Cover photo via Pennyworth Reviews

Twelve years ago, Sony and Microsoft were engaged in a battle that still wears on today, though thankfully with less internet yelling. Nintendo dives in occasionally, too, but when I think about “console wars,” I’m taken right back to 2006 when Microsoft released the Xbox 360 and Sony fans were impatiently waiting for the PS3.

My relationship with gaming consoles before then was kind of erratic. My dad introduced us to gaming when he bought a Super Nintendo for Christmas one year. I played a lot of Disney side-scrollers in those years. I also watched my dad play A Link to the Past a LOT, as well as the original Tomb Raider on PC. Years later, we got an original PlayStation that I played until the PS2 came out, which I played until mine got stolen, then got a new one which I played until it became outdated.

That was right around 2006 when Terry and I were dating and he got an Xbox 360. The first game I played on Xbox 360 was the first Assassin’s Creed. I was hooked. From there, every new game that came out we got on Xbox 360 and called it a day.

But, not every game.

Not all games are available on all systems. That’s obvious in the case of Nintendo’s IP – Mario, Zelda, you know the drill. But while Xbox and PlayStation may have quite a bit of crossover, they do have system-exclusive titles. While I would have kept right on rolling with PlayStation, you couldn’t get Halo on that system. And while you could get Assassin’s Creed on both, you couldn’t get Uncharted or God of War for Xbox.

So, you either bought both systems, or, because you were 17 and your mom wasn’t about to spend $800 on gaming systems, you bought one, and you chose.

In 2006, we chose Xbox.

Rarely did I wish I had a PS3. Occasionally I’d go to a friend’s house and we’d play some PS3 fighters, but there was never anything I was dying to play that I couldn’t play on Xbox. Even a few years ago when we decided to invest in an additional system, we got a Wii U because it was super cheap and we wanted a Zelda machine. (Yes, we probably should have held off until the Switch, but that’s another blog post.)

It really wasn’t until Terry and I started watching Outside Xbox and Outside Xtra religiously on YouTube that I even realized how many PlayStation exclusive games I had and was missing out on.

So, this Christmas, Terry and I bought ourselves a PS4 and a slew of games to go with it: Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection, Nier: Automata, Journey, The Unfinished Swan… AAA titles and indie gems alike are loaded up onto this baby, and it’s been really fun going back to games that defined a generation of the consoles.

Now about some of those old games…

We’ll talk about those in another post.