Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
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.
Demented But Determined.
Funny how the 3DO not only compares to the PS3 in price range, but also in the same ugly design.
You constantly struggle for self improvement - and it shows.
Hooray for bad Engrish on fortune cookies
As for for the N-Gage, yes it is a lame console but the article doesn't mention the bizarre situation with the QD N-Gage. Yes, it removed sidetalking, but Nokia took it upon themselves to remove the MP3 function and also take stereo sound off the console. It didn't make any logical sense at all to do that, improving one feature but removing another couple.
It's kind of a dumb, overly snarky list, picking on some systems just because they never found their market.
3D0...they left out they did BattleTanx, which, sadly, was the last decent split screen tank games, all the way back on the N64 and PS1 days.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I had an electronic quiz book in the late 1970's where you read the question, pick an answer from the multiple choice, punch the corresponding button, and the device would tell you the correct answer with all the bells and whistles. You could replace the book with other books. I thought this was the coolest thing ever when I was a kid. Until I noticed that every book had the exact same answer for each question number (i.e., 1-A, 2-B, 3-C, 4-D, etc.). Then it wasn't so cool after you figure out the pattern. That was the problem with a lot of game "consoles" back then since each game relied on a predefined pattern.
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.
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.
You're sure you're not confusing it with that game you play with your next door neighbor, Mrs. Stifler?
If you think the PS3 is ugly, the Xbox 360 looks like a PC with it's sides bashed in.
The Pippin was supposed to play games and do Multimedia like the CDi, I'm surprised it didn't make the list.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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 dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
What about the Apple Pippin? Not only was it $600 and had practically no software, it was underpowered and tried to compete directly with the N64 and PSX, after they were both established in the market.
On the upside though, it had SCSI.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
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.
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.
I remember finding it hysterical that the Neo Geo cost over £300 and the games themselves were in the £100 region ... and yet, people still play the damn things NOW. It's probably the most iconic game system. Not sure that counts as a failure.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
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:
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.
The tragedy of the human condition is that empathy is, by definition, impossible.
The thing that made the Neo Geo unique was the fact that the games were identical to the arcade version.
At that time frame, that was pretty awesome. If you had your memory stick with your stats on it from home, you could play your same character in the arcade.
IMO, most of the Neo Geo games sucked as they were all the same formulaic game.
Either fighting or a scrolling shoot em up.
Replace fighter and opponent graphics and you had a different named game but same gameplay.
Having arcade quality at home at that time was unheard of. Today, the reverse is true.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
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.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The Memorex VIS takes the lame cake. It was really a Microsoft product, but they couldn't put their name on it for fear of pissing off the OEMs.
It was a 286 PC crammed into a console. It ran "Modular Windows" - a version of Win3.x - which meant that almost any then-current software could be ported to it. This was Microsoft's first atttempt at entering the videogame/console market.
RadioShack sold them, Memorex gave it branding. MS provided the OS, and invited big publishers to release. They sure did - direct ports. None of the software was adapted for television, meaning that text was unreadable, and colors just looked wrong or shimmered off the screen. Single pixel dithering and single pixel lines abounded, but made most TVs "tear". The processor was terribly slow, as was the optical drive. The sound capabilities were horrid (think 1992 soundcard, then cheapened). The entire experience was totally inferior to older 8-bit consoles and the still-then-popular Commodore 64 - yet it cost an astounding $400.
In short, the entire thing was totally unusable. It had NO redeeming features at all.
They tried selling it for a while, but no one bit. I recall that total sales figures may have been hundreds, perhaps a few thousand. It was a huge, huge failure, perhaps the biggest one that MS experienced up until that time.
No one remembers, especially the lamo "journalist" that wrote that lame article.
Why is this a Troll comment while the same type of comment above it is labeled funny?