Over the last week or so the team here at TSA have been posting our Memories Of A Generation, a series of retrospective glances at our defining moments of what is now last generation. We’ve discussed everything from Modern Warfare to Minecraft, from BioShock to Burnout – and (thankfully) you lovely chaps seem to have enjoyed reading our thoughts as much as we’ve enjoyed writing them.
So, before we put Generation 7 to bed entirely, and all pack our PlayStation 3s and Xbox 360s away in the spare room, we thought we’d ask you good folk to discuss your Memories Of A Generation with us.
In the same way you would for our weekly WeView feature, we want you to share your thoughts about the past generation of consoles, and games – and it couldn’t be easier – all you need to do is leave us a comment below, and we’ll do the rest.
A couple of things to remember: Firstly, whilst you’re most certainly more than welcome to write us a 4,000 word monologue, and every word will be appreciated, we know you’re a busy bunch, so a couple of paragraphs about that one stand out moment is more than enough. And finally, we merely ask that if you want to be included in our round-up post next week, you try to leave your comments before the evening of Sunday December 15th – as that gives us a bit of time to read them all and once again reminisce on what has been a monumental period for gamers.
Over to you!
TheDemocrodile
In June of 2009 a tragedy occurred. Late one Tuesday night whilst enjoying a game of Company of Heroes i ordered the Wehrmacht to hold a bridge when suddenly there was a small flash and a shower of sparks from the rear of my carefully built PC: The power supply had overloaded and fried itself to death.
Lacking a gaming machine for the first time since 199X I was lost, until i was able one week later to pick up a PS3 as part of a deal when upgrading my phone, it was meant to be a stopgap….it turned into my main gaming machine for well over a year and one that i still use from time to time.
Three experiences stand out for me as highlights and one as a low:
1. Borderlands:- I was given this by a friend of mine and told “Its a first person Diablo in a comic book world full of guns”. So it was off to a winner from the start, great characters and excellent loot made this a game i played to death as did one memorable multiplayer session with a frenchman: We had no mics and yet we communicated flawlessly using little gestures with rifles and whenever we found some piece of loot that was for our characters we’d drop the for each other.
9 hours of silent teamwork – Bliss.
2. InFamous:- Essentially, despite my drab skinhead look and an inability to climb chain link fences i was Shang Tsung. One of the rare times I’ve enjoyed a platform exclusive in the console – owning part of my gaming life. Oh and you bet your ass i yelled out “Your soul is mine!” whilst being evil.
3. Dead Space:- If you were to measure my heart rate when the game is loading you’ll see it start to race before it even hits the main menu. As someone who cut his teeth on every legendary horror game released in the 90s i expected to merely yawn at it but there was something about the Ishimura that got me.
Imagine how i felt in the second one.
and now the low:
Gran Turismo 5:- I Pre-ordered this. Is that all i need to say? It stands out like a sore thumb amongst my entire game collection as the one thats caused me the most rage in the five years i’ve owned the PS3.
It was broken, badly. To the point i swore off of pre-ordering ever again and stayed the hell away from the 6th installment despite adoring the genre and predecessors.
It was also the one that made me see that the plug and play nature of consoles has gone forever. The major advantage over the PC “It’ll just work when you put the disc in” was gone….hello massive patches! hello install times! Fancy seeing you here?
So yes, all in all a generation bookmarked with tragedy and thats without mentioning the two 360s i owned in 2008 that RROD’d……..Ooooops.
Avenger
I won’t really mention all the games I love or remember, because that would take a long time. Simply I’ll say my first step in the 7th generation of gaming was playing Halo 3 for the first time. I thought the cutscenes were pre-rendered. How I was wrong. It was gorgeous and I loved it to bits, and what an entry in to the last generation. I don’t think I’ll come across that experience again somehow, with all the sequels, annual releases and indie focuses will I ever play something so cinematic, so well told, and such fun to play again.
Avenger
Meant to add on to the last sentence ‘so original’ as that’s basically why a game rarely has my jaw dropped. Maybe Destiny as another Bungie title will be good. Hmm.
TheDemocrodile
Ahhhh Halo 3! I remember my friends (whom i lived with at the time) bringing a copy home upon release and playing pretty much the whole thing in just over a day.
To be honest i don’t remember much of the actual game, my attention was taken up by the astonishing evolution of the cloud in the sky, i literally paid it exclusive attention as the game progressed noticing it’s darkening and little black specks appearing and disappearing into it at times.
Wonderful attention to detail.
Andrewww
First of all: I disagree, the generations simply overlap, the time of the PS3 is not over yet. And there were that many great games that it just wasn’t possible to play all of them yet, at least not for me, so I still want to play through some backlog of Skyrim, Last of us, Heavy rain, Assassins Creed, etc.
Boy was I happy when I bought my PS3 in April 2007. Started off with R:FOM and Oblivion, the latter of which got some weeks of my life. Best moments: exploring secret passages in some dungeons, fighting skeletons and the like.
FOM got me into online gaming, which was a new dimension at the time and super exciting.
Burnout Paradise City was great, I still remember the first time I realised I could drive up to the roof of a car park.
The first Uncharted was fantastic, with story twists you only saw coming during repeated playthroughs. At first I’ve played this still without trophies, but then there was the trophy patch, which added a lot to the experience. Loved UC2 & 3 too.
And then there was Killzone 2. I absolutely loved it, had to get it to 100%, and I still feel like going back to it sometimes.
Mirror’s Edge was superb, thrilling and fresh. Stellar there will be another one on the PS4..!
And then, of course, Demon’s Souls: Wow..!
There were so many other games I loved, e.g. FEAR, Dead Nation, Mass Effect 2 & 3, FC2 & 3, Portal 1 & 2, Rage, Fallout 3, GTA IV, Gran Turismo, and more.
And how could I ever forget the time I’ve spent in Ravenholm with the Orange Box…? :o)
zander14rfc
I’ll do my bit by talking about how I found this lovely site. The idea of trophies made me and my friend freak the hell out so we found the first game we could find that implemented them (Super Star Dust HD)and we downloaded the demo right away! We found the list of trophies online and spent the entire night trying to unlock the trophies on the one level playable demo. Never in my life have I been so disappointed not to earn a trophy and this was before I even had one. I just wanted to hear it ping and light up my world. So from there I tried to see what other games would have them in the future and this site led me to a nice famous list of games that have/will have trophies. I found the forum and signed up, eventually playing (and owning) Call of Duty with some fellow TSA members against another site. This site holds a spot in my heart and in my memories when I think back on the last gen of gaming, TSA has always been my go to website for gaming news…Sure it may not be as instantaneous as huge sites like IGN, but it’s the personality that counts. If the Playstation is for the Players then TSA is for the Community!
spooner_22
Well, my first PS3 games were Uncharted and Burnout Paradise. In my opinion these were two of the standout PS3 titles, bith fantastic for different reasons. So, my memory of the generation would be that (because of those two games) it instantly hooked and engrossed me in everything PS3 from day one.
MadBoJangles
For me, the best game of the last gen simply has to be Demon Souls.
No game frustrated and delighted with equal measure.
Kitch
Earliest memory has to be collecting my PS3 from Woolworths then not going back to work.
Warhawk had to be some of my best moments in gaming. The balance was spot on and nothing beat the rush of charging for a flag with a mine festooned to each side of a jeep with your passenger screaming to stop.
Another bad memory is all the failed games or games that didn’t live up to expectations.
Final Fantasy 13 and Starhawk are the biggest offenders.
Probably my standout “moment” is witnessing my 1st thunderstorm in Red Dead. That was a proper jaw dropping “how the………” moment.
Nocure-fd
I want to echo Andrewwws statement. But slightly differently. I am a PC gamer, as well as a console gamer. From my point of view, there is no clear start or end of a generation. Hell, I just finished a campaign of XCOM apocalypse the other day! It’s only really exclusives that make a difference to me.
That being said, I think there needs to be a mention of the operating systems of the last two consoles, as it shows how quickly technology can change in a short space of time. My console gaming of the last set of hardware started with the 360. I’d just moved into my own flat. Looking at the two systems, for me the 360 had the edge. MS had allowed you to stream video files over a home network. This was a major selling point for me as most of my media was on my PC. SCART was still the main means of connecting devices at the time, so being able to stream to the xbox meant I didn’t have to shift my PC around anymore. In my eyes this alone left sony in the Dust.
About two years later, I upgraded my TV to a 42″ Sony bravia. I wanted to take advantage of the glorious HD, so I needed a blu-ray player. So I thought What the hey, a PS3 will play games as well as BR discs. So it was a no brainer. Uncharted 2 had just been released as well. So that christmas break passed by in a haze of ultra crisp graphics and movies. It was only a few months later that the iplayer/4OD/lovefilm aps came along, as well as playstations own media streaming options. Now that I think about it, this is the point where my 360 started seeing a major decline in use.
Right around the time Steams Big picture mode was launched, I upgraded the graphics card on my PC. It seemed to be impossible to buy a graphics card that didn’t have a HDMI out. And this is when I found my 360 had become totally redundant. My PC and PS3 couold just do everything better. The nice and streamlined blade interface was gone from the 360, replaced by some windows 8/smart phone hybridn that just seemed to get in the way.
Point being, both systems have been on a bit of a journey, and neither one is anything like what it was when it first released.
Games wise: Developers now knew they had some omph to work with. So my main memories of the last 10 years or so, are as something of a golden age for open world gaming. Gone were the random encounters, short draw distances and long loading times of the xbox and PS2. GTAIV and V, Just cause 2, Far cry 2 and 3, Fall out, Red Dead Redemption all need a mention. Even Crackdown was a bit of a game changer with it’s revolutionary (at the time) co-op play.
Nocure-fd
Oh. I just played Journey for the first time. So now I need to add Journey.
Very few games have moved me to tears, and I really wasn’t expecting it…
Vallon
Having skipped a generation of PlayStation, mine pretty much focus on the 360. I did play a crap load of World of Warcraft, but these are the console games that stood out for me.
1) Gears of War (2006)
The first 360 game that really wow’d me. It looked great, played great and the coop option to play through the game was brilliant. The other gears of war games that followed were great, but never captured that excitement for me again.
2) Assassin’s Creed (2007)
After having seen trailers for this game, I couldn’t wait to play. Probably not the best of the series, but again it was the first and I think brought so much to a stale 3rd person genre. I’ve got IV Black Flag on the 360 and got about 25% through but no real desire to finish it or carry on. The first AC though had me hooked for ages. Assassin’s Creed II was actually the game that killed my first XBOX 360 :D (RROD!)
3) Forza Motorsport 2 (2007)
Being a big fan of the Gran Turismo series I was hoping something as good would come out on the 360. Whilst I don’t think Forza bettered it, the online racing with a bunch of friends was superb and so enjoyable.
4) Red Dead Redemption (2010)
Having been really disappointed by Grand Theft Auto 4, RDR was a really pleasant suprise. I really enjoyed it and played it tons. Couldn’t get into the Zombie addon DLC but the original single player game had me playing all the way through.
5) Grand Theft Auto 5 (2013)
Quite simply the very best Grand Theft Auto game ever, I loved every minute of it. Fills me with real hope for GTA6, I cannot wait to see what they produce on the new generation of consoles.
There were other games like Darksiders that I enjoyed, and the CoD series but these 5 were the ones that stood out for me over the lifetime of the last generation. Whilst early on it didn’t bother me too much, in the last year I would really have loved a PS3 to play the Uncharted Games, and The Last of Us – but just couldn’t warrant paying out £200 for a console with the release of the PS4 so close. There’s always this generation :)
simplebob
So many games, so many great experiences.
Highlights for me are:
Skyrim (over 200 hours in and hardly touched the main story)
Red Dead Redemption (feeling completely miserable hunting for buried treasure at night in the middle of a thunderstorm and then watching the sun come up as I rode back into town)
Dead Space (got the games, the comics, the art book and the films…never did get the tshirt)
Deus Ex HR (loving the Directors Cut with better graphics and the Vita)
PeaceWalker on PSP (over 100 hours put in several of which done while on holiday camping in a field).
Eyepet – my 5 year old daughter loves this game and this strikes me as a great way to introduce her to gaming without having to give her a tablet/DS etc
PS Plus. One of the best content offerings I have come across. Truly a joy to find out the monthly content and IGC titles, and the deciding factor in me buying a Vita.
But not all good…theres also been the bad:
The painful wait for Skyrim patches. First game I’ve purposefully not played until certain elements were fixed.
Lack of support for Move and PS Eye, such a great bit of tech, but gameplay experiences havent truly warrented the purchase cost.
YLOD – seeing my much loved Fat PS3 (with backwards compatibility) die for the second time and no longer boot.
Definetly looking forward to what Sony come up with for the next generation.
simplebob
And all things Naughty Dog…