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

Jaguar

[gt_mattex]

I don't know if I would call the Jaguar lame. It was certainly unsuccessful however I remember going over my friends house to play it and it was pretty awesome as far as I remember.

On the other hand the NGage was a certifiable steaming pile of failure both financially and from a user's perspective.

I don't think it even belongs on this list

[SpooForBrains]

I have a friend who still has his Saturn set up purely because of some of the games that have just never been equalled on other consoles. Radiant Silvergun and Street Fighter Zero 3 spring to mind.

Admittedly, if you used it to play Tomb Raider or some of the other, more "popular" games, the user experience was less than satisfactory, but in the 2D arena, the Saturn stood alone.

Oh, and Saturn Bomber Man is the best iteration of that series, IMHO.

The Jaguar _was_ lame.

[Ayanami Rei]

The Jaguar was in the same position as the Sega Saturn. At the time, 3d acceleration hadn't yet made it into VLSI designs so they tried to just make a "really good" version of what the competetion was doing before. I'm not really sure why they thought coupling a 16-bit CPU to 1M+ of memory and 64-bit coprocessors was a good idea for an architecture that needs to be relevant in 5 years. It wasn't easy to program for, in any case, and that would be its' downfall. The release titles were HORRIBLE, and that doesn't encourage other companies to try to jump on the bandwagon and push the state of the art on that architecture.

The Saturn, at least, started with a decent CPU and tacked on some support chips from their arcade designs... and there were some nice arcarde ports on that system because of it. (What they should have done is just figured out a way to take "Model-1" or "Model-2" and put it into mass production).

Atari was too concerned with catching up with the Jonses and totally discounted the impact of the PSX.

Take the 32X and Saturn off

[vasqzr]

Replace them with:

Maganavox Odyssey^2

Horrible. Horrible. The controllers were hardwired to the console circuit board in the first model. The games all stunk and used the same generic character sprites. Almost all the games were written by one guy.

Atari 7800

Backwards compatible with the Atari 2600 but it came out around the same time as the NES which outclassed it.

Atari 5200

Horrible joysticks. This thing had potential but Atari didn't know what the hell was going on.

The Sega Saturn Appreciation Station

[Old School Saturn Fa]

The Sega Saturn does not belong on this list. The author, Mr. Scott Steinberg equates negative sales performance in select markets with poor hardware design and poor software. The Saturn was trounced in the US by the PSX as far as sales. If sales in the United States during this period is the determinant of "lameness" according to Mr. Steinberg then he must view Deer Hunter as the single "coolest" game ever made.

I still play Guardian Heroes and Radiant Silvergun. Those games were great. SFA2: Zero was probably the best 2D Street Fighter ever. Assault Suits Leynos 2 is absolutely the best 2D side scrolling mech game ever made by the hands of man.

From the article:

"Worse, the system promoted 2-D graphics when 3-D was the first PlayStation's biggest feature, leaving its days ironically numbered."

I think that , looking back, a well executed 1997 2D game can still be played without making your eyes hurt, unlike most 1997 3D offerings. Poorly played Mr. Steinberg, and poorly written. The top ten list has replaced worthwhile game journalism and this is what we get, sales figures described as measures of lameness.