The 10 Lamest Game Consoles Ever

GameDaily has an amusing piece looking at the 10 lamest consoles to hit the market. Older flops like the Jaguar and Action Max join the new graveyard-bound contenders likes the N-Gage and the Gizmondo. From the article: "Ignore, for a minute, manufacturer Tiger Telematics' financial woes, the former executive's much-publicized, million-dollar Ferrari crash and the Swedish Mafia ties. What really irked us about the GPS- and Windows CE-sporting handheld (capable of playing games, movies and music, plus wireless multiplayer) was its sixth-rate software library and similarly styled functionality. Some hated on 2005's biggest portable flop for its abominable games, like Colors or Momma, Can I Mow the Lawn? We just dug the fact that even after dropping $229 on one, you'd still get hit with online ads three times a day." And they're going to re-launch it. Again! Have to love their enthusiasm.

Comments

Paraphrase, for the link a'feared

[johnfink]

10: Virtual Boy 9: Gizmondo 8: Saturn 7: Action Max 6: CDi 5: N-Gage 4: Lynx 3: 32X 2: 3DO Interactive Multiplayer 1: Jaguar

In Saturn's defense

[Dr. Eggman]

In defense of the Sega Saturn, it did quite well in Japan. It was so lame in the US because Sega's President didn't send over alot of the games that made it popular in Japan because he didn't think they were the kind of games Americans liked. While it may not have been Worldwide successful, I certainly don't think its one of the top 10 lamest console ever; just one of the lamest of the truly widely known consoles.

Not enough space

[mgabrys_sf]

They left out stunners like the TurboGraphix Handheld (another battery chomper and mondo expensive portable), the Sega Master System (utterly clobbered by Nintendo, and run into the ground by Tonka), and - although I liked mine initially - the Atari 7800, a nice system if anyone knew how to program the damn thing (which no one did) after Warner sold Atari up the river. Most cynical warehouse clearance con-job by the Trammels EVER.

Re:Not enough space

[NotQuiteInsane]

Oh yes, the Atari 7800. The start of Atari's foray into "unbreakable" licence protection. Rumour has it, Atari top brass got sick of the badly-written unlicensed 2600 games spoiling the 2600's reputation, so they demanded that the engineers find some way to stop it. Engineering managed to implement a full 960-bit Rabin digital signature system on a 6502 CPU, then rigged it so that the graphics chipset would lock into '2600-compatible' mode if the signature check failed.

It was eventually broken though - when someone found an ex-Atari hard drive with the encryption keys and tools on it...

More details here: http://www.cgexpo.com/encrypt/atari7800.htm
Source code here: http://www.atarihq.com/danb/a7800.shtml#encryption
And details on the Lynx and Jaguar crypto too (which IIRC was plain RSA and a proprietary message-digest algorithm) here: http://www.cgexpo.com/encrypt/

Short note about the virtual boy...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Virtual_Boy# Product_failure

Nintendo did not "goof" by letting Yokoi "ship it". Nintendo forced Yokoi to rush it out when he was not even fully behind it himself, and then didn't back it up at tradeshows, leaving him out to dry. He ended up resigning shortly afterward, despite his amazing history there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi

An amazing man left with all the blame for a silly, marketing/product-placement-driven idea.

Wither Apple's Pippin?

[XxtraLarGe]

The Pippin was supposed to play games and do Multimedia like the CDi, I'm surprised it didn't make the list.

Re:32x didnt work

[antime]

Because they were drawn using the Megadrive's graphics chip. The 32x setup worked by combining the Megadrive's video signal with its own graphics, so you needed one cable connecting the Megadrive's video out to the 32x's video in, and one cable connecting the 32x's video out to your TV.

Re:I don't think it even belongs on this list

[macshome]

With enough multi-taps, and a big enough screen to not go blind, you could play 10-player Bomberman on the Saturn.

What? No Telstar?

[east coast]

The console with three games that all were oddly like pong?
 
I know, it's a first gen console and we could list pretty much the first ten consoles out there as not having a lot of value but there was a cheapness to the first Telstar that I can not even explain.