Hmm...
This one's kinda tough for me.
The biggest fault of the Amiga CD32 is simply... it didn't exist. I know a lot of Amiga cultists/fanboys will cry heresy for this, but it's true... it was never discussed
anywhere - it was never sold in stores, it was never mentioned in any of the gaming mags out there, and it wasn't even a blip on the then-nascent internet. Out of all the various consoles across the different generations post-NES from when I started playing, the Amiga is by far the one that took the longest to even hear anyone acknowledge it existed. Heck, when more people know of the Apple Pippin than your console, something didn't go very well.
As for the 3DO, I did mention there were a few games for the platform I would entertain playing. And the daisy-chaining of controllers isn't as far-fetched an idea as it seems at least to me. I suppose the problem there would be that they later took this out as a cost-cutting measure but to my knowledge didn't release any kind of peripheral substitute to allow multiplayer. The biggest crime, by far, is that launch price. For as heinously expensive as the NeoGeo is to buy and own, that $750 launch price is balls-out bonkers.
The Jaguar? Oh, I was aware of them... as the reason that the industry very nearly died. And that controller is as uncomfortable as it looks. And the "where did
YOU learn to fly?" over and over? About the only thing I would have wanted to play on the Jaguar was
Alien v. Predator, and that's it. Finding out that the A/V out was literally an exposed portion of the PCB just tells me they weren't even
trying to hide their shameful shadow over the industry at large.
Even though I never owned one, the Saturn is by far one of the few sega systems that I wish I did own, and still have a positive memory toward. Even the original controller was great in the hands for me at the time, and the revised one was all the better. There were also a good number of games I would have wanted on the system... problem is that if I were to buy one now, it would be mandatory to mod-chip it... and get that 5-in-1 cart in order to cover the games and enable cheat support now and again. But yea, it never did make sense to me why the cart slot wouldn't accept genesis games at the time. Might have helped the system for all I know. I wonder if that MPEG card add-on meant for Japanese Saturns would work in an American model? Hmm...
The N64? Yes, the controller is weird as heck. Funny enough I almost envied those that were able to get some of the third party designs that at least tried to make it more ergonomic than the factory one. And by far it has the unadulterated
worst analog stick in history. I don't know of
anyone personally that had an n64 whose analog stick
didn't generate tons and tons of chalky residue to ruin its movement on the official controllers. Honestly I'm not surprised to hear about the Mario Party thing and nintendo creating gloves for the thing... I just wish I knew about it back then. Nintendo also committed the dubious crime of disabling the n64's ability to output in anything better than S-Video, which you'd think is a sin considering they were trying to play up how advanced it was. I suppose they were trying to hide the fact that their
worst design decision for the console was giving it only 2KB of effective texture memory. That said, it had an awful lot of fun games.
Then there's the playstation, which everyone seems to remember so fondly on internet boards like this, whereas I have a love-hate relationship with $ony now, in large part because of this division. Sony
used to be a paragon of hardware quality and reliability; but I can trace it down to the
exact day that they opened their PlayStation division from when all of that fell apart. I had a pre-PlayStation era walkman that lasted me for years and years of service. I had a post-PlayStation Sony TV that didn't even last a month. It was that drastic. The lore about that day dictates that the guy who would become known as
Krazy Ken Kutaragi was heard screaming and raging at the top of his lungs when Nintendo backed out of their deal with them for the add-on with him vowing to crush the company. Needless to say, this many years later, the perceived failure to bankrupt and kill Nintendo probably had several side effects of senility, after his venomous tirades nearly killing the PS3 before it even had a chance to start. Yes, there were many good games on the PlayStation; it was also my first real foray into various PC ports, such as the first C&C games, before I had a computer that was even capable of running any games. But that being said, it came with a number of prices to pay, and it is this that scorns me the most with the brand.
This is the console that:
- exposed me to the concept of hardware being "dead on arrival". Why? because my first one was DOA out of the box.
- Forever damaged my thinking that console hardware was reliable, after going through about three of them before having one that worked.
- DISC READ ERROR! OH GOD ENOUGH WITH THE DISC READ ERROR!
- WHY ARE YOU SCRATCHING ALL MY GAMES, YOU WHITE PLASTIC BASTARD?
- Three copies of Final Fantasy 7 at $50 apiece. This son of a bitch did that to me!
- So many ruined games...
So much money down the drain
- At the time, I thought the controller was a blatant copy-theft of the SNES one.
- Official accessories... failing? Yep. My official PS1 memory card tanked, and hard. Oddly, my most reliable at the time was a Pelican 24-page multi-memory card. Even when the LCD screen identifying pages stopped working, it managed to retain the data and still toggle appropriately.
- Jesus, $ony, you make revisionism into a sexual fetish, don't you?
- Wait, why does the new one have less functionality than the one I'm being forced to replace? Oh *expletive*.
- "What do you mean a $200 service charge for a (then)$150 PlayStation?!?"
- "How can Sony get away with saying they made this much profit when there's so many of their systems in landfills now?"
No other system has personally damaged me, and my library, as much as the PlayStation. Suffice to say, if I wasn't being forced to raise money for a replacement, or endure for the longest time the utter unavailability of a system emulator that
worked consistently, I might have had a much more complete library. And that is why the PlayStation gets my vote.
I had one and it was a decent console at the time, it was certainly a hell of lot better than the Jaguar thats for sure! It had an amazing version of Road Rash, the first semi decent 3D version of FIFA and a host of other decent games like Doom, Flashback, The Incredible Machine, John Madden, Need For Speed, Myst, Wing commander etc.
