My personal favorite would have to be the SNES. For its time, it had incredible hardware, augmented in certain games by the inclusion of Super FX chips in the carts, among other chips. It spawned many of the greatest games ever made, namely, Final Fantasy VI, Super Mario World, Mega Man X, and Chrono Trigger, though that list barely scratches the surface of the tip of that iceberg. Homebrew mods are still being developed today. Something I found amusing is that the system was specifically designed so you couldn't balance your drink on it. NES owners would do that, which ended up ruining the console when they spilled.
SNES is an easy choice. I plugged mine in awhile ago because I found a pawn shop selling a bunch of games. I don't recall The Lion King being that stupidly hard, and I definitely recall being able to finish that before. Maybe I'm getting slow. Also, the Donkey Kong Country series has some of the best music ever, those remixes will never get old ever.
I never had an SNES... cause SEGA did what NINTENDIDNT. Really, I wish I had an SNES but I grew up with a SEGA. I can remember playing any Sonic game and Super Thunder Blade the most. Oh and Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition.
I grew up with an NES, so I'm a little biased. All I had was an NES when every other kid had a PS1/N64, so I'm even more biased. But I think seeing early games in almost every genre and the implementation of ideas that are now commonplace in most games is what sways me the most.
Well, I can't say that's my favourite console, but like others, when we was little we didn't have choice ^^ For me that was only PC, yep, a pentium mmx 133mhz with 2go scsi hard drive and a matrox gpu with 4MB of vram, i was the king with that XD When others was buying a game around 60€ i was asking my dad for grabing a floppy disk from one of his friend that was downloading games on 56kb/s dsl connection The good old time with only sometimes a little serial to enter and play I was never capable to understand why people like console ... It's only done for games, hardware is always 3 years retarded than PC hardware and games are more expensive ! More, even the N64 wasn't able to do the 576i, on pc we was already on 1024p