It had to happen, with six PlayStations released, and the impending launch of the fifth PlayStation, which Nintendo/Xbox killer is your favorite? Feel free to list your personal rankings below!
0 voters
As a lifelong PlayStation Boy, this is really tough. I’ve owned and loved every one of these, and each of them was at a very different stage of my life. I learned to game on PS1, built lifelong friendships playing around PS2, went through my teen years on PS3, and PS4 keeps me connected to friends and family far away as an adult. Both handhelds were important and complimentary parts of their contemporary home consoles for me, too.
All of them have a lot of really fucking good games that have stuck with me my entire life. Some highlights:
PS1: My literal earliest memory is playing Crash Bandicoot. My brother and I became close playing Twisted Metal 3.
PS2: Endless hours of Timesplitters 2, Champions of Norrath, and Freedom Fighters with friends and my brother. The first single player game I ever beat was Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando. I learned to love Metal Gear Solid on this.
PSP: Patapon 2 multiplayer anywhere and everywhere, late into the night.
PS3: Booting up LittleBigPlanet and starting the game with four people is the most fun and laughs I’ve ever had gaming. Warhawk stands as my favorite multiplayer game of all time. Tons of fantastic first party single player experiences.
Vita: Gravity Rush - Kat and that soundtrack are unmatched. Tearaway was an absolute delight.
PS4: Bloodborne is the greatest game ever made. My brother and my best friend both live in different cities from me, and we’ve stayed in touch almost every night on PS4 with Rocket League, Fortnite, and Apex Legends.
There are so many more important life moments that revolve around these systems. It’s almost impossible to choose, so I’m just going to go with my first thought and say PS2. But I wouldn’t be wrong with any of the four consoles (I love the handhelds too but they know their place).
PlayStation and I were born in the same year and I’ve pretty much never been without it. Except I’ve had a lot of them stolen when my house was broken into, lol.
Cartoon mascot collectathon platformers was undeniably a fad and one that created far more failures than successes, but the greatest days of that fad were on the PS2 (minus the original Ape Escape on PS1 which might be the greatest of this genre).
While there are good games on the PS3 and everything I’m about to say is wildly speculative, the awful decisions made for the system architecture did untold amounts of damage to Japanese game development, as several smaller developers/publishers that survived on the reliability of the PS2’s tools and install base were put through the thresher with a system that didn’t function like anything else and which spent several years with a miserably low amount of owners, far less than could support the types of wickedly novel niche games on the PS2.
We’ve only started to see that industry pick itself back together via the comparatively great decisions made for the PS4, but the damage is already done.
With the caveat that I grew up with only Nintendo handhelds and have only really been able to explore older console games in the last couple of years, I have to go with the PS2. There’s just so much variety there in that generation of games that when I went back to play them I felt almost overwhelmed. It truly feels like big developers were able to be more experimental at that point, when games were still more of a niche interest and they didn’t have to make them as broadly palatable as possible.
This is way too tough for me to pick. I have such fond memories of all of these consoles and they’ve each played important roles during different parts of my life, but I think I’m going to have to settle on PS3 (PS Vita would be my runner up).
One of my most vivid memories from my entire Playstation history is from that generation, when I was at a Walmart and played Motorstorm at a demo kiosk. My brother and I used to play a bunch of those MX vs. ATV games on PS2, and this demo was a night and day difference. Along with the vast jump in visual fidelity, it just felt different in a way I can’t describe. But I knew then and there that this felt like a real generational shift and that I would be getting a PS3 (Motorstorm Pacific Rift would later become one of my and my brother’s most played games). Besides the games, another reason I love the PS3 so much is the introduction of the Playstation Network and with it, the Playstation Store, trophies, and ease of online multiplayer and connecting with people online.
PS4 isn’t just the best gaming console I’ve ever owned in terms of raw games on the machine, but it’s the best damn Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, and HBO Go box I’ve ever had. I haven’t played a PS4 since I finished FFVII Remake three months ago, and I still turn it on every day.
I love the UI, I love the controller. I hate that it doesn’t have buttons on the front, but whatever. Solid thing.
I’m still a little sore that we never got the UnKarted game.
I had to sit with this one a hot minute. I have fond memories of all of them, but there’s a special place in my heart for Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Prince of Persia, Sly Cooper, etc. Some of my favorite games ever, coming out every fall. I’m glad that my gaming tastes are a little more broad nowadays, but I’m overjoyed that the action platformer is still being kept alive by Insomniac. It feels like coming home.
I rank as follows:
My brother owned our PS2 and our parents expected us to share even though we were both horrible goblins and he put it in his room. Even so, we managed to play Jak & Daxter, Sly Cooper, Metal Gear Solid 2 & 3, God of War I & II, GTA: Vice City (Miami represent!) and San Andres, as well as Katamari Damacy. Those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. He played a bunch of football games. It’s probably the last time I remember getting along with him. I spent most of the time the PS2 was relevant wishing I owned my own, enough so that I ended up buying my own once the PS3 came out and they dipped in price.
I never owned a PS3, but I had friends who did, and we played through SO MUCH on that console. Okami, Resident Evil 5, 6 and Revelations (1 and 2). I would go over to my best friend’s house after work or college classes and we would just cook and eat and play games. Loved those days and miss them dearly. I was later gifted a PS4 and tbh the last time I remember playing it to any intense degree was when God of War came out. I played through Prey, some of Fallout 4 (imma be real w/ y’all i only built settlements), a lot of Let It Die, very little Bloodborne and even less Nier: Automata. I generally didn’t really know what I was supposed to be getting for the PS4, and b/c I got into an MMO and the prices were generally better for games on PC, I ended up slanting hard Steam and I haven’t really fucked with a console at length ever, really. I have 0 plans to get a PS5.
My order is PS3, PS2, PS4, because as much as I loved the PS2, memory associations are a helluva thing. I didn’t own a PSX b/c I lived in South Florida and I spent most of my time back then running around outside getting as dirty as humanly possible, secure in the knowledge that my muddy clothes were a problem for my parents to solve.
Shadow Hearts and Shadow Hearts 2 are way underrated JRPGs on PS2. I will never stop bringing them up whenever it’s relevant and often when it’s not.
PS4 on top PS1 on the bottom. PS2 and PS3 are a coin flip in the middle.
I technically still have all four hooked up to my TV.
PS2 is in argument for the best home console ever. So that’s an easy 1.
PSP is the best non Nintendo portable console ever. I’m a huge fan of portables so that’s aces.
That’s the list.
I guess for me PS1 is the next. And then PS4?
Vita and PS3 are the bottom. I could not even be bothered to own them.
I feel like it’s:
1 1
2 3
4 5
3 2
5 4
I gotta say, was not expecting such a lopsided result. I do wonder if it tells us anything about the average age of posters on this forum. 
So I’ve only really played a couple of games on each PS system with the exception of the PSP, so it’s all kinda recency bias and which games I liked the most. That said:
1, Vita: Beautiful OLED screen, Wipeout 2048, Gravity Rush, done. Thought about putting it below PSP since that has more games I like and playing them on Vita is a pain, but it can still do it and I like the hardware better.
2, PSP: Definitely the PS system I’ve played the most. Wipeout Pure/Pulse, Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, LocoRoco, Space Invaders Extreme, Persona 3 Portable (I played P4G on Vita first but P3P has held up a lot better of the two for me). Also was an impressive system before I had a DS.
3, PS3: Uh, it mostly became a Wipeout HD, SingStar and general media machine after I beat Persona 5, but it’s extremely good at those things. Oh, and I played Burnout Paradise on PS3 so that’s nice.
4, PS4: I don’t have one but I played so much Wipeout Omega Collection on a friends. So much.
5, PS1: I have never played on an actual PS1, but I have played Wipeout 2097 and Metal Gear Solid which are still good games, so that’s what the PS1 has going for it.
6, PS2: I mostly played this at friend’s houses when I was pretty young - a lot of Battlefront II, SingStar, and a Crazy Frog kart racer? Also Wipeout Fusion which I don’t remember being very good (but also I was bad at Wipeout then). This is at the bottom because there’s nothing I’d want to play the PS2 version of and I think PS2 games look kinda bad.
Looking back, I think the PS2 era was something special. There was a ton of experimentation about what games on a home console could do. Lots of games from Japan made it to the west via that console too, which opened up a whole world of things. I respect that it might well be the ultimate PS platform for most people who played during that era.
I voted PS3, because I honestly had more fun with PS3 era games. I bounced hard off some of the games that defined the PS2 era. MGS2, GTA3, and FFX didn’t click with me. I was having a better time with the games that were available for the Dreamcast. Soulcalibur, Jet Set Radio, Marvel vs Capcom, the Powerstone games, Jet Set Radio, Skies of Arcadia, etc… And for experimental, labour of love games, well, there was the PC world.
To be fair to it, I did play my PS2 enough to find out that it was a lemon. Part of that was playing more Tekken Tag Tournament than any healthy person should. I had to open that case ever other week to fix the laser alignment. Games like Shadow of the Colossus, Ico and God of War were absolute greats.
PS3 though, is when I played Demon’s Souls, Red Dead Redemption, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Infamous, etc… It also never quit. When I finally gave it a way to the children’s hospital, it was still playing just as well as it did when I bought it. I had a hardware BC version from launch. I almost never used that feature: when I sat down to play, there was always a PS3 game that I wanted to play more than a PS2 one.
Yea the laser in my original PS2 also gave out eventually as well and started giving me DREs on most PS2 games. Happened kinda mid-generation so there was a bit of a gap where all I could play were PS1 games until I was able to save up enough money to buy a slim (that still works.)
I think I have three different answers to the question of “Favorite Playstation”
On the one hand, 2008-09 is roughly the time I started taking gaming seriously as a hobby. I played a lot of games before that, yeah, but this was the first time I was able to “keep up” as it were. Stuff like Fallout 3, New Vegas, Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, GTA IV, Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age Origins, MGS4 and so on, were like major experiences for me. So I could say the PS3 because of sheer personal impact and nostalgia.
But on the other hand, when I think of an objectively stacked lineup, it’s impossible to not default to the PS2. The sheer amount of truly incredible, iconic, revolutionary, games on that platform feels like a lightning in a bottle situation that could never be replicated. Katamari, the Ratchet & Clank trilogy, Shadow of the Colossus, MGS 2 and 3, Okami, Persona 3, Ace Combat, God of War 2, FF10, 10-2 (dress spheres ruled, shut up), and 12 and I can go on literally forever. Not to mention that fact that it could play DVD’s and music CD’s, which for me, was like stepping into the far-flung future.
But on the other other hand, damn if I don’t find everything about the fifth generation of consoles fascinating. Developers trying to square that round hole of early 3D development are my favorite stories to read about the history of games. Like, how exactly did Hideo Kojima convince people the original Metal Gear Solid wasn’t an awful idea, because it certainly seems like one on paper. The PSX, like the Saturn and N64 to be fair, has such a “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” vibe and I love that. Even if it feels like a nightmare to go back to some of those games now.
Vita 4 lyfe
Most of its greatest games were ported to other systems, and it mostly became a dumping ground of ports from other systems, but damnit I still love my little back-touching baby.
Respect to a huge WipEout fan 