What’s the most worthless system or system add on ever made?

[Evaccaneer Doom]

Gonna kick out the Sega CD and 32X mainly cause if anything, they were failed from the lack of games on them. They're solid otherwise.

I'm going with the Atari Jaguar CD. This add-on did legitimately nothing for the console. Nothing. The SEGA CD had original games made for it. This didn't. Nuff said.

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's iconTamagotchiTamaHero24]

View attachment 69363
Wii Speak. Like 1 game used it.

You’ve seen Nintendo butcher Wi-fi…
You’ve seen them disappoint you with plastic guff…

Now, come one and come all, as you watch Nintendo SOMEHOW manage to mess up a microphone! Give them a round of applause everybody! They really did use a whole eighth of their ass to design this thing, so they deserve it.

(For real, this thing had zero support aside from Animal Crossing, but it’s also WILDLY worthless since there was no effort even attempted to mute non-voice audio, so you’d get this horrible electronic echo most of the time. Which, for the Animal Crossing fanbase (which has many folks with sensory issues who like a more relaxing and less explosive game), I’m sure they must’ve just LOVED that one!)

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 4:53 PM

So, okay, after all the seriousness it’s time for some good, old fashioned, making fun of Tiger. A time honored tradition. I’m the kind of person who can cite a couple of Tiger games that are not bad and can be pretty fun to fiddle with! And, when Tiger stays in their lane and makes more toy than game, I think they can come up with some fun stuff.

The R-Zone… is too funny to hate for me. It’s completely objectionable, yes, but it’s so far in the direction of insanity and trend chasing that it loops back to being adorable. A Virtual Boy competitor that does nothing the Virtual Boy does other than have a head strap. A completely impractical way to play games, which is good, since no game made for the R-zone was good enough to be played anyway. All said, it’s actually a super cute toy and something that, for a low price, I wouldn’t mind owning specifically to show people what an actually bad video game system is.

And then they went and got rid of all of the R-Zone’s charm. The XPG (Xtreme Pocket Game) is a model that stands tall as a “well now you’ve just ruined the whole thing” staple. Without the horrid head mount, the R-Zone is just a lesser Tiger handheld but now with swappable games and more components that can break. Which, this thing absolutely will, as it’s made of cheap and flimsy plastic from the year 1996.

The XPG is no fun allowed. They took the one thing that made the R-zone notable (being a ridiculous eye piece that you play games on) and they took it away to turn it into one of the cheapest feeling handhelds I’ve ever held. I have actually held one of these in my hands before, and the term “cheap” is all that comes to mind. Like, the D-pad rattles when you shake the system. I think that should give you a good idea.

The R-Zone is a stupid toy. You take the toy part away, try to make it fit in with actual handheld systems, and suddenly all my initial (warped) respect for the project is now gone. It’s an upgrade… that’s worse! It’s the R-Zone: Xtreme Pocket Game.

(If only Sonic X-theme had come out. That way we could have had the chance for an X-treme Sonic game on what is CLEARLY the most Xtreme of handhelds.)

 

[Pinballbuzzbro]

For me it's the PC-FX easily. Does literally nothing to stand out from the other better consoles of the time and only has two worthwhile games on it (Heiki Zeroigar and a Kishin Doujin Zenki game). Rest of it's library is hot garbage that gives the Philips CD-I a run for it's money. The 32x is also p garbo, but that at least has 3 or so gems on it like Zaxxon motherbase and Kolibri, and it's library isn't 80% consistent of softcore hentai games.

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's iconTamagotchiTamaHero24]

For me it's the PC-FX easily. Does literally nothing to stand out from the other better consoles of the time and only has two worthwhile games on it (Heiki Zeroigar and a Kishin Doujin Zenki game). Rest of it's library is hot garbage that gives the Philips CD-I a run for it's money. The 32x is also p garbo, but that at least has 3 or so gems on it like Zaxxon motherbase and Kolibri, and it's library isn't 80% consistent of softcore hentai games.

That’s a very good pick. The PC-FX is just depressing. Most people don’t know it exists, those who do are disappointed in it, and it’s just… not interesting. Or notable. Especially seeing as it’s the follow up to the awesome PC-Engine.

The PC-FX is to Japanese gaming as the modern XBox is to U.S. gaming. Just full of all the games you would overlook intentionally at a store because they are all worthless experiences, with only one or two actual video games you’d want to play sticking out in the library.

SEGA 32X, I literally just wrote multiple paragraphs about how awful it is, but it also has an awesome port of Virtua Fighter, the best old home port of Virtua Racing, the best old school ports of After Burner and Space Harrier, the weird and wonderful exclusive games like Kolibri and Tempo, and the bizarre Knuckles Chaotix to at least give it a lot of identity. Also it has a pretty neat version of Mortal Kombat 2.

The PC-FX has…next to nothing. Hudsonsoft would put most of the games that they probably would have put on the PC-FX onto the Saturn, which was a far more capable machine, a far more interesting machine, and a machine that was far more valuable to have in your life than the PC-FX. And then even the Saturn was squashed by the mighty Sony PS1, which had everything you could ever want out of a home console in many ways. The poor PC-FX is what happens when a company gets a successful home system almost as a fluke and then proceeds to make all the most boring and worthless decisions when designing the follow up.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 5:58 PM

Even the design is horribly boring. I can think of several other systems that do the same ”desktop computer” look better than this thing.

Not the least of which being actual desktop computers. If you want this form factor, that kind of thing already exists and is far less restrictive.

 

[ATenderLad]

View attachment 69402

Many people don't think about it because it has a slight cult following thanks to the AVGN and Smash Bros., but the Robotic Operating Buddy or ROB worked for only two games. Both are considered some of the worst that the NES had to offer and came out at the start of the console. So imagine being a little kid getting this thing for Christmas in 1985 thinking it's the future of video games when it barely functioned, was slow, did the equivalency of pushing a button on the second controller, and your dad had to mortgage the house to buy one because they were expensive as hell. Also, the thing's cameras don't work too well with modern TVs. So for the most useless add on of all time. Not because it was supposed to be a grand expensive deal that was going to change video gaming forever, but because it was defeated by simply pressing the A button on controller 2.

Okay, all of that is true and verifiable, and no doubt my friends parents would have sooner put that money towards a car payment.

I just want to lightly push back with, "Now my friend had a robot in their room, and I *didn't*, and I thought about stealing that robot every damn day".

 

[UnDubious]

The PC-FX also has a handful of untranslated RPGs, so it's not completely worthless.
NEC & Hudson Soft really struggled to follow-up the PC Engine in a spectacular way. It's not even just the PC-FX, they had the CoreGrafx first which was completely stillborn, then basically switched to banking on the PCE-CD (which had been released all the way back in 1989) around 1993, then finally put up basically no fight with the PC-FX. But still, the market was very saturated at that time with all those different consoles and there just wasn't going to be enough room for everybody. Someone needs to make the games. So at some point if the libraries are weak it's because the devs are busy on other systems, not because it was the company's intention to have like 5 good games total.

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's iconTamagotchiTamaHero24]

Okay, all of that is true and verifiable, and no doubt my friends parents would have sooner put that money towards a car payment.

I just want to lightly push back with, "Now my friend had a robot in their room, and I *didn't*, and I thought about stealing that robot every damn day".

Very true. It’s useless IN THEORY but the human mind is not fact based. Cool robot toy=want to have. It’s super cute too, with a very distinct face.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 6:56 PM

LOOK INTO THE EYES OF MY SON!
JUST TRY TO TELL HIM HE HAS NO WORTH!

 

[DanVzare]

That's an easy question to answer. The PC Engine SuperGrafx.
It literally only has FIVE games!

Can you get anymore worthless than that?

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Probably the HyperScan, as mentioned earlier.

That said, the PS1 had some godawful Gameboy player add-ons that made this CD-based console STRUGGLE to run a handheld system sporting quarter of its power.

 

[UnDubious]

The PC-FX also has a handful of untranslated RPGs, so it's not completely worthless.
NEC & Hudson Soft really struggled to follow-up the PC Engine in a spectacular way. It's not even just the PC-FX, they had the CoreGrafx first which was completely stillborn, then basically switched to banking on the PCE-CD (which had been released all the way back in 1989) around 1993, then finally put up basically no fight with the PC-FX. But still, the market was very saturated at that time with all those different consoles and there just wasn't going to be enough room for everybody. Someone needs to make the games. So at some point if the libraries are weak it's because the devs are busy on other systems, not because it was the company's intention to have like 5 good games total.

Correction (since it's too late to edit apparently): Supergrafx, not Coregrafx

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 8:27 PM

That's an easy question to answer. The PC Engine SuperGrafx.
It literally only has FIVE games!

Can you get anymore worthless than that?

The 64DD

 

[MegaDrive1987]

The shape isn't bad, but the usefulness is proven to be 0, and my grandmom can corroborate it lol.

To be fair I used mine to play my GameBoy in the dark (meaning in bed for school in the morning haha)
I have another style of light addon somewhere made by Nuby if I'm not mistaken, I'll have to dig it out.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 9:24 PM

Probably the HyperScan, as mentioned earlier.

That said, the PS1 had some godawful Gameboy player add-ons that made this CD-based console STRUGGLE to run a handheld system sporting quarter of its power.

I remember seeing a video on one of those add-ons AGES ago and being surprised at how poorly it ran considering

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

To be fair I used mine to play my GameBoy in the dark (meaning in bed for school in the morning haha)
I have another style of light addon somewhere made by Nuby if I'm not mistaken, I'll have to dig it out.

Yeah I pretty much used it all the time as a kid as well.People forget base GameBoy had no backlight at all.

 

[MegaDrive1987]

Yeah I pretty much used it all the time as a kid as well.People forget base GameBoy had no backlight at all.

That's it...I only had an original GameBoy back when I was 14 (2002) and had owned it since 1998 so I had no backlight.

 

[UnDubious]

The first generation GBA screen was so trash that I literally had to play with flashlight turned on and aimed at the screen or I couldn't see well when I was home. So that light accessory was quite necessary.

 

[nobitakun]

Another honorable mention, to me, is the XBox One.
Is it overtly awful? No…
Does it have games? Yes, in the technical sense.
View attachment 69453
But it’s boring. Like… really REALLY boring. And offensive at the beginning of its life. This console pissed everybody off in 2013 with a slew of features that they would later have to pull back on. This whole system was initially designed around everything nobody wanted from XBox, and even after all those things were taken out of it… nobody cared. This system is the most boring, boxy, loser I’ve ever seen.

The Hyperscan is notable. It’s too wild to forget.
The weird motion control add-ons you all throw out are too wild to forget.
Notoriety matters. It matters for something.

So, ask yourself, what happens when you get a console with no personality, no exclusives that people care about, and no real hook to ownership over the course of its lifetime? You get the XBox One. A system that even people who owned one as kids… don’t care about. A complete failure. Sure, it sold units, but what else did it even do? Name one notable thing it has that would make me care. Outside of Rare Replay, I can’t think of anything.

The PS4… is a total reset to your gaming library. No backwards compatibility, just starting from scratch. Its’ early exclusives, and up until around 2015 exclusives, are some of the lowest tier of PlayStation you could ever get. The controller is a flimsy experiment that not many people liked and mostly just tolerated while the light bar put a glare on their screen during play. The system is bogged down with PlayStation Eye, a useless peripheral that no games supported and had no clear way for games to support anyway (really, what games would YOU design for that godforsaken thing?) and the system’s early library was full of selling you slightly up-rezzed ports of PS3 games, a sales success that would lead us directly into the glut of ports and no-effort full price remasters we see today.
And yet the PS4 was beloved.

How hard do you have to make a console the worst and most feckless option… to make the PS4 IN ITS EARLY LIFE an actual success in the eyes of people?

The XBox One. I know multiple people who own one. It’s my go to example for how sales don’t matter for NOTHING in the gaming world. This thing sold. But it sold to the people who were never going to buy a PS4 anyway. It sold to all the people who mindlessly consume games or don’t have the time to consider game purchases anymore because they have kids. And I can tell you, for every family I know who had one, not a single one of the people I know played on their XBox One almost EVER. There was no emotional attachment. No love. No care. Just a boring, black box that might as well be a void where all the most boring elements of gaming come from. You want to know why XBox is where it is today? You want to know why it’s so hard to get people to care about the weird, wonderful, and interesting stuff from old XBox? This is why.

This system is the reason why nobody cares about XBox… except to clown on them and tell them to just go away already. It’s pathetic that Microsoft, with all their billions, never even TRIED to salvage this console with a big and interesting game. Because why would they? They’re Microsoft. Selling to the boring mass market is all they know. And the people that made XBox anything more than that were long gone from the brand by the time the One sauntered into stores.

Ohhh yes, I remember buying just one game in my entire life from that console: Sunset Overdrive. And I don't own the console because I really despise it, I just wanted the game as I found it for 10€ in a store and I liked it. So lucky it was released years later for Windows :)

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's iconTamagotchiTamaHero24]

Ohhh yes, I remember buying just one game in my entire life from that console: Sunset Overdrive. And I don't own the console because I really despise it, I just wanted the game as I found it for 10€ in a store and I liked it. So lucky it was released years later for Windows :)

Yeah, that’s about it. I was thinking “Sunset Overdrive” the entire time I wrote this, wondering if I was saying the right things because that game is so awesome…


But I also get this vibe from that game that is “artsy, but only to a marketable degree”. Which fits very well for the amorphous blob of bore that is the XBox One. Any game you could play on there, you can play on PC. They play better on PC. PC, at least, is SUPPOSED to be be an amorphous blob of clay in terms of personality. I wouldn’t want my PC to have a personality: I do work on there. And if I do want it to have one, that is for me to decide, since so much of the PC experience is customizable.


The whole thing with consoles is that they’re simple to navigate and setup, fast, cheap, have their own personality that is distinct from the rest, and have awesome video games that make you happy. The XBox One has none of these traits, aside from the games, all of whom are also on hardware that doesn’t bore me to sleep.

Post automatically merged: Today at 1:10 AM

As useful as the powerglove but look even more ridiculous while doing it!

View attachment 69370

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 6:04 AM

Also this thing from Tiger Electronics. Nice idea, terrible execution.
View attachment 69371

I just find the Activator funny, and a prime example of SEGA of America being completely taken by gimmicks over games (which has been the main thing fighting the Genesis from getting a reputation it deserves to this day), so I suppose it does fit well for the thread.

But the poor Game.Com is just an insult. I like Tiger when they are more “toy”, but them thinking they could have a big swing in the technology market is utterly laughable. Specs don’t make a system, but you have to at least be ON PAR with your competitors. For reference, their competitor in 1997 was the GameBoy… from 1989. Which itself was already using outdated and cheap technology. The Game.Com doesn’t even pass that bar.

And, much like their Tiger handhelds, its library is full of games that overstep their boundaries in trying to get the hardware to do more than it actually can do. And not in the charming “pushing boundaries” way, either. Just the sad, pathetic, “nobody knows how to program games for this forsaken thing” kind of way. The Game.Com is pathetic. It was when it was new. And it’s even moreso nowadays, where time is the great equalizer that you can’t bury your bodies to hide from. We all know the Game.Com thanks to the internet’s “dunk on everything” era, and the Game.Com is the kind of victim I just can’t be sorry for.

It deserves no respect, no love, but a ton of fascination. They did it to themselves. It’s the Game.Com, and it’s properly terrible.

 

[Frickinfrik]

Another honorable mention, to me, is the XBox One.
Is it overtly awful? No…
Does it have games? Yes, in the technical sense.
View attachment 69453
But it’s boring. Like… really REALLY boring. And offensive at the beginning of its life. This console pissed everybody off in 2013 with a slew of features that they would later have to pull back on. This whole system was initially designed around everything nobody wanted from XBox, and even after all those things were taken out of it… nobody cared. This system is the most boring, boxy, loser I’ve ever seen.

The Hyperscan is notable. It’s too wild to forget.
The weird motion control add-ons you all throw out are too wild to forget.
Notoriety matters. It matters for something.

So, ask yourself, what happens when you get a console with no personality, no exclusives that people care about, and no real hook to ownership over the course of its lifetime? You get the XBox One. A system that even people who owned one as kids… don’t care about. A complete failure. Sure, it sold units, but what else did it even do? Name one notable thing it has that would make me care. Outside of Rare Replay, I can’t think of anything.

The PS4… is a total reset to your gaming library. No backwards compatibility, just starting from scratch. Its’ early exclusives, and up until around 2015 exclusives, are some of the lowest tier of PlayStation you could ever get. The controller is a flimsy experiment that not many people liked and mostly just tolerated while the light bar put a glare on their screen during play. The system is bogged down with PlayStation Eye, a useless peripheral that no games supported and had no clear way for games to support anyway (really, what games would YOU design for that godforsaken thing?) and the system’s early library was full of selling you slightly up-rezzed ports of PS3 games, a sales success that would lead us directly into the glut of ports and no-effort full price remasters we see today.
And yet the PS4 was beloved.

How hard do you have to make a console the worst and most feckless option… to make the PS4 IN ITS EARLY LIFE an actual success in the eyes of people?

The XBox One. I know multiple people who own one. It’s my go to example for how sales don’t matter for NOTHING in the gaming world. This thing sold. But it sold to the people who were never going to buy a PS4 anyway. It sold to all the people who mindlessly consume games or don’t have the time to consider game purchases anymore because they have kids. And I can tell you, for every family I know who had one, not a single one of the people I know played on their XBox One almost EVER. There was no emotional attachment. No love. No care. Just a boring, black box that might as well be a void where all the most boring elements of gaming come from. You want to know why XBox is where it is today? You want to know why it’s so hard to get people to care about the weird, wonderful, and interesting stuff from old XBox? This is why.

This system is the reason why nobody cares about XBox… except to clown on them and tell them to just go away already. It’s pathetic that Microsoft, with all their billions, never even TRIED to salvage this console with a big and interesting game. Because why would they? They’re Microsoft. Selling to the boring mass market is all they know. And the people that made XBox anything more than that were long gone from the brand by the time the One sauntered into stores.

So boring and worthless that even the Wii U had more value than it. Red Hot Take, i know.

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's iconTamagotchiTamaHero24]

So boring and worthless that even the Wii U had more value than it. Red Hot Take, i know.

Hey, at least the Wii U had exclusive games!

 

[Cardboardtubeknight]

It's gotta be that little microphone used to yell profanities at Pikachu.

 

[Burzuru]

Easy Nintendo Labo. The idea was commendable..

$80 cardboard. commendable.

 

[Amakuchi]

I always thought the Motion Plus enhancer was useless, I only remember ever using it for Wii Sports Resort. I can't think of any other game I used it for (or that required it).

 

[CheelaCheela's icon]

How did anybody haven’t mentioned the nds expansion pak yet! Is only use by the Nintendo ds browser and the base ds isn’t compatible with it soo you have to get another one from the Nintendo online store???? And for what?! An opera based browser that could barely read wikipedia ?!?! Sjjsjsjs pretty funny ngl

 

[Eclipse14]

The PC-FX has…next to nothing. Hudsonsoft would put most of the games that they probably would have put on the PC-FX onto the Saturn, which was a far more capable machine, a far more interesting machine, and a machine that was far more valuable to have in your life than the PC-FX.

But still, the market was very saturated at that time with all those different consoles and there just wasn't going to be enough room for everybody. Someone needs to make the games. So at some point if the libraries are weak it's because the devs are busy on other systems, not because it was the company's intention to have like 5 good games total.

Something I need to clarify here is that the issue lies completely on NEC. Anyone that actually looks deeper into the system can understand that NEC was unbelievably incompetent and was basically the proto-Sega in terms of fighting within themselves over what to do. The Turbografx's overseas selection? At one point was handpicked from the CEO's daughter, who had absolutely no clue what she was even looking at. It was a total shitshow.

Come the PC-FX launching, and while it was an attempt to cater to the system's strengths of video playback (remember, FMV was one of the biggest crazes in 93-94), NEC put up tight restrictions that all games must have had it incorporated in some way, which put Hudson in a quandary and prevented some of it's bigger names (Adventure Island, Bomberman, and the PC-Engine mascot in Bonk, for the major examples. Arguably the only ones that did was Galaxy Fraulein Yuna and Tengai Makyou.) from getting onto the system. Given how long animation takes to make even back then, and there's the core reason why it rivals the Atari Jaguar in a number of categories.

I made a video on it back in December, and it's about as detailed as anyone's gonna get when it comes to it. I'll drop a link if you're interested.

 

[Matricks]

Yeah, I considered 32X here. No small part of the Saturn’s failure in the U.S. sales charts was due to the 32X being this confusing moment for consumers. It would have been one thing if it was actually designed as a “low end” 32 bit machine, getting many of the same games as Saturn (think how the Master System was able to work alongside Mega Drive over in Europe), but instead it’s a competitor to the Saturn. I don’t want to pull numbers into the equation, but none of them match up either. The system’s library was small at the time, as not a ton of software came out to justify the thing in those important initial months (a problem Saturn had as well), but the 32X never got the chance to get its act together because the price of the software. Sure, you saved money on the initial cost of a 32 bit machine, but the individual games were in the $70 to $80 range at the time. And some of those wildly expensive games were crap like Motocross Championship and Cosmic Carnage, which are some of the lowest of the low software you can imagine from that time frame.

It’s such a shame. It adds a lot of power to the Genesis, but it’s so not worth it in the year 1995 because… it’s still a Genesis. The 32X can do all it wants, it’s still tethered to the ball and chain that is this 1988 piece of technology. It will never, would never, could never be as strong as it needed to be in the 32-bit generation to bring over the games it needed to have in its library. What SEGA of Japan put out on it are genuinely great reasons to own the device today, and some games like Tempo and Kolibri are interesting and artsy experiences worth having, but the project was doomed to fail from the start because it had no compatibility with Saturn development, so therefore it was a competing device.
SEGA CD? It’s mostly just the horrifically high price and full motion video slop that haunts it, but it’s still a good device with several great games under it’s belt (Lunar, Popful Mail, Snatcher, The Terminator, Mortal Kombat, Sonic CD, Final Fight, etc.) Even with all said and done, it’s a good device that was hampered by certain poor marketing decisions that would haunt it forever.
32X is not that. Its best use to this day is as a homebrew device, as people have done absolute magic with it. But at the time, there’s no sugarcoating it, this was a nuclear bomb over SEGA’s reputation.

Why else would it be shaped like a mushroom cloud?

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