I promised myself long ago that I’d never become biased toward any particular system until I’d played a fair share of games for it. I’m probably the only person that thinks this way…
Playstation: If a 32-bit system can still be popular after so many years, it’s got to have good games. And even you N64 fanatics have to admit, there are a lot of good Playstation games.
Nintendo 64: I’m sorry, but I really do not like Nintendo 64. When it came out, the graphics were pretty spectacular because of the texture filtering, but because of that, the polygons render verrrry sloowwly. I think it’s mostly because they even bothered to make the edges of the polygons blurred, which takes a helluva lot of time to draw. The result? A bunch of low-detail, blurry images, which gives you a very weird effect that looks like everything is made of marble. Compare the forest in Quest 64 with the jungles in Crash Bandicoot. The Crash jungles are easily 10x more detailed because they don’t need to bother with texture filtering.
Dreamcast: My favorite system so far. The Dreamcast is great, despite the fact that it’s not really 128-bit (64 bit game processor, 64 bit graphics processor.) The graphics on Dreamcast games are amazing. And they have a lot of kid-oriented games, too. I recommend Sonic Adventure (I could go on a full-page review of the good and bad things about SA), and Toy Commander (which is rather kid-oriented, except that it has quite a few military weapons. No blood though.) It also comes with a preinstalled 56k modem and a web browser CD (you can even use a preexisting ISP.) You can download stuff off the internet and save them to your VMU (including mini VMU games and add-ons for the games) And Sega has a policy saying that no game will ever be sold for more than $49.99, period.
Playstation 2: I still haven’t rented/bought a PS2, so I can’t give a full review exactly, but here’s the impression I get:
The Playstation 2 is basically as powerful as a Dreamcast. And I’ve even seen Dreamcast games that look much better than PS2 games (Toy Commander, for example.) The difference? Sony launched the Playstation 2 with a bunch of games that feature very high-detail objects, but not a lot of objects on the screen. i.e. fighting games, sports games, maybe an RPG or two. But the result is basically the same; the objects look slightly smoother, but it just shows that the PS2 game processor can’t handle as many objects on the screen at once as the Dreamcast. The system, and games, and also more expensive than Dreamcast.
Nintendo “Dolphin”/“Gamecube”/I forgot what they’re calling it nowadays: I saw a preview video for this a while ago. The graphics look very impressive. But the games…eh, personally I don’t care for another Mario game, or Zelda game, or another 50 Pokémon games, thank you very much. The only game that looked interesting was the Metroid game, but that’s not worth buying an entire system for.
My final vote: Dreamcast is the best buy. Okay, maybe that was a bit biased, but my conclusions aren’t totally unjustified.