Nokia N-Gage
It’s pretty hard in this day and age to imagine a cell phone that you couldn’t play games on. Application-based versions of Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty,  and many more major titles are available for download on most smartphone App Stores and some new game designers actually intend for their titles to be available ONLY on cell phones. However, back in 2003 this would have been completely unimaginable as the best game on cell phones back then was arguably the classic Snake. Finnish telecommunications giant, Nokia – who created the original Snake on an early model – decided to change this. They introduced the N-Gage: a bizarrely designed ‘taco’ shaped cell phone, which took gaming cartridges.
Running on its own Symbian operating system, you would have to remove the battery of the phone in order to insert a cartridge – a design flaw that led to a re-release in the N-Gage QD the following year. General use of the handset as a phone (yes, it did actually make calls as well) was clunky and unnatural due to its shape and whilst Nokia often came up with some very stylish and unique designs, this one just didn’t work.
The titles that were released on the N-Gage were respectable with ports of Sonic Advance (SonicN), Crash Nitro Kart, Tomb Raider, and FIFA among many other great franchises and they led prospective gamers on to think they were picking up a winner. However, with the announcement of the Sony PSP the same year and a hefty price tag of $299, the N-Gage wasn’t quite good enough to meet its target audience.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, however, as some individual successes bloomed from the device. Pocket Kingdom: Own the World was critically acclaimed and a very original MMORPG in the sense that characters knew they they were in a video game and would often refer to you as a noob while learning the game.
R.O.B the Robot
R.O.B – or Robotic Operating Buddy – was a peripheral created by Nintendo in 1985 to support the Nintendo Entertainment System. Its wireless design was to function as an additional controller or a virtual ‘Player 2’ as it would respond to visual flashes on the TV screen and operate by itself.
Originally created to make retailers believe that the NES was a toy rather than a video game system (following the famous Video Game Crash of 1983), R.O.B was cute and sweet but realistically not very successful. A peripheral that required even more peripherals of his own, R.O.B would interact using Gyros, little discs that he would then be able to drop onto buttons that acted as a controller. As well as being impractical and very demanding of batteries, R.O.B was only designed to work on two video games, Stack Up and Gyromite. Both games feature the crazy scientist, Professor Hector, and can’t be played without R.O.B.
While being a failure in its role as a peripheral, R.O.B has gone on to be a bit of a legend, featuring in titles including Game Boy Camera, Pikmin 2, WarioWare, and Star Fox 64 as a cameo and as even an unlockable character in Super Smash Bros. Many people consider now that the idea and concept behind R.O.B was actually very smart, just poorly executed.
Virtual Boy
It’s fair to say that with new gadgets such as the Oculus Rift and 3D technology becoming more advanced than ever, we’re in a good generation now to experience decent gameplay in an alternative reality. Sadly, when Nintendo created the Virtual Boy in 1995, advancements weren’t quite so good.
Branded as portable, the iconic red headset on a tripod embedded a dual virtual reality screen when worn and boasted true 3D graphics for the first time ever. Admitting that using color images would have made the system too expensive, so it went for monochrome – that actually also just looked red and black. While it was designed to be worn on the head, it was far too large and heavy without a harness and you had to be sat at a table for ultimate comfort. Even the controllers went all futuristic on us and dual D-pads were added to enhance the 3D experience.
You could exhaust the Virtual Boy’s gaming library in a week with just 22 titles released for the console. Although you definitely wouldn’t want to, as playing it for too long caused many health problems ranging from headache, dizziness, and nausea to neck and eye strain, as well as speculation that repeated gameplay could even cause permanent brain damage. Job well done, Nintendo.
Sega 32X
1994 saw the launch of the 32X, one of the Sega Genesis’ many add-ons. Its concept was to bring gamers into the 32-bit generation while they waited for the next big console: the Sega Saturn. Initially well-received and given positive reviews, the extension was considered abandoned by Sega once the Saturn joined the market and gamers were left wanting more. A total of forty titles were available for it, however, some of them also required the Sega CD set up.
Once you finished preparing your Genesis for play (especially if you had all of the peripherals), your living room would have become a jungle of cables and wires and your console would have transformed into a mutated block of black plastic, probably by now bigger than your TV. And if your mom or dad only gave you a short amount of time to play video games, you had better make sure that setting it up wasn’t included in that time slot or else you weren’t going to have any time left to see it past the title screen.
Many of the games that became available on the 32X were simply ports of Genesis titles that had slight enhancements (not enough to go to this extreme for, however) and other games were canceled or being developed for the Saturn that was short to follow. Also, with the classic video game rush to get the 32X out on the market in time for the holiday season, many titles just didn’t make the cut.
PSX
A perfect example of a console that just did not need to happen is the Sony PlayStation X (or PSX). Its sales figures were so bad that it wasn’t released outside of Japan, so that’s probably why you may not have even heard of it.
Its primary role wasn’t a games console – it was a digital video recorder that happened to have a fully integrated PlayStation 2 inside it. It wasn’t really considered to Sony as a video game console and was instead marketed by Sony Corporation as a general device. The machine could be linked to a PlayStation Portable for media transfers and even housed memory card ports.
Available in two memory sizes (160GB and 250GB), the device was initially considered far too expensive for most consumers and had many price reductions on both models before eventually being phased out. Upon release, the 250GB model was retailing at as much as 95,000 yen or $866!
What do you think of the disasters on this list? Let us know in the comments below!
This post was originally written by Claire Pulpher.
Published: Dec 8, 2015 11:04 am