Top 10 Game Console Failures

Older and wiser, the games industry is still no stranger to failure. Thankfully, due to a wider market and a new found ability to learn from the mistakes of the past, disasters come and go without toppling the biggest names in the industry (well, we assume they do). For those nostalgic for a time when pieces of dark colored plastic came and went in the blink of an eye, here’s a top ten list of games console failures:

10. Neo Geo

The absolute hardcore of the hardcore are typically defensive of the Neo Geo’s inevitable inclusion in lists such as these, and not without reason. The fact of the matter is that the Neo Geo was about a generation ahead of the rest of the home console market and it offered some fantastic Arcade quality gaming in the home. It was basically an Arcade machine in a home console format, after all.

Collectors swear by it, but hindsight is 20/20 and eBay prices for Neo Geo cartridges are considerably less than the obscene $300 you once had to pay per game. The console itself was $650, and bares inclusion for that alone. However, it’s only a failure so far as mainstream success is a criteria for failure. The Neo Geo was clearly only ever intended for the enthusiasts and with new software titles being released as late as 2004, it actually stuck around a lot longer than consoles that sold millions more units.

9. SEGA Saturn

SEGA’s true 32-bit machine was scuppered in part by the 32X, a diabolical piece of hardware we get to later. The Saturn wasn’t a bad machine by any stretch of the imagination, it was merely priced to reflect the fact that it was slightly more high powered than the Playstation and therefore more expensive to manufacture. The hardware was sound, but software was a problem. Sega came out two years after release and admitted that the development tools hadn’t been great, and it wasn’t long before all confidence was lost in the machine and the people who made it. SEGA lost 30% of its employees and $260 million.

8. The Original Xbox Gamepad

 

This list continues with a smaller scale failure. Or rather a big failure, with a daftly over sized controller that (in retrospect) actually provides something of a mission statement for the Xbox brand. Though Kinect is trying to bring that coveted wider audience into the living room, it undeniably has a software library built around having massive man hands. Forget your pansy Playstation-sized gamepad for the average palm. These weathered, hard skinned hands are for strangling, not moisturizing.

Rather patronizingly, a ‘type-S’ revision was made for the Japanese market, only to be officially adopted in every region a year after the console’s release. But the stupidest thing about this mistake was that SEGA had already done exactly the same thing with the Saturn. Chunkier western model replaced by more sensibly sized Japanese version two years after release.

7. Nokia N-Gage

Now here’s a case of being too ahead of its time. Mobile gaming has really taken off since the N-Gage crashed and burnt, to the extent that I’m not entirely sure I won’t be putting today’s more traditional handhelds (3DS and Vita) on a list like this in five years time. We’ve even got devices like the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play doing the N-Gage thing (and not necessarily doing it better).

So why did N-Gage kick start mobile phone gaming? Well, it wasn’t a capacitive touch-screen phone for starters (that’s arguably the real revolution in handheld gaming). But it was also a classic case of a ‘jack of all trades’ device. The full phone keypad necessitated buttons too small for gaming, the screen was daftly in portrait (rather than landscape) and when you used it as a phone, it looked like you speaking into a Taco.

6. Apple Pippin

History may have been thoroughly rewritten on this one since the iMac onwards, but if you concentrate, you may be able to remember a time when Apple products were desperately uncool.  And thanks to the iPhone, the comic stylings of an Apple gaming console may also be lost on some of you.

The Pippin was very true to Apple’s form in the nineties. Firstly, it was grossly overpriced compared to competing devices with better features (Playstations were $300 at launch, the Pippin was double that). And secondly, only 18 games were ever made for it in North America. Manufacturing partner Bandai expanded the library to 80 titles in Japan, but it was doomed to obscurity.

5. Atari Jaguar

Lies, damned lies and statistics. Atari’s last stand was sold as the first ’64-bit gaming system’, but the claim was disputed considering that the fundamental components were using 32-bit instruction sets. Of course, this meant more to us back in the days when console power was still advertised in terms of ‘bits’. But it was clear that the Jaguar didn’t have either the power or the third party support to compete with the supposedly inferior consoles from Sony and SEGA.

The Jaguar killed an Atari brand that had already suffered major setbacks in the two preceding hardware generations. 125,000 consoles were sold two years after release, with nearly as many still in inventory. Some of these ended up in UK Game stores, sold as retro novelties in the early noughties.

4. Virtually Every CD-based Console

The optical media plague that spread across the industry in the early 90s seems very strange in retrospect. Not only did a whole host of new manufacturers try to crash the console market with consoles based around CD media (CD32, CD-i and the aforementioned Pippin), but CD add-ons started growing, abscess-like on already successful machines (Sega/Mega CD being the most obvious).

They were onto something of course. The Playstation proved that optical media was the way forward for consoles, and Nintendo lost significant market share when it stubbornly stuck to cartridges in the same era. Even they were tempted into the CD add-on game with the unfortunately named N64DD.

The problem was, the possibilities of games on compact disk inspired some very lazy thinking. CDs were used for music and movies, so CDs should be used for music and movie games! A high proportion of terrible FMV games (including Night Trap and Phantasmagoria) with minimal interactivity ensured that these platforms bombed, and bombed hard.

3. Current Generation Manufacturing and Design

The big players are making all the right decisions with their current designs. They’re in step with the march of technology, whilst offering technology that may or may not take. Aside from the Wii’s motion control gamble, they’ve been experimental without being too risky. The thing is, one major aspect of their internal design is fundamentally flawed (or it’s intelligently designed to fail, depending on your viewpoint).

The most famous flaw of this generation is the Xbox 360’s ‘Red Ring of Death’, but the ‘Yellow Light of Death’ in Playstation 3 models is equally baleful. The failure rate of 360 consoles was once said to be about one third of all units manufactured, and a lot of the problems its suffers are down to matters as simple as airflow, and the type of solder used in manufacture. Rather pathetically, it all seems to stem from the teasing that Microsoft received over the size of its original Xbox. The 360 had the liposuction treatment, and now sits there stuffing its face all the same, a ticking time bomb of heart-disease.

2. SEGA Mega Drive 32X

There’s something in the 32X philosophy that most consumers could surely get behind. Instead of buying an entirely new console every few years, simply plug something new into your old machine and enjoy several years of next generation gaming. In practice, you end up strapping 3/4s of a new console onto an old device that probably already has a pointless CD add-on, but it’s not an entirely unappealing idea.

SEGA themselves weren’t behind it anyway. Or perhaps it’s impossible to tell what exactly SEGA were behind, considering they were lining up the Neptune in addition to the Saturn. The 32X suffered the same curse of a limited games library that all the above consoles labored under and it was given the axe as soon as it became apparent that the Saturn was going to struggle against the competition.

1. Virtual Boy

The Goggles! They do nothing! Well actually, the goggles give you full parallax 3D game play and you can have it every colour of the rainbow. As long as it’s red. Oh, and they’re not even goggles, since the device rests on a stand and you peer into it, like a Mutoscope peep-show. With seventies visuals and a 19th Century  form factor, the three quarters of a year the Virtual Boy spent on the market in 1995-6 is actually something of an achievement. Nintendo have a pretty flawless record with their hardware releases, but when they mess up, they clearly have to mess up well.

Top 10 Baffling Video Game Accessories

The video game industry has pumped out countless accessories over the years. Most are functional but forgettable, the Ray Romanos of the video game world. Some, like the NES Zapper, are iconic. And then there are these ten, which make absolutely no sense. Maybe they were good ideas that went awry, or maybe they’re shameless attempts to cash in on fads. Or maybe they were designed by a team of drunken monkeys. We’ll never know.

10. Kinect Game Boat

The Game Boat adds a whole new level of realism to all one fifth of the Kinect’s boat themed games. Who would buy an accessory that’s only intended for one portion of one game? Especially if all it does is make the game more awkward to play? The Amazon listing even says it’s “the first accessory for the peripheral which doesn’t need any.” It’s an impediment to fun. Asking a clerk for a Game Boat is like asking a pharmacist to poke holes in your condoms.

The boat looks so poorly designed it would have been rejected by Titanic evacuees. And the box’s crudely translated slogan of, “Enjoy the emotions of the best games in the reality of your home” suggests that the Game Boat was made in a country where video games rank behind trying not to starve to death as the number one pastime. So not only will purchasing the Game Boat announce to the world, “I have no concept of fiscal responsibility,” it will probably support slave labour, too.

9. Wii Baby and Me

Baby and Me is the perfect game for parents who don’t want to waste any time ruining both video games and the idea of reproducing for their children. By adding a Wii Remote to the doll the baby itself becomes a controller, because nothing says “realistic childrearing simulation” like splitting open a baby’s back and jamming a hunk of plastic inside.

Cries, giggles, gurgles and more emerge from the remote, thereby “bringing the baby to life.” Although we’re not sure how having tinny sounds pulsate from an infant’s chest while its cold, dead eyes stare unblinkingly at you could be considered lifelike. Maybe they meant “unlife.”

Once you’ve turned your doll into a cyborg you can play all sorts of exciting minigames with it—everything from rocking the baby to sleep to clapping is included! And several of the minigames are even compatible with the Wii Balance Board, because that’s a wonderful lesson to teach future mothers—the best time to test your balance is when you’re clinging to your newborn child.

8. Wii Cooking Kit

 

The Wii has more food preparation games than scientists say can theoretically exist, so it makes sense that somebody would try to cash in on this baffling, nature defying market. The only problem is that exactly zero of those games are played with motions that even vaguely resemble cooking. Trying to make pan fried lobster in Cooking Mama is like trying to mime a howler monkey assassinating the pope. Attaching a plastic frying pan won’t make it any more realistic, it will just look like the monkey stopped off at a Home Outfitters.

The demographic of “people who like cooking enough to buy accessories for cooking video games, but not enough to cook actual food” is limited to nerdy anorexics and anyone who’s so fat they can no longer wedge themselves through their kitchen doorway. And the latter works up a sweat just turning on their television—asking them to flip a plastic frying pan would be like asking them to have a heart attack, assuming they didn’t get desperate for a snack and eat it first.

7. Wii Slip Proof Gloves

Are your Wii sessions so intense that you constantly find the controller flying out of your hands? Are you still having difficulty getting the hang of using your thumbs? Or do you just sweat more than Lil Wayne at a paternity test? Whichever it is, the Wii Slip Proof Gloves are the product for you, you disgusting, uncoordinated nerd!

For a mere $12.99, you can purchase the video game equivalent of a special kid helmet. Look, if you need gloves to play video games, you’ve suffered too many concussions to know what video games are. Anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to wear these would choke to death on them when they tried to put them on. Buying these for your children is like admitting that their mother chain smoked during pregnancy. If you need gloves to help you hold a piece of plastic you either lost your fingers in a chainsaw slapping competition or you produce so much perspiration that your pets drown every time you forget to put on deodorant. You’d have to be pretty dumb to buy these, is what we’re trying to say here.

6. Wii Bowling Ball

The Wii Bowling Ball is meant for people who want to spice up the thrills of virtual bowling by making every frame a chance to put a hunk of plastic through their television. It comes with a safety strap, but anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to buy the ball will mistake it for a tail.

The ball is advertised as having, “additional silicone finger slots to accommodate smaller fingers.” That sounds like a feature a sex toy would have, and using this as a sex toy might actually be a safer idea. The quote, “perfect for the gamer looking for something new to conquer” only reinforces that notion, because the only time we’ve heard “conquer” used to describe plastic balls is when they’re intended to enter orifices. And that would probably look less ridiculous than using this to pretend bowl—the image of the Bowling Ball in action looks like it was taken by someone who mistook bowling for rhythmic gymnastics.

Add “crude Photoshop work” for “realism.”

5. Wii Inflatable Racing Cart

This inflatable cart features a steering wheel with a slot for a Wii remote, giving players the ability to embarrass themselves in a wide variety of racing games. It looks like a cute idea for kids until you realise it’s impossible to control any game from that position, unless your goal is to crash into walls repeatedly and lose. But don’t take our word for it—check out this hilariously bad promo video, where the picture in picture gameplay clearly doesn’t sync up with what the actors are doing.

That’s a pretty serious design flaw, although if you expected any better from a company that thought it was a masterstroke of artistic design to put “racing” on their racing cart you have nobody to blame but yourself. The cart’s website notes that it was “designed in the style of the sports car,” which only raises further questions. Either this is the most poorly designed sports car in history, or they don’t even know what product they’re selling. And if those are the only two conclusions you can reach about an accessory, you shouldn’t pay money for it.

4. Sega Action Chair

The Sega Action Chair comes from an era where every accessory, no matter how mundane, needed a rad adjective in front of it, like the Nintendo Power Glove, or the Siemens Xtreme Speculum. It also comes from an era where every accessory was an overpriced piece of crap that didn’t work.

In theory, players would sit in the chair, grab the handles and pull themselves around, and the game would react to their movement. But you needed Herculean strength to move the chair just a single inch, and by that point your virtual character had long since died. Trying to play a game with the Action Chair was like trying to make your car turn by leaning over; and the inevitable four car pileup would still be more comfortable than sitting in this monstrosity. Add in the hundred dollar price tag, and the only people who owned an Action Chair were rich kids whose parents passive-aggressively hated them.

3. Sega Activator

The Activator was Sega’s attempt to introduce motion control to the world of video games, but it was about as successful as an attempt to introduce sanitation to New Jersey.

Players used the Activator by standing inside the octagon and having a seizure. Each of the eight panels represented a button, and to “press” that button you waved your hand or foot over it. If it worked, and it often didn’t, you soon discovered the Activator’s biggest flaw—even the simplest combination of moves required an insane motion. Want to perform a special attack in Street Fighter? Punch to the left and right simultaneously while kicking straight back. Trying to rip out some dude’s spine in Mortal Kombat? Kick both legs back at once, and punch backwards and forwards at the same time. Just want to pause the damn game? Do a spinning jump kick while head-butting sideways.

Playing a game against someone with a real controller was like a paraplegic fist fighting a gorilla. By the time you remembered what three directions you needed to punch to shuffle forward they’d already finished kicking your ass. An Activator player’s only hope was to flail at random, and that was only effective if they “accidentally” hit their opponent in the face. After five minutes with the Activator, they’d be angry enough to do it.

2. Wii Car Adaptor

Buying a Wii Car Adaptor is like buying a traffic accident. No matter how safe and responsible your passengers are, sooner or later one of them is going to stick a Wii Remote in your eye and you’ll be running down pedestrians while Mario music plays. And since the sort of person who would buy this would also buy the Wii Bowling Ball, you’ll probably be unconscious while it happens.

The only people who think it’s safe to use this don’t know what cars are. It would be less irresponsible to install a minibar in your vehicle than it would be to let people play Wii Sports while you drive. If you were pulled over by the police and they saw you had a Wii Car Adaptor installed, they’d legally be allowed to beat you. It probably comes with a disclaimer stating that the manufacturer can’t be held responsible for your vehicular manslaughter. The only upside to the Wii Car Adaptor is that anyone who uses it shouldn’t be contributing to the gene pool anyway.

1. Rez Trance Vibrator

 

 

Rez is a rail shooter set to electronic music. Vibrators are sex toys set to vaginas. Combining them was so obvious.

Produced only in Japan (of course), the Trance Vibrator pulsed in time to the game’s soundtrack. The official story was that you were supposed to hold, pocket or sit on the vibrator while you played, and the sensation would “extend the game’s synaesthesia.” The idea behind Rez was that everything, from the graphics to the gameplay, synced up with the music, and the vibrator would bring that synchronisation to a player’s sense of touch. There was just one tiny flaw—everyone used it to masturbate.

And we’re not just jumping to perverted conclusions—for one thing, the use of the word “synaesthesia” makes it sound like they would have packaged a hit of acid with the game had it been legal, so it’s hard to believe their intentions were pure. As further evidence, check out this quote from the game’s creator: “You can put it anywhere—your foot, your back, your waist. It’s up to our customers’ imagination.” He didn’t explicitly add “Jam it up your butt if it makes you happy,” but the implication is there. Did we mention the vibrator was designed to be washable?