Wouldn’t this criteria make PS2 and Xbox “peak gaming” also? I remember playing CoD online on PS2 and many praising Xbox for its online features.

Once PS3 and Xbox 360 came in picture, things changed slightly since they relied more heavily on their network services… albeit, PSN back then was free for online gameplay. These were on the same generation as Wii, but Wii was a winner for casual playing.

Dreamcast came with a modem and an optional Ethernet adapter 8 years earlier. The GD-ROM was too clever by half. But perhaps it was the prototype of peak game consoles. I have a soft spot because the home brew scene on that started a full quarter century ago.

> The Wii was truly the peak of gaming consoles.

everyone says that about their childhood :)

For me it's the (New) 3DS. It's about the peak for handheld gaming. It can run GB, GBC, NES, SNES very well, GBA can run natively and obviously DS/3DS. You can run pretty much any Zelda game up to the GameCube on it with the official ports of Ocarina/Majora. The emulation community also has some promising demos of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, but who knows about that. I have a Switch and it's frustrating seeing games that Nintendo haven't released for it (like WW and Pokopia), but maybe after a decade I'll get a Switch 2 OLED whenever that comes out.

I'll forgive you for thinking Wii was the peak because people are obviously biased based on the time they grew up. For me it was the SNES/Genesis era. Or arguably PlayStation 1.

The motion controls make it age really poorly imo (motion controls aren't bad, but forced motion controls to do anything is)

Agree to disagree on the Wii. It was fun, but the poor thing got a lot of dust in our households. A bit too gimmicky for us. Doubly so for the Wii U.

not every console stays connected to my tv... and wii stayed. wii sports is still fun and get everyone moving during a rainy day which is quite an achievement all by itself

The Wii was the first era where game discs came with console firmware updates that were silently installed and could lock you out owning your device.

> so quality was at a higher standard

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I don't disagree, but the wii remote market was/is the absolute worst console device market.