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Retro The PS360 are perhaps the least talked about retro consoles, so let’s change that for a while.

Nmanic said:
I had both a 360 and a PS3 growing up, but really, this time period was around when I got reeeally into looking into retro games on the internet. I started trying out fan translations of old Fire Emblem games, found a treasure trove of amazing titles that came out before I was born, and I also got absurdly into Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst. I kept up with major Nintendo releases on DS and Wii, but I can count the number of PS3/360 games I played back then on two hands.

360 highlights-- Eternal Sonata, Blue Dragon, Sonic 06 (yes, really)

Eternal Sonata is a game I really need to revisit and finish. It inspired what became a deep passion for Chopin's music and the romantic era in general. Blue Dragon I'd also like to revisit-- I got to the last disc as a kid and soft locked myself on a timed sequence that I was underleveled for. Really sad.

Sonic 06 came out during a period where I was absolutely obsessed and I overlooked a loooot of shit. I fully completed the game twice! Still think there's potential in it, but hahahahaha I was blinded by love.


PS3 highlights-- journey, Infamous 1 and Infamous 2

Journey speaks for itself... That game is magical. Infamous I'd LOVE to see a modern collection of. I found these games super fun back then (I got the first game as a freebie from Sony during the huuuge PSN outage period). This series is also a big reason I got a PS4, which I then went on to play waaay more than PS3.

One other thing I really enjoyed on PSN was the retro catalogue and PS1 backwards compatibility. I got a lot of mileage out of this-- it was my first time playing Xenogears and FF7.


Now, in the last five years or so I've spent time revisiting this era... There's a ton of great stuff I missed. I just started Metal Gear Rising a bit ago and am loving it. I view it as a cool thing that there's an amazing era of gaming that I have barely scratched the surface of, because I was so busy looking into the past during those years that I missed some of the great stuff.
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Yeah, I was also one of those sonic adventure fans who really forced myself to try and enjoy 06, because it was basically adventure 3, and it had a “serious story for serious grown ups”
 
I’m not old! I’m not old!
Metroid said:
It's wild to think the 360 right now is actually older than the Snes was when the 360 first dropped.
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I’m not owned! I’m not owned!

I had a lot of time to play video games in this era, so I’ll always remember it fondly. Thankfully it’s easy to revisit with Xbox BC! I’m playing Final Fantasy XIII right now.
 
A lot of ink has been spilled over the years about how Japanese devs struggled with HD dev, and how in many cases they flourished on the DS/Wii/PSP, but since this thread is about PS3/360...

Yeah, not a pair of consoles I look bad on too fondly. Owned both but I didn't play either a ton, or often I played old games on them. This was kind of the era I started falling out with gaming in general. For my tastes I definitely preferred the next gen.
 
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Xbox 360 has a surprisingly good Japanese game and arcade port library from my understanding. Some gems that are already gone from or soon to be gone from XBLA as well.

The first half of this gen was genuinely great, but around 2010-2011 things started to go downhill outside of notable exceptions like the Souls games. It was just hard for developers to adapt and a lot of publishers started chasing Call of Duty money to compensate for higher costs. I would say overall PS360 are better than PS41 and PSeries5.

Notable games/essential plays from these consoles for me:
Golden Axe Beast Rider
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
Demon's Souls
Dark Souls
Dark Souls II
Bayonetta
Bionic Commando Rearmed
Bionic Commando (2009)
Mass Effect
Mass Effect 2
Street Fighter IV
Marvel vs Capcom 3
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II
Fallout 3
Batman Arkham Asylum
The First Templar
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Lair
Yar's Revenge (2011)
Bioshock
Bioshock Infinite
Mortal Kombat (2011)
Splatterhouse
Dead Rising
Resistance: Fall of Man
Resident Evil 5
Pacman Championship Edition
Grand Theft Auto IV
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
 
I grew up in this era, but it's by far my least favorite time period for gaming since the 80's. And I'm not even just talking about PS360, I had and have pretty much no interest in those consoles at all. Wii and DS is again my least favorite Nintendo period since the 80's, outside of the year or two long wasteland between Wii U's demise and Switch.

Things do start picking up after the end of the decade, though. That's when indie games really start blowing up. And remember when Wii went from having like three platformers to suddenly becoming one of the best systems for the genre ever in the last two years of its life? That was weird.
 
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SunnyDays said:
Layoffs in the industry are normal right now as early-pandemic era investment and demand both shrink. Activision still has the ability to make video games. It feels weird to come into a thread about a retro console and air out grievances on something that happened literally yesterday.
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You missed my point. The AAA publishers are in decline and/or crashing. The layoffs are horrible and also symptomatic that MS and SIE made hardware that priced the third parties out of the business, unless they develop for Nintendo hardware. Some seem like they’d rather go out of business than develop for the market leader.

That decline started with the PS360. First there was consolidation in the Japanese AAA space. Then Konami left AAA altogether. Later the western publishers started loading their games up with MTX. Then Bethesda sold itself to Microsoft because they were one flop away from bankruptcy. Later Activision did the exact same thing. Look for the next shoe to drop be Ubisoft. They destroyed the Just Dance cash cow out of greed and arrogance.

None of this would have happened if SIE and MS hadn’t been so dead set on ballooning costs with HD rather than trying to find other ways to entertain customers.

Without Nintendo, there would no longer be a console video game industry. I’m not happy about it even though I am a fan of Nintendo games.

This decline of the third parties is completely due to the high costs of developing for the PS5 and Series x, as well as Series X being a failed console. That path was really started with the PS360.

If you want to understand the business logic behind the Wii and DS being underpowered and aiming for an expanded audience, Nintendo predicted the decline of AAA back in the late 1990’s when they were shocked at the cost to develop Ocarina of Time. Them losing bad with the Cube taught them that they needed to make new customers and get back old customers with new gameplay ideas. It took them a while to develop a different path and the Wii and DS was the first result of it.

The AAA’s all decided to keep making the same games for the same customers just with higher development costs and are now reaping the rewards of the logical conclusion of the unsustainable business path from the PS360.
 
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PS360.
Retro.

savingprivateryan-ww2.gif


These are actually two of my favourite consoles, and together with the Wii made for my favourite generation to date.
It was great cos on the one hand we had the quirky lofi stuff on Wii, while on the other we had the epic stuff like Bioshock, the Mass Effect trilogy, Bayonetta, Vanquish, Dead Space, Skyrim, The Witcher 2, the Uncharted trilogy, Alan Wake, Halo 3/4/Reach, the Gears of War games, Dishonoured, Puppeteer, Binary Domain, the list goes on and on.

It was an amazing time to be a gamer cos both the fresh and innovative blue ocean stuff and the boundary-pushing PS360 showstoppers complemented each other so well.
 
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They’re the least talked about as “retro” because none of us want to admit we’re old.
 
AngryAlchemist said:
And then of course the entire PSP library is basically untalked about and borderline irrelevant nowadays, because even the good games usually have a better console counterpart.
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This is true for most Western games, but PSP had a ton of Japanese gems. Sony's experimental Japan Studio games, AAA sequels of PS1/PS2 series (you can argue that PSP had its own Kingdom Hearts 3, Metal Gear Solid V, and Parasite Eve 3, even though they weren't numbered), tons of JRPGs and visual novels, remakes of old classics, Falcom's renaissance... It was and still is a great library.
 
Gingerbread Man said:
This is true for most Western games, but PSP had a ton of Japanese gems. Sony's experimental Japan Studio games, AAA sequels of PS1/PS2 series (you can argue that PSP had its own Kingdom Hearts 3, Metal Gear Solid V, and Parasite Eve 3, even though they weren't numbered), tons of JRPGs and visual novels, remakes of old classics, Falcom's renaissance... It was and still is a great library.
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Eh, don't think it has much to do with Japan vs the West. Yes the Japanese support was better overall, but even in the West you had stuff like the God of War prequels, Patapon, Liberty City Stories etc. Which are all pretty well received.

Really though I'm not saying the PSP didn't have great games at the time, I'm saying the reception of games either fell off overtime or that the games had better console counterparts (either literally as in different versions of the same game, or figuratively as in symbolically similar games) a lot of the time, which makes me understand being less attracted to it retrospectively. Like I feel using the Third Birthday and Birth By Sleep is a pretty good example of just how poorly received or aged the library is, one is one of the most hated Square games ever made and another is one of the lesser received KH games. Even using Peace Walker is not a big positive when that game has some of the worst bosses and grind in the entire MGS series, and also got an extremely quick console port anyways.

There are exceptions of course, but im just saying it's a library that has aged to a degree where a lot of the notable software isn't notable anymore. That doesn't mean there aren't great games but I get not finding it super interesting in hindsight. Really, the PSP is just lacking a lot in "classics" unless you want to engage in semantical list wars.
 
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Never have ever had any console that gave me as many headaches as the 360 I briefly owned. Never had the RROD, but the disc drive was problematic enough to not only require shipping to Microsoft for maintenence, when I got it back, the disc drive immediately damaged a game disc.

Fuck that piece of shit hardware.

But I did enjoy Eternal Sonata and Ninety-Nine Nights.
 
I sometimes think a lot about how PS3 introduced me to a bunch of amazing game series that either immediately went to shit or I eventually stopped caring about in subsequent console generations lol
 
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this gen kinda sucked.

idk why, maybe motion controls but that shouldn't have hampered the ps3 as much.

when i think of really memorable games from that era I just think of late games form the earlier gen and early games from the next gen.

it has its own identity but it feels like it came between the time big companies really stopped making mid range games and before indie game companies really got their notoriety.

include that with japan trendchasing western games and you get gems like RE6.

theres a lot of gems. but this was one of the weakest gens for me overall with a really homogenous line up of games.

edit: it felt like a filler or awkward puberty era for the industry
 
There are so many amazing games there but they are sort of stuck on cumbersome, ready to explode at any time, loud, comsoles with long load times that are too modern and not designed well for CRTs but too old and look like shit in modern high resolution displays because of the low frame rate screen tearing and not even hd most likely 600p output from the game you are playing

In a way they feel like the atari 5200/ Coleco gen that came inbetween the 2600 and NES in terms of how awkward they feel just existing
 
Idk, I feel like there is a faint glimmer of PS360 era revivals happening with titles like Evil West and Gungrave G.O.R.E. - though the latter had its genesis on the PS2 rather than the PS3 - but given how the early generation felt like an extension of Generation 6 in its design language and stylings, that's a bit of "po-tay-to/po-tah-to".

I'm personally ambivalent towards PS360 - it had some genuinely great stuff but a lot of it was just rooted in deep insecurities for the games industry on the whole with how obsessed it got with chasing that precious "Art" label - as in, "art" not representative of the creative forces within the medium, but "Art" as a label of respectability for those on the outside.

So, uh... I don't know if I can say anything remotely coherent beyond that - outside the fact that it was probably better for Japanese games than people used to say back in the day and most of what came from there during that period has "aged better" than the more "modern" takes on gaming by Western studios.

em said:
PSWii360 was a renaissance of games, despite the prominence of Souls/GTA/COD.
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OK, you need to explain that underlined one to me - if anything, Souls was the most classically "videogamey" IP that came out of Gen 7.
 
On one hand I think the PS3/360 gen is the one I liked the least, since I've started playing. In addition I think a good part of best games of that era are already avaliable as remasters on PS4/Xbo or PC.
So from my pow it's less interesting for a retro gaming perspective.
Wii, DS and PSP are a different story though.
 
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While not a big fan of the consoles themselves, that generation of games is really good, the small period of time where Dead Rising was good, stuff like Alice Madness Returns, Bayonetta, Tomb Raider, the most beautiful fighting game ever made King of Fighters XIII, Red Dead Redemption, Rayman, Strider (2014) , UMVC3, Halo 3 and Reach, MGS4 even with all its issues. Uh, Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day was a also a game of all time.

And with RPGs the last peak of the Tales of series with Vesperia, one of its best stories in Xillia 2, and Berseria was still overall a great game, Xillia and Zestiria were still solid fun times, the Mass Effect games, Dragon Age Origins, 6 Atelier games where the franchise still was more interesting before slowly diluting itself into feeling just like any other game in its niche. Lost Odyssey is also there, Demon Souls is a wonderful experience. I put RPGs as an aside here because it was the last generation where I felt that I played through and enjoyed so many of them.

And I'm looking forward to continue playing and finding more great games from that generation.
 
BlackthornOrion said:
I think they aren't talked about as much because in a lot of ways, they just don't really feel retro, and not just in a "if those are old then I'm old, so obviously they can't be old" way. Like, numerically I agree that almost 20 years ago is clearly retro. But there isn't generally the same sense of "games from this era are archaic" that, say, NES games had acquired by the 2000s.
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Yeah. Honestly I don't consider these consoles to be retro and I think making 'retro' synonymous with 'old' where consoles automatically become retro after a certain period of time results in a less useful term. What does it mean when Super Mario Bros, Mario 64, and The Last of Us are all 'retro' games? Retro to me is evocative of the earliest eras of gaming (I'd even include the GCN/PS2/Xbox in this range) prior to standardization of high definition displays / wireless controllers / internet connectivity, and not just two decades from the present time.
 
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I consider PS360wii to be the beginning of the "modern" gaming era because right now it doesn't feel to me like the 9th generation, we're just in 7th gen part III. We have more powerful machines but the games themselves haven't changed much since the 360 launched (other than an arguable dip in quality and death of AA) although Nintendo continues to innovate quite a bit these days and so do other studios like FROM. The 6th gen is what I like to call the end of the classic era so that is usually where i draw the "retro games" line. I would even include the Wii in that too. I do have fond memories of the mid 2000s to early 2010s with those machines though. It's still one of my favorite eras/generations!
 
Dead space
Mass effect
Uncharted
Red dead redemption
The last of us
Infamous
Metal gear solid 4
Halo 3
Gears of war
Fable 2/3
Assassin’s creed when it was first good.
Skyrim and oblivion
Fallout 3 and New Vegas

A lot of these games defined me during those days. Loved them all. I still wish Sony would give us infamous remasters.
 
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Bonejack said:
PS3 and X360 ... retro ...

Why is this board so keen to make mee feel old. ;_;

J/K

or not.

On topic, i wonder ... i still have a perfectly working OG launch PS3 at home, yes the one with PS2 BC. How much ìs that thing worth today?
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the really scary thing is there's probably a bunch of people out there that consider the PS4/Xbox One retro
 
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I wasn’t feeling the gen at first, but later on we got some great games. I think the vocal group of people debating online sometimes killed the excitement for me; the Wii vs HD twins put me in the camp of the former;

Yeah, sure, Nintendo fan and all that, but I played more weird games on it and that was more appealing. However when I got the PS3 and some PC games, I finally discovered some amazing games; a selection of games I like from that particular era:

- Uncharted series; I mean, come on, especially 2 is a fantastic gung-ho adventure which was just fun to play through.

- The Last of Us: playing that on a PS3 was mind blowing. Still one of my favourite titles from that gen.

- Dead Space 1 + 2: great horror action games; shame about three getting into the micro transaction hype, but overall the first two are among the best games put out by EA. Shame not enough people were on board. The Ishimura was amazing.

- Batman Arkham Asylum: Batroidvania? Hell yeah. Good combat system, Conroy (RIP hero) and Hamil as Bruce and Joker? How can I not like this?

- Shadows of the Damned: it’s a Suda51 game alright. Is it weird? Yea. Does it a huge gun called Johnson? Yup. Does Garcia FUCKING Hotspur take his pole for a stroll? You better believe it.

- El Shaddai: Asscension of the Metatron: yeah, it’s me. No I agree. This game is far better than I expected. Everybody should play it, but I get why people are turned off. Still, it’s one of the coolest releases.

- Deadly Premonition: It’s all in the coffee. The proof you want. A grand time for everyone.

- Spec Ops the Line: maybe a very run of the mill third person shooter, serviceable, but the story… aw jeez. One way to tell a story about the impact of war. One of those games you need to play.
 
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Serif said:
Yeah. Honestly I don't consider these consoles to be retro and I think making 'retro' synonymous with 'old' where consoles automatically become retro after a certain period of time results in a less useful term. What does it mean when Super Mario Bros, Mario 64, and The Last of Us are all 'retro' games? Retro to me is evocative of the earliest eras of gaming (I'd even include the GCN/PS2/Xbox in this range) prior to standardization of high definition displays / wireless controllers / internet connectivity, and not just two decades from the present time.
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I largely agree with this. There’s a lot of standardisation that kicked in on PS360 in terms of controls, controllers, cameras, big action games and 3D combat. The difference in two generations between, say, the SNES/Megadrive and the PS360 is light years compared to, say, TLOU on PS3 and similar games on PS5.

To me retro is something that kicks in when games don’t feel immediately familiar, which most AAA action games on PS360 pretty much do. It’s weird really. Of course there’s been massive advancements in processing power and a ton of trends in game design have come and gone or stuck around since. But when I play PS3 games today, whether that’s Valkyria Chronicles, Skyrim or TLOU to pick 3 off the top of my head that I’ve played in the last few years, they don’t feel ‘retro’ to me in the same way that SNES games already did in the early 00s to me.
 
I will never forget that the first video game I ever completed from start to finish was uncharted 1 on my cousins Playstation 3 in 2014
 
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As always in these discussions I think there’s also a difference in ‘feel’ between early gen PS360 games and later ones too. In that a PS3 launch game like Heavenly Sword or Resistance felt much closer to PS2 action games and FPS respectively. But the later stuff like TLOU and whatever the last Assassins Creed game was (as they drifted into being action RPGs like a lot of modern action games) felt near indistinguishable from PS4 games outside of graphics. Or the difference between Oblivion and Skyrim being that the latter, in 2011, felt a lot more slick and still very modern (hence why it had huge appeal on Switch as an example of what to expect).

Having said that, then you had stuff like Gears that came along early and was a huge trendsetter for the generation, which is why Mass Effect 1 felt a bit clunky but more of an rpg, but by the time ME2 (2009?) released, it had its combat heavily reworked as a slick cover shooter and a lot of RPG stuff like equipment stripped right back.

I think that’s why I struggle to put the whole generation in the retro category, when, sure, early PS360 games can often feel that way in the lack of familiarity, the often awkward individual control schemes/mechanics when returning to them. But by the time it’s the late 00s, PS360 games by bigger studios don’t really feel any different to such games today in terms of standardised controls, slick presentation, mechanics. Plus the visuals at that point (to my aging eyes at least) are ‘good enough’, which is why I often feel like modern AAA games have diminishing returns on graphical improvement.
 
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For all the popularity highly scripted, cinematic AAA games gained throughout that gen, they do have an insane lineup of racing games honestly

  • Dirt 1 through 3
  • Grid 1 through Autosport
  • Motorstorm series
  • Forza Motorsport 3 and 4
  • Forza Horizon
  • Gran Turismo 5 and 6
  • Split Second
  • WipEout HD Fury
  • Burnout Revenge and Paradise
  • A shitton of NFS games
  • Blur
  • Ridge Racer 6 and 7
  • Sonic All Stars Racing 1 and Transformed
  • Test Drive Unlimited 1 and 2

This isn't counting BC or re-released titles that are playable on those consoles even. Makes me sad to look at the current lineup of racing games compared to that generation as we'll probably never hit that again.
 
Spec_Ops_The_Line_cover.png


Spec Ops: The Line is one of the most important and interesting games of that generation for me. It did such a unique job of weaving story, gameplay, and message together. There are multiple ways to interpret it from the literal message about war to a metacommentary about the military shooter boom at the time. Its unrelenting violence and bleakness are not going to be for everyone, and the gameplay itself is not exactly remarkable, but it had so many layers and so much depth to it. After I finished the game, the most enjoyable part afterwards was listening to Walt Williams, one of the writers, talk about the decisions he made. From there, I read all kinds of forum posts and theories about the game. It's a game that stuck with me for months after finishing it, which didn't happen with a lot of games from that era. The "are video games art?" question was all over the early and mid-2010s, and this was the standout game I thought about during that debate.
 
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