amiga, snes and megadrive were all equals (in my opinion) although I personally loved the Amiga most.. simply because I had such a huge collection of games on it.
But yea, it was the golden age of gaming for me also.
I think of the SNES-N64 days as the golden age. SNES had awesome 2D games and introduced me to video games, and on the rare occasion I went to someone's house who had an N64, it astounded me how awesome 3D was. I can remember thinking Donkey Kong 64, Mario Party 2, and SM64 were so amazing. And the redeads in OoT scaring me. The gamecube era was also very mysteriously alluring, I loved watching my friend play Wind Waker. Now since I have the systems it's still fun, but not nearly as unique and interesting. It's hard to explain.
16-bit = defo the golden age for gaming! I remember the excitement of all those "3D" games that started to appear on the Mega Drive and SNES (Virtua Racing, StarFox and Stunt Race FX), bringing in another milestone of gaming. It was at this point you felt as though gaming couldn't get any better, with the perfection of 2D and the introduction of 3D graphics.
Wow! I'm glad so many people agree with me that it was the golden age of gaming! Even though it had an occasional 3d, I would still call it the peak of 2d games. BTW, I also really enjoyed Final Fantasy 6(aka 3), even though I was never a Final Fantasy fan. All of the Megaman X games were great. Anybody ever a fan of Secret of Mana? I loved that game! It's got a japanese sequel that's even more polished and well made called Seiken Densetsu 3. It's definitely worth your time to look for a good translated rom of it
And of course, I can't beleive I forgot this the first time around...I feel a little ashamed...
EarthBound! Earthbound still remains one of my favorite games of all time! The characters were so enjoyable and the plot was good, and extremely goofy at some points. How could you not laugh at the concept of Trout Yogurt? Boing! It was one of the few RPGs I felt like I could play through completely without wanting to play something else. Many games get sloppy towards the end. Earthbound doesn't! I've got so many fond memories of it, so much that, I'm even making a tribute to it.
us lot from the UK weren't so overwhelmed with Nintendo. I'm not sure if it's the same for the rest of europe but the Nes and Snes were both far too late to make a huge impact. I can think of about 2 people that owned a Snes and a Few that owned a Nes but way more that owned Master systems Megadrives. Although the Gameboy was epically popular, a fair few had Game gears.
I can't think of many people that owned Amigas although it was really popular here (i know no one that had an atari st though)
In the US video games and Nintendo are synonymous. Or at least they were. My mom and gramma call all video games nintendos and I'd never heard of an Amiga until I got internet. I knew what the master system was, but I still only know of one person who owned one.
Almost everyone here had a SNES, GB and Gamecube. I only knew 1 other person with a Mega Drive.
We all had Amiga's too. Ours was a 600, neighbours had a 500, 500+ and a 1200. Some had hard drives and extra floppy drives, think we had a memory expansion. But literally everyone had 1 flavour.
Not many had a NES and only 1 kid had a Game Gear.
Well, I wasn't even aware of consoles when i was really young. I was quite happy with my dad's Amstrad cpc. Then one day my grandparents gave us their old Atari 2600. After being used to waiting up to 15 minutes for games to load from audio cassettes, instant loading cartridges were just amazing.
It turns out of of my friends from middle school used to own a zx Spectrum because one day he decided to give me some games. Obviously they didn't work on my Amstrad, lol.
I'm not that old, so my first video game experiences were playing games on SEGA Megadrive and Commander Keen on DOS, then I got a PlayStation.
I didn't own a SNES I was a Gameboy kid though, Gameboy, GBC, GBA, GBASP, NDS Lite.