Genesis: Phantasy Star II, full-stop. I pored over Game Players' coverage over and over. Look at that spread! Your first party member is a product of bioengineering! Man, I read that article so many times when I was a kid, and now I want to read it again.
Sega CD: The Lunars. I think I've told this story, but I was introduced to Lunar by a penpal who sent be a VHS tape he'd made of all the animated cutscenes. (He also started off the correspondence by sending me a FF3 cartridge right out of the blue.) He was the first person to whom I could talk about my love of RPGs, and we exchanged very long letters about all the 16-bit titles. I hope he's in a good place.
Saturn: I asked for one in anticipation of the 32-bit version of Lunar. Of course, a Saturn version of that game famously never came out in the West, so my Saturn became the machine on which I played Myst (and Resident Evil, though that didn't happen in earnest until many years later). I should apologize to my father for asking for it. $399 is no small amount today and was even less so back in the '90s; I think he bought it only because he was stuck for anything else to get me that year. My father also railed against my plan to buy PS3 for $80 or whatever back on release - "you could buy an entire accounting program for that!" - and while screenshots of the game's olive world eventually dissuaded me from that course of action, perhaps I should have learned to trust his judgment on Sega misfires.
N64: I got this but never used it. I wanted to play the Resident Evil games - 2, at least, though I had no particular affinity for 2. I had just heard that they had toned down the gore for the N64 release, which was a sticking point for me in the old days when it came to survival horror. (I went through Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare without hitting a single dog enemy.) That reticence eventually faded, of course, for better or worse. I can't quite reconcile this with my acquisition of the Saturn Resident Evil - perhaps I was trying to minimize the violence whenever possible. In any case, I never got that N64 copy of RE2 and didn't play the game until decades later on the PSP. The N64 is packed away somewhere, not having hosted a single game since its second-hand pawn-shop acquisition by me, unfortunately.
DS: Lunar: Dragon Song. (Or Genesis, since I got the Japanese version.) It was indeed bad, but I don't have the raging hate for this game that some fans do. It's too inconsequential, for one thing. There were umpteen Lunar continuities by this point (TSS, SSS, GBA, the novels, possibly the audio dramas), and this game didn't fit in any of them.
PSP: Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star. I've actually gotten way more use out of my PSP than I thought I would. I thought it would be Lunar and out, but I've used it to play numerous PS1 games I missed - Resident Evil 2 and 3, FF7, a number of Square's more questionable titles like Chrono Cross and Legend of Mana - plus otome games, retro compilations, puzzle titles... It's been a great little buddy throughout the years.
PS2: Silent Hill 2 (and 3 and 4). Probably the most prestige choice on this list. Unfortunately, the PS2 proved to be the most fragile of my consoles: I had to get it secondhand, as it was well into the PS3 generation that I got into Silent Hill. My initial purchase died prematurely and had to be exchanged, and though the replacement served me faithfully through many titles, the laser, or something, on it is now dead and has defied repair, with several major titles in my collection unplayed. I should just emulate, but it seems a waste to have the discs for so many games and not use them.
Gaming PC: OK, obviously, I had a PC before this game, but I did for the first time buy a gaming-spec laptop in anticipation of...NightCry. It didn't have top-of-the-line specs, and I needed a new machine at the time, but I did make a point of getting a mid-range gaming model and not just something built to handle a word-processing program so that the towering tech demo that is NightCry, which I Kickstarted, could be handled. NightCry had major problems, but I wasn't sorry we got that game. I got enough out of it to make it worthwhile.
PS4: Mass Effect: Andromeda. I saw the combat and thought it looked really fun. And it was really fun! I liked this game, despite the uproar. I know many say the choices weren't as impactful as the unplayed-to-me originals, and even without a point of comparison, I can see cause for , but I enjoyed the gameplay and the scenario and Planet Blood Dragon. It was a solid 7/10 for me.
Vita, kind of, in PSTV: Neo Angelique: Tears of an Angel, whose surface, despite my interest, I have barely scratched. I wanted to catalog my play experience (the bane of my forays into Angelique games), and I lost the text for my second post. I found the image files, and I want to get back into the game, even if it's with a replacement script for that second post, but another Angelique title (previously, the translation project for the SFC original; currently, Luminarise) is always beckoning. Mathias, man, I'll come to see you someday. Bring your dagger. It'll be happy stabs for everybody.
Switch: Deadly Premonition 2. *Sigh.* What story choices that game made. When it was over (or nearly over - I refused to go through with that choice at the climax and simply turned the game off, never to be played again), I sold it immediately. I just wanted it out of the house.
