It’s a Little Challenge to Hop from Nintendo to Sony

For many gamers, including myself, I started on Nintendo. It was a bit of a challenge trying to jump from Nintendo to Sony all because the game you want to play is a PlayStation exclusive. With the brand having reached its 30th anniversary yesterday, I want to talk about a gaming retrospective when it comes to deciding between either Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft.

For any gamer who began their life in the 1980s, Nintendo was almost always their first console, or an Atari 2600, if you go even further back. I came right at the turn of the millennium, and at the time, the sixth generation of consoles was starting to begin with the PlayStation 2 being released in Japan in March 2000. The very first console I ever owned was a Nintendo GameCube. You had to own a Nintendo console for a reason, and that was because they had some amazing exclusive games that weren’t found on Nintendo’s high-end rivals. In fact, many third-party games that are available on either PlayStation or Xbox are also available on Nintendo’s platforms!

I didn’t own my first PlayStation console until the early 2010s when I got a PlayStation Portable (PSP) for Christmas 2010, and I got a PS2 a few years later? Why? This was because I wanted to play Final Fantasy X, and it was the only console that had it at the time. The game has since been remastered on the PS4 and Nintendo Switch. In fact, playing Super Mario RPG on the Wii Virtual Console the year before made me want to play the Final Fantasy games.

When I first started, I couldn’t figure out which button was which. When I first started, I thought the Circle and X buttons would confirm and cancel respectively like in their original Japanese counterparts, until I powered the system on the first time and learned it was the other way around! It wouldn’t become the standard until the PlayStation 5 came out in 2020. Nowadays, every gamer knows that X is A, Circle is B, Triangle is Y, and Square is X. Sony intentionally went this way because they wanted the original PlayStation controller to be easily understandable to players who may have not learned to read yet!

What also added to the difficulty is the position of the button you use the most. That’s basically the X/A button. On Nintendo’s platforms, it’s on the outside. What about PlayStation? It’s on the inside. It was tough after having played the GameCube for several years and being used to tapping the button on the outside and later messing up the commands on the PSP!

That said, Nintendo’s rivals are high-end and more expensive. That’s why Nintendo’s platforms are low-cost and intended for newcomers. You would only get a PlayStation for the games you want to play.