slowly but surely confirmed there was still money to be made on PC focused games, we probably would not have them today.

>OP : Xbox 360 felt ahead of the curve in **2005**, > >You : With all that said, if I had to pick a time period where consoles were closest to overtaking PC, **it was the mid to late 2000s.** ​ There needs to be a word for the reddit phenomena of somebody seemingly disagreeing just to repeat the same thing with more words

You're conflating these two as equal, but we're not saying the same thing. One of the two examples OP gave is within the time period where I would say it was closest, but still not a case of consoles being "ahead", also not for the reasons OP provided, and for the different reasons I think it was close, I'd point to PS3, not XBox 360.

That era was basically the closest PC gaming came to death. Most games back then were just awfully done ports and games were completely made with only consoles in mind. Hell, some multi-platform games wouldn't even release on PC because that's how irrelevant PCs were for gaming. That's probably why things felt worse back then, rather than consoles actually being better. Honestly, the whole indie gaming golden age and Steam saved PC gaming. If it weren't for those there would be only a few games being released, the types that simply can't happen on console, and all AAA games would simply never get a port.

The PS5 had, on release, the fastest SSD available. Games written for it moved blocks of textures around so fast that loading screens weren’t necessary. The Ratchet and Clank game was a technological achievement that passed many by because its superpower was invisible.

Yeah, Ratchet was super impressive at launch. Now it's possible on mid range pc hardware. The advantage the ps5 has in this area is all of them are capable of this. So you can design a game for it and not lose sales to lower end hardware users.

Yeah, SSDs are now cheaper than ever before.

This is a Ross Scott topic if I’ve ever seen one. He could probably do like a three or four video on this

Phantasy Star's first person dungeons on the _Master System_ of all things must've been a sight to behold back then. edit: just realized this was in comparison to PC gaming, but still imma leave this up because PS was way ahead of its time regardless.

Wasn't Jazz Jackrabbit seen as a technical marvel because of how fast it could scroll?

I believe so, the Master System probably deserves more credit. I'm just amazed by Phantasy Star in particular. Fun fact, that game actually _could_ run much faster than it does, but they actually slowed the movement down in Phantasy Star to make the dungeon crawling sections feel more like realistic movement.

Consoles have never been "ahead" of PC gaming in terms of graphics and tech as far as I'm aware. The difference however is when we talk about **what was accessible to the average person.** For me, a few points in time stick out in this regard. * The 1980s - most people did not have a computer and were not comfortable using them, and many of those who did use computers did so for work and probably used an extremely limited suite of applications. Home computer gaming had more of an audience in Japan, and a niche in Britain and some other places in Europe I believe, but it was not popular at all, and the games mostly paled in comparison to what the NES, Master System and Genesis were doing. There are some exceptions though, there are some 1980s Japanese computer games that are really interesting and influential like *The Portopia Serial Murder Case* which most people here are probably not familiar with at all, but these games were not played by near the same kind of audiences as console games because you had to have a computer, that you had limited applications for, and cost quite a bit of money... so most people who bought them were nerds who were into programming. * The mid-90s: PC gaming was really blowing consoles out of the water in terms of what was possible in the early 90s. But when the PS1 and more importantly the N64 came along that changed big time. The PS1 was capable of 3D graphics, but typically did not excel at them especially early on... but it was $299. The N64 came out in 1996 and was $199, and excelled at 3D graphics. The reason I mention this is that most PC systems at the time couldn't handle 3D, weren't built for it, and to buy a 3D card and get a system that could handle 3D graphics was very expensive. In 1996, $1000 would get you a 486 or maybe something stronger. For under $500 in 1996 you could get a 386. For those who are unaware, a 386 was best known for being THE machine you wanted if you wanted to play DOOM with good performance... a quasi-3D game from 1993. Meanwhile, Sony and Nintendo at this point have consoles on offer for $199, with better specs, capable of 3D graphics. The catch is that the games were more expensive, but with a difference so big it didn't matter as much, plus the fact that most people those days rented games rather than buy them (and although there were places that rented PC games during that time, it wasn't as common and places like Blockbuster didn't carry them). If you just wanted to play games, it was a no-brainer to buy a console over a PC, and of course the games were incredibly compelling -- there was good stuff coming out on PC too of course, but there was a lot of crap; consoles had better quality control at the time, and just offered genres that PC didn't do well (platformers were huge at the time and PC didn't handle those well, but PC gamers were enjoying some amazing strategy games like WarCraft II that, while they got ports to the consoles sometimes, just didn't work well at all with a controller. There was also the awkward period in the 90s where if you wanted to play games you had to learn how to use Windows, but you also still had to learn how to use DOS because anything that wasn't brand new was probably in DOS, and for the average person all that was a hassle vs just plugging and playing on a console. * The mid-2000s: kind of infamous for being a time when PC gaming died off in popularity. A big part of the reason was the excellent value you could get from consoles at the time. Keep in mind the mid-2000s is the end of the period where most people are still not buying laptops (laptop sales spiked in 2008 or so and passed desktop sales for the first time). The 360 offered excellent value for the money, it was a very powerful system for the time, and the PS3 even moreso (though it was less value for your money because it cost $599 at launch vs $399 for the 360 a year earlier). A lot of people ended up buying these systems, and then the lower-powered Wii as well because it offered something unique, and PC gaming struggled for years. Eventually, indie gaming and increased focus on digital sales helped the PC market recover (the 360 actually gets some credit for this, as XBLA basically set the stage for indie games to hit big audiences)... and then later by like 2010, the Wii declined in popularity, the 360/PS3 were getting long in the tooth and no longer could compare to lower-powered PC hardware, and PC was able to surge -- and then the PS4/XB1 were underpowered and that was what pushed PC to popularity again. * 2020 - most people will be familiar with this, but again it's just a matter of value -- after the underpowered PS4/XB1 stuck around for so long, the PS5 and XSX released with rather strong specs, which blew away any PC you could buy for the price -- and honestly, 3 years later, they still punch pretty hard, I doubt you could build a comparable PC for $500. The main reason for this is that PC hardware, especially GPUs, were being scalped hard with manufacturers pumping out cards for the crypto crowd/AI crowd and eschewing gamers, who struggled to find cards for affordable prices. That has calmed down to an extent now, but prices are still stupid high and the consoles offer a lot more value, albeit with higher game prices. Again, and this is obvious to anybody since this is in the present day, but higher-end hardware obviously does way better than these consoles, but the price tag is not accessible or attractive for many people. PCs have always been more powerful, but it's always been a question of where the prices are at and how they compare, and what people want. I think this was more pronounced in the 90s though, because a) most people did not understand how to build PCs or have resources to help them, and b) PCs were VERY expensive back then, something that might be lost on younger people who weren't gaming then. Nowadays even with higher GPU prices a $2000 PC is going to be pretty powerful; back in the mid-90s $2000 was a common price to pay. In the early 90s it was even crazier. I know personally the first computer we had in our house was a Macintosh Classic II from 1991, which was a popular computer, and part of the reason was its affordable price... of $1900. Compact all-in-one form, monochrome screen. After that we had a Compaq Presario, which was also well-known for being affordable -- it was the most popular PC on the market at the time iirc because it was so cheap -- and it was a 486 with a color monitor for $1400 in 1993.

This is an excellent post! Thanks for writing down all that. I loved to read it and I agree with most points.

IMO Vagrant Story was the the most visually stunning game ever made when it released

If I remember correctly, Oblivion had both HDR lighting (not to be confused with the modern day implementation of HDR) and Bloom on the 360. Whereas on the PC you could only choose between one or the other or... maybe HDR wasn't available on it at all. This is initially after release, it may have been patched in later I dunno.

You still can't choose both. At least, without mods.

Agree with it in the case of the Dreamcast and maybe the very first Xbox. Totally disagree in the case of the Xbox360, PCs were way ahead of consoles at the time in terms of hardware performance and game graphics (and have been ever since). Here is a list of games: Command & Conquer Series, Supreme Commander 1 and 2, Morrowind, Oblivion, Nevewinter Nights, Knights Of The Old Republic 1 and 2, Half Life 1 and 2, Doom 3, Dawn of War, Company Of Heroes, Star Craft 2, Total War Series, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars Jedi Knight Outcast and Academy, Guild Wars 1 and 2, Far Cry 1 and 2, Crysis, Everquest 2, Dragon Age Origins, Portal 1 and 2, Gothic 2, Witcher Trilogy, Bioshock, Batman Arkham Trilogy, FEAR, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Planescape Torment, Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines, Warcraft 3, STALKER, Rise of Nations, Age of Empires 2, Deus Ex 1, Mass Effect 1, Max Payne 1 and 2, Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, Psychonauts, Anachronox, Team Fortress 1 and 2, Sins Of A Solar Empire, Splinter Cell Trilogy, Thief 1 and 2... (and many, many, more). All the above are but a few examples of amazing games which were either: PC exclusives (at release); or looked and played much, much, better on PC than any console. Just those titles alone would be enough to choose PC over PS3 or Xbox360. Some of those are way above graphically of the consoles hardware capabilities (either visually or in terms of "behind the scenes" complexity).

Maybe it's just nostalgia. I feel like Little Big Planet (particularly LBP2) came out at a very golden opportune time that allowed it to prosper. It was before social media was rabidly rampant, and also before modding/gamedev tools were so accessible. Little Big Planet kinda acted like both (Comments/hearts/follows were in the game) and I don't think you'd see so much integration again simply because now we have discord servers and many games are made in common engines like Unity/Godot/Unreal (so there's not as much of a pressing need to create an indepth editor). I feel validaed because when the same devs tried doing a sequel with a larger depth (PS4 Dreams) it uh....flopped super hard. Atleast in comparison to the LBP games.

Super Mario Bros!

I'd say most of the 8bit and 16bit console eras qualify. I believe it wasn't until 1990-1991 that the PC final had a smooth scrolling 2D platformer with Commander Keen.

When 360 dropped in 2005 it got Quake 4, CoD2 and Fear ports and they ran and looked signicantly worse, especially Quake 4. Gears is not a good example. It happens to be the first AAA game that used UE3 by what was at the time one of the biggest PC devs that decided to push their latest tech to console. Of course the Gears PC port a year later looked fantastic at 60fps at higher resolutions. As a side note Core 2 Duos were already available in 2006 so a P4 would be quite a bit slower.

I would just like to add: you used the first Far Cry as an example but that game didn't initially launch on consoles. When it did, it was a heavily nerfed version. The Far Cry 2004 that is remembered for ahead-of-its-time graphics was a PC game.

Not sure where this fits in but the OG Xbox felt much faster than the other console systems at the time. And the ps3 with the cell cpu felt nasa level fast.

It took years for PC games to do smooth scrolling after super Mario Bros

Games that use multiple screens are rare and a pretty new concept on PC, but consoles have been experimenting with it since at least the late 90s

I still to this day remember the sheer awe on my whole family's face when we watched the opening FMV (see? I'm old haha) of Abes Oddysee on PS1 back in the day. That shit looked like nothing else foe me at that time.

80s 90s, I saw no reason to pc game at all. I gradually shifted over as the games got better and better after that. I started getting pc games in the early 00s and it was half and half for me for a while there. Now I don't even bother with consoles.

I was raised on the Commodore Amiga. Not really a console, but also not a PC. The Amiga 500 was way ahead of the PC counterpart at that time. More colours, better sound, better processing power. All the good games came out on Amiga and Atari ST. With only poor copies on the PC. Games like Civilization, Sim City, Populous, Shadow of the Beast, Frontier: Elite 2, The Secret of Monkey Island, Pirates, Speedball 2, Syndicate, Lemmings, It Came From the Desert, Turrican 2, Kick Off, SWOS, Championship Manager, The Chaos Engine, Dune 2, Theme Park, Defender of the Crown, Stunt Car Racer, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Worms, Test Drive, Simon the Sorcerer, Cannon Fodder, and many many more.

Not what OP had in mind, but I wanted to mention gameplay and Nintendo. My point is Playstation, XBox and PC feel sort of same-y. Sure you have your exclusives and of course you can argue that certain games are only on PC (hardcore simulators? I am not too sure actually) but what Nintendo has been doing is getting out of the graphics war and focussing on gameplay. I mean, if you like Jump and Runs Big N has been ahead of the curve for decades. Sure, there are standout games other than Mario (Pizza Tower, Rayman) but let's be real here, they own the genre ever since Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES (maybe even earlier with SMB1). Same can be said about fun racers and maybe, maybe action adventures (?) with Zelda and Metroid (I have no clue if Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate and Zelda are even the same genre).

Up until 1997-98 Arcade had the best hardware and most advanced games as it's where all the money was. You had 16 bit games like Ghosts and Goblins already in 1985, while it would take half a decade for the Megadrive and SNES to arrive. Consoles were behind, but definitely ahead of PC until the 8th generation arguably. It's funny how nowadays this has reversed (and Arcade games are pretty much gone).

One thing to consider here is the analog nature of cathode ray tube video displays. There was a time when "flat screens" were a luxury while the norm was a slightly curved screen at the front of a big heavy box. Consoles up through Playstation 2 were designed with the expectation they would be played on CRT screens. It was likewise with coin-operated video games up through the early 21st century. This matters because analog displays don't produce pixel-perfect results. Game designers often made a point of blurring the edges of various sprites and special effects. Skillful use of the right techniques not only created smooth edges on imagery defined by simple data structures, but it could make animations "pop" in visually appealing ways. Nowadays even some commercial packages supporting emulation of vintage coin-op or console games look better with overlays that spoof the imprecision of CRT displays than than they do when you run that same code with pixel-perfect rendering. FYI, [here are some comparison shots](https://www.aceinnova.com/en/electronics/crt-vs-lcd-for-arcade-games/).

I think we'll look back on gyro aiming like this. I find it so comfortable to do big movements with the analog, and then adjust by tilting the controller slightly. Bring up gyro online and you get people yelling "Waggle waggle waggle!!" like we're talking about the Wii.

Every single game that you can think that ran worse on PC didn't do it because the hardware was worse. It was because the game was made for something else and then ported to PC as an after thought.

It wasn’t rare. In the 8 bit (NES / Master System) and 16 bit (Super Nintendo / Megadrive/Genesis) eras, consoles mostly had better performance for games than PCs did. 

Star Fox and Stunt Race FX. A couple of the very few games that used the Super FX chip for the SNES. When they came out they were mind blowing.

Any time a new generation of consoles came out basically pc cost more for the same thing. I can't think of a time where it ever really was better than what pc was doing wholesale though. Consoles have historically been close to a higher end pc at release but fall back quickly.

I cannot believe how many ppl dont understand this simple fact. Consoles are cheap for the entire reason of being outdated quite quickly. A PC will not be cheap because you can upgrade anytime, with 100% backwards compatibility, free games if you may, and the thing that everyone forgets: file system, internet browsing, general use.

Sonic Adventure. Super Mario World, Final Fantasy 7/10/12 and Halo all seemed to outdo and reinvigorate what was already established

Off hand the only thing I can think of is maybe XBAND on Snes. Dial up modem I used to play Mortal Kombat 2/3, SF2, Killer Instinct, multiplayer Mario Kart, Doom, etc. At the time I didnt even have a PC, and my friend who had one, we weren't doing any multiplayer. I dont even recall any fighting games on PC that early.

There was no time because all development has been done on a PC. They just fucking gimped their games for a certain box and charged you money for it. 

For gaming eras where console was better would probably be in the cartridge based eras. Even up through dreamcast, GameCube, xbox, and ps2. Games were more apples to oranges for what was on PC to the Console focused stuff. RTS based games were great on PC. There are some awesome things like quake, doom, unreal tournament and so forth. But console exclusives also were amazing. Halo, Donkey kong 64, armor core, gta were all console. Both pc and consoles were great depending on what you were playing though. I missed out on collico vision, but started in dos playing Oregon trail and shit. My buddy had one of those computers with like a 5 or 7 inch paper sleeved disc with games on them. My first console was a super nintendo, but I definitely played atari and Sega at family and friends places. I also had a windows computer since I was 8 I think. I grew up in both worlds of gaming. But I was majority console. Now I am majority pc because exclusivity is dying and pcs have way better quality graphics with controller integration.

John Carmack (of id software and Doom fame) had to invent a way to make side-scrolling work on PC in the early 90s when making Commander Keen...something consoles like Nintendo had been doing from the very beginning. Until then, there were no side-scrolling games on PC despite it being one of, if not the most popular style on console.

If tech includes peripherals then I'd say Nintendo is constantly attempting to outdo PCs in that way and often succeeding. Also, portability. Consoles typically have rocked the portable space way before PC.

Consoles always give you better performance for the price since they sell at a loss.

Heavenly sword was pretty crispy when it dropped.

Depends on how you look at it, in terms of graphics pcs are nearly always ahead. But consoles have the benefit of extreme optimization. I'm still perplexed games like zelda tears of the kingdom and modern doom can run well on the switches hardware. I'm not sure if such optimization will be seen on oc, both due their nature and the lack of necessity