Elimin8 02.04.10: The Worst Gaming Consoles

Posted by Josh Boykin on 02.04.2010

From the Virtual Boy and the N Gage to the Phillips CD-I and even the Nintendo DSi, 411’s Josh Boykin breaks down the 8 worst gaming consoles ever! See which consoles made the list and why!

Welcome back to another edition of Elimin8! Tonight we cover the 8 attempts made to cut into the gaming market that should have never happened: The Worst 8 Gaming Consoles. Too many attempts have been made to get our cash through new, terrible console outlets, and I'm calling them out. Let's get to it.

Elimin8: The Worst Gaming Consoles

8. Nintendo DSi



"Josh, it's selling like crazy! It was one of the best selling systems of this past year! How can you put it on this list?" Simple: the console is a blatant attempt to cash in on the market without really contributing anything new. When it comes to sequential system releases, I take the Game Boy as the model of perfect release. Each new Game Boy system offered something new and useful that changed the nature of the system. From the enhanced portability of the Game Boy Pocket to the backlight and clamshell layout of the GBA SP, each Game Boy iteration was productive. The DSi, on the other hand, is not.

I bought one just a couple weeks after release, trading in my DS Lite and sacrificing my GBA slot for the camera and SD card, figuring that system-specific software was only a few weeks away. WOW, was I wrong. Now, for new gamers entering the handheld market, the DSi is as strong a system as the DS has ever been with its streamlined menu layout, hotswapping capabilities, and digital camera. But for the people who upgraded (like myself), the DSi has really fallen flat. DSiWare isn't particularly great, the camera is grainy, and the internet moves very, very slowly. Worst of all, though, the DSi hardware hasn't been taken advantage of. I could have stuck with my DS Lite and been much better off, and for a company that's traditionally done a great job with handheld console management and migration, they're really not doing much here. Now we have the DSi XL coming out... is that going to change anything? Unless it's going to be iTampon sized, the XL won't do anything other than continue to cash in on the public. Come on, Nintendo; get your act together.


7. Virtual Boy



"Playing video games IS NOT bad for you! It improves hand-eye coordination!" Every gamer has had that argument at one point in time, and felt like they were winning. A select few of those gamers used that argument to convince a parent to purchase the Virtual Boy, Nintendo's black sheep system that's gone down in gaming infamy. Why infamy? Ask the gamers who walked away with headaches and nausea, and the parents who threw the systems out and felt a small bit of satisfaction after that very argument. Nintendo's quickest release and discontinuation, the Virtual Boy's lifespan was a grand total of 1 year.

The Virtual Boy was the first genuinely 3D console, using mirrors and individual screens for each eye. Yet another good idea with poor implementation, the 3D technology just wasn't at a place to be received well by consumers. Each game had an optional warning that would come up every 15-30 minutes, telling the user to take a break, and for good reason. Playing the game for a hour throws the vision out of synch with the rest of the body's senses, distorting concepts of motion and depth, leading to the headaches and nausea people experienced. Virtual Boy systems sat on shelves collecting dust from 1996-1997, when Nintendo decided to put more stock in the N64. Now the things are collector's items...as if shows like Jersey Shore don't already cause the world enough pain.


6. Nintendo 64



"Blasphemy, Josh! Goldeneye, Super Mario 64, Quest 64!" (Quest 64 was NOT good.)

I'm not knocking the titles that came out on the 64, mind you. Some of my long-time favorite titles, Ogre Battle: Person of Lordly Caliber and Jet Force Gemini were on that system. And let's not forget about the classics: Goldeneye, Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, and many others. The point of criticism comes with Nintendo's choice of format for the 64: the cartridge. A single decision that changed the face of the gaming world forever.

Had the N64 been disc-format like the PS1, Nintendo would have retained its dominance in the market, and Sony would have fallen to the wayside and been pimping Crash Bandicoot out on the corner like Sonic is now. But Nintendo decided to go with the more expensive, smaller-storage capacity cartridge format in an attempt to combat piracy. Way to win the battle and lose the war, Nintendo. The smaller capacity of the N64 outweighed the higher processing power, better graphics, and virtually non-existent loading times. Huge titles like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid went to Sony and its multiple-disc marketing, allowing developers to make deep, involved games that the N64 could never match. FAIL. But hey, it's not like they'd basically make the same mistake all over again with the Gamecube, forcing them to cater to the casual gamer market to retain market power on the Wii...


5. Sega Game Gear



Who didn't love Sonic back before he and his 19 counterparts showed up? Who didn't wish they could play Sonic in the car, or on the school bus, or on a flight to Montana to visit great-aunt Sally and her house that smelled of mothballs and oatmeal? Well, the Sega Game Gear offered you that opportunity! If you had 6 AA batteries, that is. And a backpack almost exclusively for the system. And if you only wanted to play for maybe 22 minutes.

The Game Gear tried to conquer the market-dominating Game Boy by releasing a full-color, backlit screen. And what better way to win over gamers than insulting them in commercials like this one:



The Game Gear, which likely never even made a significant dent in the Game Boy market, was discontinued in 1997, and for good reason. Though the backlight and color screen were advances that needed to be made in the handheld market, its requirement that you carry a bandolier of batteries (or play plugged into a wall, defeating the purpose of a PORTABLE system) became its downfall.


4. Nokia N-Gage


Another idea too early and poorly executed. An iPhone 5 years too early, the cell-phone /game hybrid resembled a taco and gamed just about as well as one. With the exception of two well-received games, Pocket Kingdom and Pathway to Glory, the N-Gage failed as BOTH a cell-phone and a gaming system.

Imagine talking to your best friend on a taco. Imagine holding a taco up to the side of your face, and then imagine that the speaker is at one end, and the microphone on the tip of the other. It would feel a little awkward, no? Well, that's because it was. Gaming was convenient if you only had one game that you never wanted to change out, because swapping cartridges required you to take the battery out of the back. Add in that the buttons weren't well designed for gaming, since they were...well, designed for CELL PHONE usage and you have a flop of a system. The redesigned N-Gage QD tried to rectify some of these issues by redesigning the look and placing the cartridge slot in a new, more convenient location on the underside of the system, but the cheaper, gaming designed GBA wrote the N-Gage out of the mainstream market. Nokia then released a cell-phone DL system called "N-Gage 2.0" to release mobile-phone games, but that system will be discontinued this year. Too soon, Nokia...too soon.


3. Game.com



So many good ideas that just never, ever worked out for Tiger's handheld. Internet access, a touch-screen interface, online leaderboards...too bad it all went up in flames with the poor implementation and system design. Game.com, a grayscale machine that attempted to appeal to an older market through its PDA functions and email capabilities, required its own modem and payment for game.com online service. Considering there was no actual online-gaming offered through the Game.com, just online leaderboards, it was hard to really convince many people to use the service. Let's not forget that if the watch battery in the system gave out, then all your data would POOF into thin air.

As a gaming system the Game.com fell on its face time and again, even after two hardware revisions. The screen was low-res and the touch screen was imprecise. As for the 20 games that ever got released on the system, most of them were poor ports of licensed franchises like Wheel of Fortune and Resident Evil, ports that never brought any viable credibility to the system. When the first word in your console's title is "Game", you should probably make sure the games are good. Then again, Tiger was probably too busy making Little Mermaid LCD handhelds to worry about that.



2. PSP Go



Nintendo could have done worse than the DSi, I suppose. They could have released the DS Lite all over again, with virtually exactly the same hardware, and then made it impossible for you to play the DS games you already bought on that new system. They could have announced that they were going to cease making games for the classic DS, and that you would have to download all the new titles, and that if you wanted to play any of your old games on this new, virtually identical system, you'd have to re-buy those games at full price digitally. Ha, who am I kidding? Nobody would do something like that...a marketing scheme like that sounds ludicrous.

Oh, wait. Sony? They what? PSP Go? Really. Wow.

So Sony must have decided to pull a Wii-level market swap, deciding to fight for a new market: the super-casual gamer. The PSP Go isn't suited to fight against much of anything other than the iPod touch, a device which is pulling a surprising amount of gaming clout because of its portability, functionality, and massively-huge App Store. See, the problem is that people who buy the 5-dollar iPod touch games aren't going to want to pay 30-40 dollars for downloaded PSP Go games. And the 43 PSP classic owners out there who might have thought about upgrading don't want to get a new system that has basically identical hardware but won't let them play their UMDs. Even with its new sliding layout, slim design, and trendy name, the system's going to stagnate just like the classic PSP unless Sony does something crazy. Like give them away. With free games. Forever.


1. Phillips CD-i



Single-handedly responsible for some of the worst games ever released to the public, Phillips' CD-i console did so many things wrong at the same time it can't help but be Elimin8ed as the Worst Gaming Console. Starting with the $700 price point, the CD-i played Audio CDs, VCDs (with an additional Video Card), and Karaoke CDs. Oh, and it played games too. If you can call them that.

Phillips tried to show off the power of the CD-i by including FMV cutscenes (full-motion videos) in their games. They also tried to increase the system's popularity by creating games using Nintendo licensed franchises like Mario and Zelda. The combination of these two prospects resulted in visual vomit-piles like this:



The CD-i, because of titles like Hotel Mario, and Link: The Faces of Evil is known for being responsible for some of the worst games of all time. We all appreciate our 360s and PS3s being capable of playing multiple-disc formats, but the idea of paying $700 dollars for either of them is absurd. And those systems are made by legitimate game companies, with track records of successful game creation. Why Phillips thought they would be able to cut into the market share with an overpriced, poorly produced system like the CD-i eludes me to this day, but they should have done what they're doing now and stuck to TVs and universal remotes.


That does it for this week's Elimin8. If you've got some commentary to add, give me a holler here or on Twitter.

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Anyway, catch you all next week. And if anyone's going to shut down their computer and go sing karaoke on a Philips CD-i, consider your taste in technology purchases Elimin8ed.

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