Your Top 5 Favorite IPs and Favorite Console of All Time

First things first, need to give credit to the inspiration of this topic. My friends over at the Iron Lords Podcast ask all their guests this question and I find myself captivated hearing how different gaming franchises have had meaning or impact on people growing up. How have different games effected you as a gamer? How about as a person?

  1. What are either your top 5 games or IPs of all time? These are franchises that have had impact on you personally. Doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.
  2. What is your favorite console of all time?

Stories not required but will make your lists even more awesome. For me personally:

1. Halo - The first time I ever saw Halo, it was for 5 minutes at a Game Stop kiosk. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days however my ex was expecting a ring, I was doing a poor job saving up, so spending money on consoles was a no-go. A week later I picked one up while she was working. I somehow convinced her that my parents bought me an early birthday present when she came home. Her ring would be delayed.

Looking around the Halo ring or landing on the beach in the Silent Cartographer remains two of my top “oh shit!!!” moments of all time in gaming…and that’s only where it began. More importantly, Halo is where I’ve met a lot of my gaming friends over the years. From Halo game nights to trying to figure out what I Love Bees was to the most amazing gameplay level we cheered together…but never got to play (E3 2003), it’s been the most complete IP for me and it’s not that close.

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2. Metroid (the OG) - There is no Metroidvania. Only Metroid-likes. Metroid was the 2nd NES game I owned. The one that started a genre. Castlevania, a very good linear game, was the 3rd. So I can confirm there is no Metroidvania. Only Metroid and everything else that copied it. We all give Castlevania way more credit than it earned. What I remember most is the eerie music, finding my first secret pathway with a bomb and Metroid codes scattered throughout my house.

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3. Half Life (the OG) - Today’s PC Master Race really doesn’t understand what gaming superiority meant unless they had a power rig back in 1998. Yeah sure, you pay $1000s to get those extra frame rates and better hair physics today. When I played Half Life for the first time on a gaming PC, I thought I went to another dimension in gaming. From the opening crawl, no game has ever duplicated the immersion I felt the first time I explored Area 51. Will never look at a crowbar the same way again.

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4. Ninja Gaiden - This franchise is the only one to wow me across 3 different platforms. Very few games ever captivated me in a magazine the way the Ninja Gaiden preview in Nintendo Power did. Me and my brother carried that issue around until the pages melted away. When he finally got “our” birthday present on his birthday, it lived up to the hype and was the first game that truly humbled us.

The first time I saw it in the arcades, it’s stunned me. Everything else looked dated in comparison.

The first time I saw it on the OG Xbox, it once again wow’d me and set the bar for 3rd person action games.

I think it’s time for Ninja Gaiden to wow us again.

5. Dark Souls 3 - This is the only IP on the list that didn’t have the advantage of nostalgia. For nearly a decade, my gaming diet was mostly multiplayer and sports games. Sometimes I’d dabble with single player games but rarely stuck with any or beat any campaign outside of Halo. Then Dark Souls 3 was available on sale. After a couple hours of getting my head beat in by the first boss, I retired. Problem is when I’d look at it, it was like it was talking shit to me. I realized it was the only game I quit playing due to being hard rather than apathy. It challenged my character. So I decided I would beat the first boss, then retire. But the rush…man the rush of beating the first boss…I couldn’t stop after that. Somehow Dark Souls revived the old school gamer in me. Today I play lots of games from all types of genres because I learned that if you stick with something and give it a chance…like a real chance…well you never know what you’ll like.

Favorite Console Sega Genesis

  • Me to the new kid on the bus: “Do you like Sega Genesis”
  • New kid: “Yes”
  • Me: “Do you want to come over and play”
  • New Kid: “OK”

This is how a shy kid made his first real friend in High School…who’d go on to become my best friend. Years later after many hours crowded around small TVs trash talking in EA sports games, tearing off each other’s heads in Mortal Kombat, and taking turns fighting through levels in Streets of Rage or Shinobi, most of my best friends and many memorable moments were built around this console. Yes gaming is about games but nothing beats gaming’s special powers to pull people together. And that’s what Genesis did that Nintendidn’t.

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Hi everyone, I’m new here, gamer since 1983 with a MSX as my 1st computer, I love the idea of Xboxera! My fav 5 IP are:

1- Halo

2- Dark Souls (I’m in love with DS3 but serie as a whole is fantastic)

3- Zelda

4- The Evil Within (1st one is the greatest horror game ever, a mix between Inception and Chainsaw massacre)

5- The Witcher (W2 on 360 was fantastic and W3 on One X is a classic)

Favorite console would be Xbox 360 for so many reasons, but SNES is not far away

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Love this thread.

  1. Metal Gear Solid 1

I remember watching my dad play through this as a kid and being blown away by it. Sniper wolf, Psycho Mantis and the other countless memorable bosses. It really opened my eyes to how amazing games could be. From that point on it became my favourite gaming franchise and still is to this day.

  1. Tekken 2

So Tekken 1 was the first ever video game I’ve ever played. I have so many memories of playing Tekken games with my dad and siblings as well as my cousins whenever they’d come over. Tekken was that one game my entire family played together. However when it comes to picking a favourite Tekken it’s always a toss up between Tekken 2 and Tekken Tag 1. Ultimately i went with Tekken 2 because of its dark and moody tone that was never replicated again in other Tekken games. It still has my favourite soundtrack to this day

  1. Crash Team Racing

My favourite kart racer EVER! I can’t count the amount of hours i spent on this game as a kid it’s insane. I honestly struggle to enjoy mario kart because Crash Team racing was my first experience with kart racers and so everything after that just seems lackluster. I remember having mini tournaments on this game with my dad and brother. We had a pen and paper to record our results. Was an amazing game and I’m so glad it recently was remastered.

  1. Gears of War 2

Gears is my favourite Xbox first party franchise. It’s my favourite shooter franchise and my favourite online game. With Gears 1 i dabbled with multiplayer but it wasn’t until Gears 2 where i really started to get addicted to it’s multiplayer. I spent so many weekend nights playing this with my friends. I can still remember certain matches i had on this game so vividly. I do miss the hayday of the Gears games but i do love them all and still continue to play Geara Online to this day

  1. Grand Theft Auto IV

This may be the game i was most hyped for in my entire life. It didn’t quite reach the heights that teenage me thought it would but I still loved it. I basically lived in GTA online with my 13 man GTA crew. The amount of chaos and laughs that came from this game was insane. I was a regular on the GTA forums back then and all i could do back then was talk and think about GTA. One of my favourite franchises. I’d love to return to liberty city one day

Favourite console

This one is so hard to choose. It’s a toss up between PS1 PS2 and Xbox 360. I think I’ll go with the Xbox 360 however. It was my introduction to HD gaming, Online gaming and it’s when my gaming tastes started to diversify. Xbox 360 will be hard to top. Maybe Series X will top it.

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My top 5 games/franchises…

1. Halo At this point I’m so deep in the Halo universe that I believe it’s something I will always have around. I can’t get enough of any Halo related media, don’t get me wrong I’m middle aged and a father now so I don’t go grabbing all the collectables like Mega Construx etc but I’ve played everything, read everything and watched everything countless times. The novels for me are always a great read and add so much to the expanded universe.

My first experience with Halo was actually a surprising moment, My first OG Xbox was actually purchased pre-owned a year or so after launch as I purchased a GameCube at the beginning of that generation, I was swayed by the way PGR looked and many of the upcoming games, Halo wasn’t even on my radar at that point. Anyway I got the console home with a copy of PGR and Munches Odyssey, plugged it in and opened the drawer for a session of PGR. Low and behold there was a copy of Halo CE still in the disk drawer, I took it out and put it to one side and spent the afternoon playing the two games I had purchased, that evening I popped it in for the first time and ended up playing solidly the entire night and I’ve never looked back. Everything about that game was mind blowing I remember studying the incredible bump mapped surfaces and frankly the best looking grass texture I had every seen at that point and I’ve not stopped since. Almost 20 years later and I still go back to the campaign’s every single often just for a refresh.

2. Sonic Poor Sonic has had a bad time since the end of the Dreamcast but I have a little spot in my heart for the blue blue, Sonic on the Master System was the first game I ever played, it was Christmas '91 and I hastily unwrapped the Master System I had pointed out to my grandparents in the Argos catalogue and proceeded to ignore everyone for the entire day as I played through and finished the entire game. It began a journey I am still on to this day, Sonic was alongside me for the early years of this journey and was the first franchise I really dived into, I collected comics, toys, VHS videos of the TV series and everything else I could get hold of.

3. Forza I’ve always enjoyed a good racing game but I used to be strictly arcade racers, I dabbled a little in Gran Turismo on the PlayStation but could never really wrap my head around it. I picked up Forza pre-owned for the OG Xbox just because it happened to be on sale and boy did that open a world for me, from the get go I was blown away by the gorgeous graphics and sound, the customisation was incredible and the more I played the more I learned. Seven Motorsport games and four Horizon games later I still put a ridiculous amount of hours into this series, I love tuning the cars and seeing how my adjustments make a difference in hot laps. Turn 10 have managed to churn out almost perfect games with each new entry and Horizon really hit my love of both arcade and simulation racing in just the right spot. Like Halo this is a series I don’t think I will ever walk away from.

4. Burnout 3 I love the Burnout series having played the original and second entry on the GameCube then picking up Burnout 3 on the Xbox. It was Burnout 3 that really sealed the series greatness for me, everything about the game was exceptional, It looked great, felt great and sounded great. Takedowns were so satisfying and the soundtrack was exactly to my liking. I have played every entry in the series to date and even put 500+ hours into Paradise on the quest for 1000g on my original gamertag.

5. Metal Gear Solid What a game the original MGS was, I loved the more mature story, stealth mechanics and excellent boss battles, later entries in the series stood up really well but it’s the original that really stuck with me.

Favourite console…

Gamecube

Despite not having a single game or franchise in my top five I have to say the Gamecube is my overall favourite console, it had some incredible games that I have fond memories of to this day. Mario Sunshine, Wind Waker, Fzero, Lost Kingdoms, Star Fox Adventures are just some of my highlights of the console.

I have one funny/pretty bad story about the Gamecube, at the time I was a real bratty teenager that caused hell for my mother but as with all teenagers I was too selfish to notice. The Christmas after I got my GC I asked for Star Fox Adventures that Christmas and my mother agreed, I caught my mother wrapping it up one evening in December and instantly wanted to get my hands on it, that night I snuck downstairs and found the wrapped up game hidden in a cupboard with a bunch of other stuff and made the decision there that I would play before Christmas. I took it to the kitchen then surgically cut the tape and slid the game out if the wrapping, I took the disk from the box and replaced the empty case in the wrapping and retaped it very carefully and placed the now empty present back in the cupboard, I finished the game before Christmas even came around and tried my best to excitedly unwrap the empty box on Christmas day. My mother never found out :joy:

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Virtua Fighter, Phantasy Star series, State of Decay, Elder Scrolls series, OG non pvp forced no hand holding MMO’s (EQ, WoW vanilla/classic, etc)

Console is probably 360 since it’s the most played but I LOVED my Master System, Saturn and DC… hard call there.

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Ooof - tough one - top IPs - in no particular order:

  1. ID Software - OK its not an ‘IP’ but can I just lump classic Doom/Wolfenstein/Quake in together I grew up playing these games and I absolutely adore them.
  2. Wing Commander - again another PC fave from my youth - literally hundreds of hours fighting the Kilrathi with my friend from next door
  3. Tomb Raider - Oh man I love the games from the original on the playstation right up to the reboot (Shadow sucked though - sorry!)
  4. Battlefield - Man I love Battlefield - I’ve played every single game and since 3 all on console. My absolute go to Multiplayer.
  5. Destiny/Halo - Ok I’m cheating again but I can’t rip these apart really - I think Destiny has been my most played game this gen. Halo probably fairly close behind. Destiny’s MP is poor compared to Halos but Destiny had a hook that dug its claws in.

Favourite console: Hmmm my PC in mid/late 90’s. Its not a console and I’m CHEATING again. But my happiest memories of gaming are then. If I had to pick a console I’d say probably Sega Mega Drive (Genesis to you Americans).

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Favourite consoles - Dreamcast

Favourite Franchises:

  1. Virtua Series

  2. Zelda

  3. Halo

  4. God of War

  5. Street Fighter

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1. Perfect Dark

2. Ace Combat

3. Halo

4. Eternal Darkness

5. Banjo-Kazooie

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Favorite (and best) console of all time: Dreamcast

I honestly can’t give you a top 5 that I will be satisfied with.

  • Sonic The Hedgehog
  • Counter-Strike
  • Zelda: Ocarina of Time
  • Goldeneye
  • Halo

I’m still not satisfied with it.

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Top 5 series

Mario platformers. Always so excited to have new Mario platformers since i was a kid i just couldnt get enough. Day one everytime.

Halo. Day one everytime without fail.

Forza horizon and motorsport. Friggen love these 2 series. Cant wait to see them on series x.

Metal gear. Only started at the PSone game, have been in love with it since.

Warcraft. The old strategy games and WoW, really Blizzard at their best. Was hooked on wow for years and is my most played game by a fair margin.

Series I’ve fallen out with, probably Gears. Still love the single player but I just cant handle the MP anymore (im too old and too slow)

Also Zelda, used to be every game day one but BoTW bored me half way through. Hopefully botw 2 keeps my attention.

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  1. The Last of Us

Incredible single player campaign with powerful storytelling and characters. The online mode, called Factions was unique and underrated.

  1. Zelda (In particular Ocarina of Time)

This, along with Mario 64 and Goldeneye was just… Ahhh.

  1. Gears of War

The original game is still my favourite. I love the horror vibe it went with and the online multiplayer is always awesome. It’s a unique feeling ip, nothing else quite like Gears.

Gears_of_war_cover_art

  1. Half Life

The first ever game I played on my families home pc back in the late 90s. It blew me away. The sequel ain’t bad either :wink:

  1. Shenmue

I didn’t know what I was getting into with this game when I bought it day one. I had heard the buzz and just went and got it. Ended being my favourite game of all time. It hasn’t aged very well, but at the time it was in a league of it’s own.

Consoles

Sega Megadrive/ Genesis Nintendo 64 Sega Dreamcast Xbox 360 Xbox One X

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Without order:

  • Mass Effect
  • Halo
  • The Witcher
  • Borderlands
  • Forza
  • Splinter Cell
  • Assassins Creed
  • Souls Games (in particular Demons, Souls 1 & 2)
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I’m probably one of the rare few who doesn’t actually have an all-time list. Instead, I go based on generations and never mix them because to me, it’s weird having say an NES game with an Xbox 360 game. Different times, different tech, etc.

I do have an all time gaming console list though. Majority won’t like what my number one is but I can’t argue or deny as they’ve been completely dominant and given me a bunch of excellent 9.5/10 games that dominate my top five of the gen. My top 3 -

  1. PlayStation 4 (Won’t be official until I trade it in and done for me but it’s already #1 and nothing is going to change that for me)

  2. Xbox 360 (An excellent console. Loved Gears. Bought it for Splinter Cell Conviction which was my favorite game of last generation. All around excellent console)

  3. Super Nintendo (While I started with NES, it was Super Nintendo that completely wowed me as a teenager. Arguably the best launch lineup of all time or at least tied for best and still by far the best launch year of any console I have ever owned)

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  1. Kingdom Hearts
  2. Halo
  3. NCAA Football (Please come back!!!)
  4. Ghost Recon
  5. Total War Series

Xbox 360 for my favorite console.

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I’m gonna cheat here (maybe), but will still answer as honestly as possible.

I grew up a Nintendo kid. Starting with NES. Graduated to SNES - playing JRPGs like Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Illusion of Gaia, Earthbound, Super Mario RPG, etc.

I yearn for those days so heavily. That’s the dragon I’m chasing still when it comes to gaming: SNES RPGs. PS1 JRPGs were fantastic, but much of my nostalgia leans heavily to their 16 bit older brethren.

Sticking with my Nintendo fanboyism, I got a Gamecube as soon as it launched and adored that library, as well as the PS2. Eventually traded a friend something or another for his original Xbox and had all three major consoles at the time.

This is where I discovered something new, which captured my fancy like never before: The Western RPG

  • Deus Ex: Invisible War
  • Star Wars: Kinights of the Old Republic
  • Elder Scrolls: Morrowind
  • Fable

Suddenly - I felt that SNES rush again! The whole element of my decisions affecting the plot and outcome of the game were mindblowing to me at the time. People can crap on Invisible War all they want, but they weren’t there when little 13 year old me was discovering this massive universe for the first time. To this day - those remain my favorite IPs. That, Final Fantasy, and Devil May Cry, etc.So glad I can play all the Devil May Crys on Xbox and PC now - not an RPG but I love it so much.

In 2015 I built a PC and dove even further into western RPGs. I followed Nintendo and Sony all the way up to PS4 and Switch, but I eventually sold those off because they weren’t scratching my itch like their previous iterations had. I kept my PC and Xbox. I need a console to complement my PC to play NHL 20 - and Xbox does that just fine. Also Game Pass! Gears! Halo! Forza! It’s fantastic!

Xbox leaning so heavily into RPGs next gen has me ecstatic. That, and their dedication to backwards compatibility and supporting older hardware and a slew of consumer friendly business decisions enabling players to play however they feel will ensure my loyalty for years to come.

Thanks Phil.

So to answer the question.

Favorite IPs

  1. Final Fantasy
  2. Deus Ex
  3. Devil May Cry
  4. Elder Scrolls
  5. NHL

Favorite console: Original Xbox

Introduced me to western RPGs, SEGA goodness (JSRF and Panzer Dragoon!) , 7th gen RARE goodness, Halo, Xbox Live, HDD saves… even had an exclusive Buffy game! I played my favorite game (apart from maybe Chrono Trigger) Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic for the first time here. This thing was a beast! I love, love, love, Xbox you guys.

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Top 5 games

  1. Witcher 3
  2. Jet Set Radio: Future
  3. Mass Effect 3
  4. Guardian Heroes
  5. Skies of Arcadia

Favorite console of all time? This is tough. My instincts say Dreamscast. But the XBOX360 is like the Dreamcast in its final form. It’s between those two.

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Top 5 ips:

1- TLOU 2- Zelda 3- God of War 4- The Witcher 5- Halo hard tied with Mass Effect

Top consoles: 1- Ps4 2- X360 3- Switch 4- Ps2 5- Ps3

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  1. The Elder Scrolls
  2. Halo
  3. Final Fantasy
  4. Legend of Zelda
  5. Uncharted

Favorite console: Xbox 360

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In no order

  1. Halo
  2. Forza
  3. Call of duty
  4. Deus Ex
  5. Battlefield

Favourite console would have to be between the GBC or Xbox 360.

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  1. Halo 3
  2. The Last of Us
  3. Gears of War 3
  4. Red Dead Redemption
  5. Fallout New Vegas
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