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scroll down for

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scroll down for 6th one and pictures of consoles

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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2014/feb/04/the-six-best-retro-consoles-for-modern-gamers#img-1

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The machine that took on the might of the Playstation 2 – and nobly failed – is one of the most interesting mainstream consoles in recent history. It was the first entrant in the 128bit generation, the first to include a built-in modem for online multiplayer action, and the first to include a personal screen in its controller, capable of playing its own games – an idea later borrowed by Nintendo for the Wii U. It was also home to some truly wonderful games, from Sega's own Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi and Shenmue, to brilliant third-party titles like Soul Calibur and Metropolis Street Racer. There was the prototype console MMORPG, Phantasy Star Online, and the utterly weird Seaman, a game about a talking fish, with a narration from Leonard Nimoy. There was the musical fun of Space Channel 5 and Samba de Amigo; there was a fishing game – Sega Bass Fishing – that came with a fishing rod controller; there was a train simulation – Densha De Go – that came with a train driving dashboard controller. The visuals were luscious, the sound gorgeous, the ideas plentiful. A beautiful loser.

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Another Nintendo machine, but this one takes us to the periphery of the modern era. Launched against the mighty PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox, it is often erroneously thought of as a failure, even though it sold over 22m units and Nintendo made a tidy profit on each one. Well-known for its distinctive box-like design and proprietary mini-disc games format, it looked childish compared to its super-masculinised rivals, and never got the third-party publisher support it deserved. Still, there were some amazing games, with the likes of Super Smash Bros, Super Mario Sunshine and Animal Crossing all holding up to modern scrutiny. And it wasn't all family-friendly cuteness: GameCube had arguably the best ever survival horror title, Resident Evil 4, as well as the bizarre Killer7 and the dark-as-hell Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem – every one of those will shock and amaze even today.

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It was tough to decide between Sony's original 32bit console and its spectacularly successful successor, but for greater retro appeal, we went for the former. This was the machine that totally disrupted the home console market, shoving Sega and Nintendo out of the way and bringing Sony into the industry in a big way. The sleek hardware architecture is built for 3D graphics, and unlike its rival, the Sega Saturn, developers got to grips with it fast, relishing a new piece of kit to fiddle with. Games-wise, this is where a lot of the key current franchises came into their own, including Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Tekken and Tomb Raider, and where developers discovered the twenty-something, post-pub gaming generation through offbeat music-powered classics such as WipEout and Pa Rappa the Rappa. It's also worth tracking down gems like Konami's strategy RPG Vandal Hearts and Reflections' early open-world gangster adventure, Driver.

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Some call Nintendo's 16bit machine the greatest games console of all time, and it's difficult to disagree. It was technically superior to the Mega Drive with more colours and clever sprite rotation/scaling hardware and it has a truly vast software catalogue. Indeed, from 1990 to 1996, the system saw some of the most iconic series' of all time, from Final Fantasy to Street Fighter, with Nintendo wringing the most out of its exclusivity deals with Japanese developers. And of course, there were homegrown classics like Super Mario Kart, Super Metroid and F-Zero, as well as the wonderful Donkey Kong Country titles from first-party studio, Rare. And basically, if you want to understand the history of the JRPG genre, this is where to come and gorge yourself: Chrono Trigger, Zelda, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy III... the list is endless.

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As the first major 16bit console, the Mega Drive was a massive success in the US and Europe, thanks to its combination of fantastic arcade conversions and authentic (for the time) sports simulations. It was the golden age of the scrolling action game, with titles like Streets of Rage, Altered Beast and Mickey Mouse: Castle of Illusion typifying the genre, while EA came into its own producing the Fifa, NHL and NBA simulations. There were also wonderful RPGs like Phantasy Star and Shining Force, as well as compelling blasters such as Gunstar Heroes, Truxton and Contra: Hard Corps, all filled with colour and energy. And of course, there was Sonic the Hedgehog, his first three adventures still as astonishingly fast and vibrant as they were 20 years ago.

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commodore Amiga 500
Okay, this isn't strictly a console, it's a home computer, but if you owned an Amiga in the late-eighties or early nineties you owned one of the best games machines on the planet. This was the glory era of Britsoft, when idiosyncratic UK studios like Bitmap Brothers (Speedball 2, Chaos Engine), Team 17 (Worms), Bullfrog (Syndicate) and Sensible Software (Cannon Fodder, Sensible Soccer) were in their pomp. It's also where a lot of technically gifted European studios like Guerrilla and Housemarque originated, courtesy of the 'demo scene', where coders, artists and musicians competed to wring the absolute most out of the Amiga hardware.

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People often make the mistake of thinking that video games are a relentlessly forward-looking medium. It's all about the next big release, the next console generation, the next PC graphics card technology. Except it isn't really. Games are, like most other artforms these days, obsessively self-referential. They are constantly mining the past for successful ideas, merging old genres to create strange new ones, or simply borrowing the aesthetics of past generations. If modern games have one fault (they probably have more, but let's not go there), it's that they can seem intimidating to newcomers because they rely so much on age-old conventions and traditions.