Richard Leadbetter has mentioned several times that where the current generation of dedicated video game systems-- made in an era where people thought tablets were the future-- were created with conservatism in mind, this incoming crop of systems have been formulated with optimism as the key ingredient: dedicated to pushing hardware envelopes to the bleeding cost-performance red line. He's correct: but it goes even further than that.

In 2012, I sold a PlayStation 3, with which I was bored, and bought a Wii U, simply for lack of anything more interesting to spend the Gamestop store credit on. I liked the Wii U more or less, and in fact it was the first time-- however briefly, in the Wii U's case-- since the Nintendo 64 that the Big N had the most powerful console on the market.

But in general, the Wii U was never anything more than a "well why not" purchase, versus a system I was particularly passionate about. When the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One landed a year later, I simply couldn't have been less interested in those: they felt like marginal upgrades from the Wii U, the software in the hobby felt very derivative and lacking in innovation, while the experience in general had the overwhelming sensation of "more of the same, with a slightly prettier coat of paint."

I did eventually buy a used Xbox One at a low price, but got bored with it quickly, and sold it. "What happened to the days of the Xbox 360?", I wondered?

The Xbox 360 was an incredibly innovative machine: it had full 16:9 HDTV support across the board; it invented the concept of "Achievements"; it invented the concept of having a parallel library of smaller, digital games ("Xbox Live Arcade"); and the graphics were a jaw-dropping leap over the original Xbox-- remember "Oblivion", or the spider crawling out of the cave ceiling in "Gears of War"?

When I watched this; video earlier today, it immediately invoked the sensation that these new systems are on the Xbox 360 side of the spectrum, versus the opposing PlayStation 4 end-- to put it mildly: many of these new user interface features are absolutely game changing, and simply would not have been possible at any earlier junction.

And that's not even getting to the hardware: RTX 2070-to-2080 levels of performance, with real-time ray tracing, and better-than-PC levels of IO and memory bandwidth. Obviously "Ampere" puts them to shame, and with DLSS even "Turing" is faster in supported games-- but the leap from the PlayStation 4 Pro to the PlayStation 5 is substantial, as I realized yesterday while flipping through my catalog of screenshots on the former. And that's before the ever-present "targeted one set of specs console-specific" enhancements are taken into account.

But there's even more: for the first time in my entire life, "old" games really are feeling "old"; the real-time Machine Learning and AI integration in the new "Flight Simulator" has totally opened my eyes, and for the first time since the shift to texture-mapped polygons, I think we're going to see game software match the sentiment I laid out above regarding system software: these new kinds of games will fundamentally, at their most basic levels, not have been possible at any earlier point in history.

I'll forever love the sheer artistry, authenticity, and originality of games like "Sonic the Hedgehog" or "Star Control II"-- and I think those will always be the ageless classics I continue to replay over and over as the years roll by. But on the flip side, I've noticed that 2020 is the first year where I've found myself playing very few old games on a day-to-day basis, relatively-- and I think that's a testament to new games finally starting to do fresh things again.