I noticed it with Starfield. The game was obviously objectively shit, but there were still tons of people defending it online. Dig a little deeper and you quickly discover that most of them were just Xbox fanboys who were mindlessly shilling for their first big “next gen exclusive” over Sony.
Now I’m seeing the same thing with Astrobot. It is, by all indications, a solid platformer with very nice graphics. Look around the internet a bit and you find people calling it the best game of the generation, which is completely unhinged. But I guess that’s what happens when the console exclusives have been utter dogshit for almost an entire hardware cycle.
Seriously, this has been the worst condole generation of all time. They let the old systems anchor development like 3+ years too long, and what few big games they’ve developed for new hardware have been either woke trash or live service trash.
PC indie gaming is the only place to be.
I remember how I used to be adamantly against the Xbox 360 and Wii to a lesser extent during the 7th generation.
I thought that the PS3 looked like the best console that gen because it already had exclusives like Ratchet & Clank Future, Killzone, LittleBigPlanet, and MGS4 among others. I was also hyped for GT5; it looked like that was going to be a dream racing game.
I was very young and far too committed to being "cool", so I thought that if you liked one thing, you had to be against everything else like it. There was no in between, you picked a side and stuck to it; closing yourself off to the others.
I look back upon that time now and realize how short-sighted and silly that way of thinking was. Now that I own many consoles, I have learned to appreciate each manufacturer's strengths and like all of them for different reasons. I now know that there is nothing wrong with say, liking Nintendo for Mario, Zelda, etc; Microsoft for Forza and Halo; and Sony for their respective franchises.
I realized that you can enjoy all the consoles equally and that there is nothing wrong with that. That alone has made this gaming medium so much more exciting and compelling for me.
Point is, I think the idea of a console war is pointless and stupid. I think people that devoted to taking sides like that are missing out on many great experiences that could really connect with them.