Exhibit A: the PSP.
Even OPM (Sony's official printed magazine at the time) pretty much specified that unless you were able to rip your movies to the memory stick to load that way, you'd be suffering from the PSP (1000)'s embarrassingly bad battery life. And nobody with any amount of sense was going to spend $50 and $20 on a handheld game and a movie you could only watch on a 4" screen because Sony couldn't even think to offer decent TV-out until much later. Post-hacking, it's been an ultra-versatile handheld, able to emulate a number of systems flawlessly, and some reasonably well.
Exhibit B: The Dreamcast.
As excellent as its library is, the ebay scalper rates for some of the better titles are absurd, and even more when you consider that (a) region locking, and (b) there were a number of games for the console that were never released during its active life cycle. Even now, it's still getting support from indies because Sega basically had a fire sale on the Dreamcast SDK systems. I discovered many games I didn't know existed once I was able to start actually burning games for them as easily as it was made possible by the community - games that simply were not ever going to be commercially available.
Now, if I could just get a broadband adapter, and maybe that Toro VGA box, I'd have the pinnacle of the platform ready.
Exhibit C: the Wii.
I probably would have boxed this bugger up in a year if not for No More Heroes and Madworld, and without the excellent mods available, I absolutely would have cursed trading in the GameCube I had for it, since I had the now rarer model with component cables, a broadband adapter, and the GB Player on it.
At this point, none of the current consoles have enough to even warrant spending full price on any of them, and none have nearly enough games to warrant purchasing on their own either. The WiiU does have more than the others, but that's in part because they're the only company that bothered with some actual Backward compatibility. But all have their down sides that keep me from really investing in either direction fully.
The WiiU suffers from Nintendo being morons and scaring away every third party that ever gave them a chance with gimped hardware, a non-existent online capability, and pissed me off with that EULA update that effectively bricked the console for anyone that didn't agree to it. And that particular EULA had some very concerning language that gives nintendo permissions I don't necessarily think they have any business asking for. People would be up in arms if they added that "feature" to the 2/3DS firmware updates, so why are they just silent on the console? Effing double standards.
The Xbox One finally started having BC for Xbox 360, but at this point it's so far behind that it's unlikely to reach even half of the total software library like the 360 had for Original Xbox games, and despite the similar architectures... of course the X1 won't even try to handle Original Xbox games. That said, I fully expected at least something to have been cracked about it by now.
As for the PS4... even if it ever gets a "you sunk my battleship!!11!" level of hack, I need only remember the shit I went through supporting sony for so many years, and how they betrayed me as a customer. There is absolutely no reason that I had to go through as many playstation systems as I did. And there's no point in me buying their stuff again just so they could render it useless by bricking my account and system yet again. Nothing on it is appealing enough to want the system, when I know I could have a much better experience with most of the same games on my PC.
