Viral tweet about the jump from PS2 to PS3 has the retro gaming community debating what the "most significant leap in gaming history" really was
Jan. 9, 2024Is GBA to PSP the real answer?
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One question has gotten the retro gaming fandom up in a tizzy, and now the community is trying to decide what the biggest generational leap in gaming history really was.
The question was posed byObsolete Sony, a Twitter account that specializes in waxing nostalgic about oldSonyelectronics. This account asked “Can we all agree that the upgrade from the PS2 to the PS3 was the most significant leap in gaming history?” Obviously, the answer is no - both because Twitter can never agree on anything and because suggesting that the leap from PS2 to PS3 was so grand is bordering on nonsense.
Jumping from PS2 to PS3 did give us a lot of things, like easy access to online play, downloadable games, and (marginally) high-definition graphics. But as Digital Foundry’sJohn Linneman notes, there was a big cost: “We went from 60 FPS being the norm to it becoming a rarity. Even 30 FPS solid was uncommon that gen.” If you’re concerned with performance, the PS3 was a step back. Never mind the fact that the PS3 had a substantially smaller library than its predecessor, and despite its powerful for the time hardware, many multiplatform games ran much better on the competing Xbox 360.
That leaves us with a big question: what actually was the most significant leap in gaming history? Never mind the five PlayStation generations, what about console gens as a whole? If you scroll through the responses to that initial tweet, there are a lot of votes for the move from 16-bit consoles like the SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive into the 3D era, and a fair few arguments that gaming peaked in the PS2 era. (Given thegraphical leap from the PS1 to the PS2, that one’s pretty strong.)
But there’s a dark horse candidate that I’ve found particularly intriguing: the leap from GBA to PSP. Yes, we’re talking about handhelds from two different manufacturers, but these platforms released just four years apart from each other. The GBA offered lovely 2D graphics roughly on par with the SNES, but those visuals were nearly a decade out of date even at the time. The PSP, in contrast, was nearly on par with contemporary consoles.
I don’t know whether the pace of technological advancement has truly slowed or whether we’re just in an era where games already look so good that it’s tough to be wowed anymore, but it’s nice to remember a time when new gaming generations genuinely felt like generational shifts. Even if some of those shifts were bigger than others.
This does still make me want to revisit some of thebest PS3 gamesof all time.
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