Worst console ever?

punqsux

punqsux

CAGiversary!
Feedback
88 (100%)
what do you guys think is the worst console ever?

im gunna wait to announce my, because you guy might remind me of something that sucks even more lol, but right now im thinking atari jaguar
 
[quote name='MrBrando']Phillips CD-i, I can't believe I actually wanted that thing.[/quote]

haha yeah i can remember wanting that too
 
I know its technically not a system, but the tiger hand helds that could only play one game were pretty bad. Looking back, I bought so many of those I could've gotten a gameboy instead.
 
[quote name='dcfox']I know its technically not a system, but the tiger hand helds that could only play one game were pretty bad. Looking back, I bought so many of those I could've gotten a gameboy instead.[/quote]
lol same here, but eachof those was the same price as a Gb game. Worst system? hmmmm, Im gonna have to say saturn I fucking hated it.
 
virtual boy didnt suck, the games it had were fun (for the most part) it just suffered from not getting any support, and having a high price point, i mean even nintendo didnt support it that much!!

but it has its fair share of good games, like mario clash, nesters funky bowling, mario tennis, there were a couple others i liked as well
 
[quote name='BigNick'][quote name='dcfox']I know its technically not a system, but the tiger hand helds that could only play one game were pretty bad. Looking back, I bought so many of those I could've gotten a gameboy instead.[/quote]
lol same here, but eachof those was the same price as a Gb game. Worst system? hmmmm, Im gonna have to say saturn I shaq-fuing hated it.[/quote]

The Saturn is only good if you are willing to import. If not then it is a pretty lackluster system.
 
[quote name='BigNick'][quote name='dcfox']I know its technically not a system, but the tiger hand helds that could only play one game were pretty bad. Looking back, I bought so many of those I could've gotten a gameboy instead.[/quote]
lol same here, but eachof those was the same price as a Gb game. Worst system? hmmmm, Im gonna have to say saturn I shaq-fuing hated it.[/quote]

when saturn came out, i HATED it. why? because i was 12 and loved playstation. simple as that, i wished nothing but bad luck on saturn games, but i for one a few years later, and you know what? its a fun system.

its an aquired taste tho, but there's a good number of domestic games that were just great games. most are kinda pricey now tho (at least for cheap asses, id still rather pay 50$ for dragon force disc only used than van helsing Xop )
 
Game.com was much more fun that the original Game Boy. If only it was supported more. Castlevania SOTN (played a Demo ROM got it from Rom World) was sick...if that came out I woulda been SOLD.

Worst system...I HATED The N64 but I'll say The Pippin.
 
[quote name='MauMauProductions']Game.com was much more fun that the original Game Boy. If only it was supported more. [/quote]
You could say the same thing about the Game Gear, Neo Geo, and the Wonderswan. I wonder if 10 years from now people will be talking about the N-Gage and Tapwave the same way.
 
[quote name='MauMauProductions']Game.com was much more fun that the original Game Boy. If only it was supported more. Castlevania SOTN (played a Demo ROM got it from Rom World) was sick...if that came out I woulda been SOLD.

Worst system...I HATED The N64 but I'll say The Pippin.[/quote]

the most powerful system in the world dosent matter if it dosent have good games....look at xbox :wink:
 
I have to second the sucking of the Vboy.


What better way to spend your afternoon than staring into something that makes you blind? The quality of the games dosent matter if the system is burning your retinas with bright red LED.
 
[quote name='punqsux'][quote name='MauMauProductions']Game.com was much more fun that the original Game Boy. If only it was supported more. Castlevania SOTN (played a Demo ROM got it from Rom World) was sick...if that came out I woulda been SOLD.

Worst system...I HATED The N64 but I'll say The Pippin.[/quote]

the most powerful system in the world dosent matter if it dosent have good games....look at xbox :wink:[/quote]

Ohhhh bbbuuuurrrrrnnn
 
[quote name='Alpha2']I have to second the sucking of the Vboy.


What better way to spend your afternoon than staring into something that makes you blind? The quality of the games dosent matter if the system is burning you retinas with bright red LED.[/quote]

gaming > retinas
i wonder why my eyesight is so bad... :whistle2:k
 
Game.com by far.

The CD32 is great if you have the right games. Just don't expect anything to take full advantage of the hardware. It's kinda like a 16-bit console really.

The Saturn was great here in the states. Guardian Heroes, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter 1 & 2, SF Alpha 1 & 2, Panzeer Dragoon (all of them), and plenty more.

The V-Boy had some great soft too. Don't knock until you've played all the way through Wario Land, Panic Bomber, and V-Tetris (import).
 
[quote name='punqsux'][quote name='Alpha2']I have to second the sucking of the Vboy.


What better way to spend your afternoon than staring into something that makes you blind? The quality of the games dosent matter if the system is burning you retinas with bright red LED.[/quote]

gaming > retinas
i wonder why my eyesight is so bad... :whistle2:k[/quote]
Is that why you have the eyepatch? Just had to get in a few extra minutes on the V-Boy. But no matter how much you knock the Virtual Boy it's by far not Nintendo's worst business decision. For those who read Game Over might remember Nintendo's venture into love hotels.
 
[quote name='CaseyRyback']The Saturn is only good if you are willing to import. If not then it is a pretty lackluster system.[/quote]

I'd have to disagree there. I had around 30 games for my Saturn, all of which I loved, and only 8 of which were imports. If you loved the Capcom fighting games, you had to import.

My vote for the worst ever would have to be the Atari Jaguar. Nothing I played on that was even remotely fun, and the POS had the worst controller I've ever seen. A close second would be the CD-i. And I'd say that the 32X should be somewhere on the list of worst consoles, but definitely not the worst. At least 32X had Kolbri, which was possibly the finest humming-bird based shooter I've seen.
 
If it's a system from an established company with deep pockets that simply should have known better, the prize has to go to the Nintendo Virtual Boy. This practically had the word 'DOOMED' printed in 288 point type on the front of the package.

In a business venture you can typically survive one major flaw but not two. The Virtual Boy had two major flaws in that it had a very high price for what it was and it had a terrible lack of a must-have game until well after rigor mortis had set in. If the price were $125 or under it could have held out much longer on sheer novelty until worthy software was produced. Alternately, the presence of a must-have Nintendo franchise would have sustain a lot of sale until the price be brought more in line with mainstream interest. With those two failing working against it simultaneously there was never any hope.

When Blockbuster was getting rid of their rental units (packed with all the accessories in a nice carrying case) for $20 and the game for $2 each I bought a dozen or so to use as gifts. Most of the recipients weren't up enough on the game scene to know what it was so they were utterly blown away.

A close runner up is the Nokia N*GAGE. The idea that this product went into production with the stunningly idiotic design that required removal of the battery to change game cards suggest a incredible among of arrogance within the company in that they apparently conducted almost no serious testing with potential buyers. Going farther back, it's simply stunning that they even got past the blueprint stage without someone pointing out what a horrible design flaw they'd incorporated.

I cannot award the Nokia the grand prize since they've already produced a replacement model that correct most of the implementation flaws. The product may still become a profitable platform.

The Atari Jaguar gets much more abuse than it deserves. In its day it offered a lot of capability the incumbent 16-bit systems couldn't touch. It points out a very important aspect of console marketing. Atari's #1 problem is that they simply didn't have the necessary capital resources needed to make a new platform viable. This same lack of capital is the doom of a number of potentially great devices like the Tapwave Zodiac. The price of properly marketing a new game platform, both to developers and players, starts at $1 Billion. If you can't command that kind of financial resources you're dead before you've even begun.
 
[quote name='karmapolice620']^^You didnt say which one you vote for...You just went on rambling about different ones and never said a pick...[/quote]

cd-i was a good nomination, but i think my pick is the jaguar, i cant think of anything id even want to play on it
 
OTOH, love hotels are a well established business in Japan and Nintendo's investment in those was likely less than they spent on the company who produced the Virtual Boy technology, nevermind the cost of manufacturing all those units software.

Once again, I must defend the Jaguar and state that it had a number of very enjoyable games, some of them even exclusive. I say this as someone who has owned nearly every system ever offered in the US since the early 80's.

By virtue (?) of its failure overall the Jaguar certainly belongs on the list but all the entries should be made with some perspective and appreciation of each console's specific flaws rather than a blanket "It sucks!"
 
Perhaps someone should create a comprehensive list for a poll. There can be different categories for the nature of the failure. For instance, for a lot of folks the failure of the NUON stealth console within a DVD player would score high in the "Who?" category.

Anyone remember the name of the Pioneer Laser Disc system that took plug in modeules to handle Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 games? It had a genlock feature that let it overlay objects from the game system over FMV for its exclusive games. It was kind of nifty actually but doomed by its very high price, which was around $1400 with both Sega and NEC modules, IIRC.
 
Is it fair to rate hybrid machines along with those that are primarily dedicated to gaming? I mean sure NUON can play games but so can other dvd players. There even have been games made for the VCR (not sure how that would work myself but I've seen them on ebay). Maybe there should some restrictions on what is considered a gaming console.
 
CD-i was a good example of a perfectly good system that was killed by its own parent's bad decisions. It actually did a fair amount of business in some markets. The worst single thing Philips did was to forbid developers to create console-style sprite oriented games. There wasn't great hardware support for such but the sheer horsepower and resolution of the system was so much greater than what else was available when it first hit the market that it still could have had some very impressive games that attracted console gamers while still offering all of those other items that reached beyond the console market into the realm of CD-ROM (which was still far from universal then) equipped PCs without any of the hassles.

Philips was so determined that their product not be mistaken for a overgrown Nintendo that they completely cut themselves off from a critical portion of the market. Like so many others, by the time they wised up and starting trying to do things right it was too late. Too much bad word of mouth and the arrival of the Sony Playstation (the first truly successful CD-ROM based game system in the US) made it impossible to get back that critical market lead time they'd once enjoyed.

I've got a CD-i that Philips me sent with the MPEG-1 decoder module. They were trying to make a software and modem package that would let a CD-i act as a WebTV sort of device. THe MPEG decoder was needed because it added a megabyte of RAM to the system which was desparately needed for the task of web browsing. It was pretty miserable, as you'd probably expect but it did work and did some things better than the Dreamcast software even though this was only a early beta. They never sent a final version but they also never asked for the hardware back. When Best Buy was selling CD-i games and movies for 50 cents I built a very nice instant library.

A lot of my former co-workers from Cinemaware spent time working on CD-i titles. Most of them had gotten to the 'married with children' stage of their lives and found it was much more important to work for the company least likely to bounce a check rather than the one with the coolest rig as they had in their Amiga.
 
Yes, there have been some DVD games but they are of a very limited sort, using the underlying menu system to handle simple branching and plying a chunk of video for that branch until the next decision point.

In other words, Dragon's Lair and not much better.

NUON was far more than that. They used a fairly unconventional architecture that was becoming fashionable at the time but has failed to appear in any reallt successful products. The MPACT chips were also based on VLIW. The company who produced those, Chromatic, was bought out by ATI and their engineers put on completely different projects. Nowadays, the only VLIW product that gets much attention is Transmeta's line of CPUs which have been of dubious value to date.

Nuon didn't have the kind of structure you'd recognize from a sprite or 3D polygon oriented video system but it could do some pretty good stuff. Tempest 3000 was pretty spectacular, albeit a simple classic game enshrouded in spectacular effects. The kart racing game was pretty decent but bizarrely featured a cast of characters with no established visual recognition factor, just names from the Arthurian mythos. Iron Soldier 3 was a pretty fun mech game for the era.

None of it was going to give Sony or Nintendo nightmares but that wasn't the idea. The intent was to create market for DVD with much more than just movies and associated documentaries onboard. Getting the movie and the game of the movie on a single disc was what they were hoping to see as a big enticement to movie studios.

What ultimately doomed NUON, before anything else could, was the price of plain DVD players. This dropped at a much faster rate than they'd expected while the NUON took much longer than planned to reach the market. By that point the product just wasn't very compelling. When the PS2 came out with DVD playback as a subsidized freebie there wasn't the slightest shred of hope for NUON to ever build a nice little niche market.
 
Speaking of games for VCRs, that raises a whole other kind of failed system. Game console than were fully developed with a small library ready but never released.

My favorite is the Hasbro Isyx. This was a box that went in between a VCR and a TV. It had full quality FMV before the first CD-ROM console add-ons were produced. The tape was split into four video tracks to allow all kinds of branching tricks.

This was the platform on which the tempest in a teapot game 'Night Trap' was originally created, along with 'Sewer Shark' and the make your own video series. There was also a sharpshooter.SWAT/assassination sort of exercise in the prototype sample we had but I don't think that ever became a game on another system. All the rest were eventually released as CD-ROM games on the Sega-CD, 3DO, and others.

Basically, Hasbro thought they had a great product but couldn't get the price below $300. They felt this was guaranteed to kill the product so they junked the whole project before going to the manufacturing stage.
 
My vote goes out to the original NES, and here is why:

Sure the games were incredible, as many will find out when some more get rereleased in the coming months, but the system was a piece of crap. Many people I know nowadays complain about the PS2 disc read errors as being the end-all, but old school gamers will surely remember that constant twitching red light. The only reason I bought 3 NES systems was because the games were so addictive. To this day, there has not been a poorer model than the first NES.
 
:eek: :eek: :eek: Epobirs, I haven't read a single one of your posts. Damn, those are long. I'm sure you have some good insight into this but I'm too lasy to read that much. Too much work. :wink:
 
[quote name='MauMauProductions']Game.com was much more fun that the original Game Boy. If only it was supported more. [/quote]

WTF? Are you sure you're talking about Game.com??? I own one of those bastards (I know, I know...I was about 7 when it came out and thought it looked cool) and the framerate almost never goes above like 15 fps. The damn thing is impossible to use! At least the Game Boy actually gave the illusion of movement. :?

Anyway, I vote Game.com.
 
[quote name='manofpeace20']My vote goes out to the original NES, and here is why:

Sure the games were incredible, as many will find out when some more get rereleased in the coming months, but the system was a piece of crap. Many people I know nowadays complain about the PS2 disc read errors as being the end-all, but old school gamers will surely remember that constant twitching red light. The only reason I bought 3 NES systems was because the games were so addictive. To this day, there has not been a poorer model than the first NES.[/quote]

Yes, NES systems never lasted more than a few years. I remember the sad, slow deterioration of my first gaming console, but that was because of the moving parts that Nintendo for some reason thought was a good idea. Reliability-wise, yes, the NES was not an example of a well-built system. But look at what it did to the gaming industry! The games themselves were revolutionary. You wouldn't have PS2 or Xbox today if not for the NES--it saved a defunct, downhill fad from being just that.
 
[quote name='manofpeace20']My vote goes out to the original NES, and here is why:

Sure the games were incredible, as many will find out when some more get rereleased in the coming months, but the system was a piece of crap. Many people I know nowadays complain about the PS2 disc read errors as being the end-all, but old school gamers will surely remember that constant twitching red light. The only reason I bought 3 NES systems was because the games were so addictive. To this day, there has not been a poorer model than the first NES.[/quote]

the only problem with your philosophy is that all that is bad are the pins and replacment pins cost 8 bucks or you can just bend the ones in your system back to fix the problem.
 
[quote name='The Cheapest Ass Gamer'][quote name='manofpeace20']My vote goes out to the original NES, and here is why:

Sure the games were incredible, as many will find out when some more get rereleased in the coming months, but the system was a piece of crap. Many people I know nowadays complain about the PS2 disc read errors as being the end-all, but old school gamers will surely remember that constant twitching red light. The only reason I bought 3 NES systems was because the games were so addictive. To this day, there has not been a poorer model than the first NES.[/quote]

Yes, NES systems never lasted more than a few years. I remember the sad, slow deterioration of my first gaming console, but that was because of the moving parts that Nintendo for some reason thought was a good idea. Reliability-wise, yes, the NES was not an example of a well-built system. But look at what it did to the gaming industry! The games themselves were revolutionary. You wouldn't have PS2 or Xbox today if not for the NES--it saved a defunct, downhill fad from being just that.[/quote]

I can't see all the heavy heat on the blinking issue. My 15 year old NES systems (three or so) have the problem, but it's just an annoyance at best and doesn't hinder me indefinitely.
 
[quote name='CaseyRyback'][quote name='manofpeace20']My vote goes out to the original NES, and here is why:

Sure the games were incredible, as many will find out when some more get rereleased in the coming months, but the system was a piece of crap. Many people I know nowadays complain about the PS2 disc read errors as being the end-all, but old school gamers will surely remember that constant twitching red light. The only reason I bought 3 NES systems was because the games were so addictive. To this day, there has not been a poorer model than the first NES.[/quote]

the only problem with your philosophy is that all that is bad are the pins and replacment pins cost 8 bucks or you can just bend the ones in your system back to fix the problem.[/quote]

The only problem with that is the games get messed up. each time I bought a new NES and I put in a game I previously put in the NES, the whole system would have the flashing red light.

I'm not denying the NES had excellent games, some of my favorites of all time are on that system.
 
The worst system would probably be the Memorex VIS. It was released during that period where companies were trying to establish the All-in-One box. It had almost no true games, just a bunch of edutainment software.

That being said I still hold a soft spot for the VIS just because it is an extremely obscure console and it was the first console that Microsoft worked on (not the Xbox). It included the precursor to what became known as Windows CE.
 
Virtual Boy is my pick. I have yet to play a system besides VB that actually physically hurt me (it hurt my eyes after trying for 5 minutes in TRU). As crappy as any other system has been, at least you could play them without physically damaging your eyes (maybe psychological damage though).

Jaguar isn't anywhere near the worst I would say. Sure, there aren't more than a handful of good games for it, but there are a few that make it worth my while to own one. Tempest 2000 in particular is an excellent game.
 
Also I vote for the Socrates...I dont know if anyone else had one...but the only games were learning games (yes I know it was a system for learning) but they were not fun at all...well maybe they were cuz I was little but still...It had soooo many problems...Like one out of 10 times it would actually work and it had wireless controllers but they were like really bad remote controls and you had to point it at the system for it to work...
 
I'm going with the CDI. Crap educational games = crap system.

The Virtual Boy would have been my pic, but I loved that Wario game they had on it. It was a blast. Then I was gonna say Game.com but then I remembered that it was fun to play Solitare on.

and shame on the folks who hated the Saturn. The console was the shit. You gotta be a die hard gaming freak to enjoy most of it's games though. Like someone said above, you gotta have a certain taste.
 
Wow...I cant believe someone else knows what it is...no one else that Ive ever met has ever know what in the hell it was...I wish mine still worked (I threw it away cuz it wouldnt work)...I found one on ebay a while ago for 5 bucks but I missed the bid time...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
bread's done
Back
Top