Xbox One. Everytime I booted it up to feed the Halo crave, there’d be an update that took like an hour. Finally get on… Halo needs to update. 1 hour later, I’ve lost interest.
Repeat 6+ months later.
I quit getting consoles after the PS3 and Xbox 360 and I made the right decision. The PS4 and XBone were painfully slow, had horrid load times, and everything was expensive. Watching my friend play Monster Hunter drove me insane, like five minutes of loading per hunt!
An hour progress in Morrowind, so caught up I forgot to save. Red ring.
Probably the Sega 32X. The messaging around it was kind of confusing, and still being fairly young when it came out, I was expecting it to be the gateway to 32 bit gaming that I would be enjoying for years to come. I ended up getting virtua racing on it, which was better than the Genesis version, but nothing spectacular really. I also got virtua fighter, which was a genuinely good game. Almost everything else was ports of mediocre games that had already come out on the Genesis. A couple of original games like knuckles chaotix just… Kinda sucked. Then when I found out that all of the support was going behind the Saturn, and that’s where all of the new and original games were going, well I just felt swindled.
PS3. Coming from the PS2, the library was bland in comparison. And later on, when I got interested in console modding, the PS3 was the slowest and most cumbersome to do anything and with barely any variety of homebrew stuff. And also, I’m dreading having to replace the controller (due to the 3rd party PS button situation) and replacing the HD (due to how entangled pieces apparently are).
Later on, it’d become an overpowered PS2 console for me.
PS3 was on one the best consoles ever released tho
Maybe the library was meh (I didn’t really notice it) but from a hw it was peak. It was famously sold at a loss based on how much power it had
For a while, it was the cheapest Blu-ray player you could get
I’ve replaced the HDD with an SSD a few years ago. It’s very easy. Just make sure you backup your savegames and settings first.
The Sega Game Gear. That sucker could drain six AA batteries in about three hours. Do you know how hard it was to find a place to buy AA batteries on Christmas day?
While a rechargeable battery pack fixed that problem, most of the games were garbage compared to the GameBoy. The first party games were the best, but most everything else was ‘meh.’
I never did get that TV tuner add-on either.
I think one saving grace for the Game Gear was that you could also play Master System games using an adapter, if I remember correctly?
You might be thinking of the Sega Nomad, which was made explicitly to pay the full size cartridges. My dad had one for a while and it was the Game Gear turned to 11, flaws and all. Huge, hot, heavy, and devoured batteries. It was a cool concept on paper but nobody wanted to spend hundreds on it to play Sonic the Hedgehog on a tiny screen with a giant warm brick as a controller.
I was in primary school when the Game Gear was a thing, so my memory was foggy - but the adapter was definitely a thing:
Instant flashback to my childhood. At some point i finally got a used game gear somewhere and the games were just awfull.
I wouldn’t call any console I own a disappointment, even the Wii U had several games I loved and put too many hours into. But the system I ended up playing the least was the Steam Deck. It’s just too bulky to feel like a proper portable, not nearly as cozy as the Nintendo handhelds I grew up on. I get some use taking it to FGC events as a monitorless setup (and I will be bringing it to Combo Breaker 2026 next week), but that’s kinda all I ended up using it for.
I still don’t regret buying it as the most important thing to happen to Linux gaming, but it was a system I bought to have more than to use. I later bought a Miyoo Mini Plus and ended up putting far more hours into that than I ever did the Deck. If anyone ever gets SteamOS running on a device in that size form factor, they’ll get my entire bank account.
I acknowledge the Steam Deck is an important step forward for PC gaming, but I just didn’t get enough use out of it to justify the purchase. I ended up giving mine to my friend whose only gaming option prior to that was a shitty old laptop. At least now we can play stuff together that’s been made in the last decade.
Honestly, my gaming laptop. Bought a few years ago, 3050. It was good and I could play games on it - but I live in a situation where all my electricity is solar generated and limited, charges 12v batteries and runs mains appliances via inverter. And the laptop was just too power hungry for long gaming sessions.
It was more a failure of me to properly research than a problem with the product, but was a let down. Bought a steam deck and never looked back.
I get a nervous inhalation each time an acquaintance asks me for advice in buying a gaming laptop.
Their computing world started with laptops, and they want to extend the idea. It’s so hard to express to them it’s generally not a good one.
Yeah right, especially with handheld devices becoming increasingly popular. The steam deck was by best purchase by far, in terms of fun per pound spent. And there’s much more powerful alternatives out there now.
I bought a gaming laptop around 2005. You could anchor a ship and melt the polar ice caps with it. I don’t think I ever installed a single game on it.
PS5. Minimal games
Nintendo Switch
Mario Odyssey was fine, but I didn’t really see the use for a portable slab compared to a pocket-size device like my phone or the 3DS. Also, this was the first Nintendo device that felt completely soulless. At least the Wii U had some charm to it.
yep, switch sucks balls.
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That’s unfortunate. Hopefully you’ve made up for lost time
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I was pretty disappointed after getting a Switch 2 when I found out that Nintendo had blocked all video streaming apps on it. Even apps like Pokemon TV, which had transferred from my Switch 1 during account migration, were blocked from opening despite being downloaded on the device.
even youtube?
Yes. I couldn’t get any video streaming app to play. I don’t think you could even download them from the Nintendo Store, but I’d have to double check.
PS Vita. It had so much promise, but the games weren’t really there and Sony kinda just forgot about it. I remember it was the first time you could stream a PS4 game to a handheld, which was novel at the time. But it never felt “good enough” and most games didn’t support it or were too finicky. If I look at my Steam Deck now, I think that’s more or less what Sony had in mind for the Vita as well
PSP. I know now people are raving about it, but the games basically all sucked except a few and it was a pretty good emulator handheld though. But it mostly collected dust.
The PSP was both amazing and awful. So much squandered potential. So few developers did anything cool with it.
Nintendo Switch, I should have known better. Nintendo consoles are great for kids who are new to playing games, not so much for people who have been gaming for generations.
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I’ve got more than a thousand hours on my Switch, easily among the best consoles I’ve ever played on since my start on the Game Boy and Genesis. What do you feel brings it down for adults?
Nintendo titles are, essentially, very good introductory video games. If you’ve played, well, pretty much any RPG, there’s no point playing Zelda or Pokemon. Same for fighting games and Smash Brothers or racing games and Mario Kart.
Everyone has to get started gaming somewhere, but beyond nostalgia? The rest of gaming has moved in from Nintendo.
Weird. Smash, Mario kart, and even Splatoon are very unique games within their respective genres and not really “beginner,” because there are some people who are really, insanely good.
If you’ve played, well, pretty much any RPG, there’s no point playing Zelda or Pokemon.
Oh, there’s a point, and it’s a pretty big one that people tend to forget:
Games like Zelda and Pokemon are fun. They might not have the best graphics, but they’re fun. They may not have the best story, but they are fun. The hardware may not be powerful, the gameplay might be repetitive, the scenery might be bland, the NPC’s might not be engaging, it may not be particularly challenging, it may have questionable design choices; but the games are fun to play.
I feel that as gamers get older they forget that, at its core, games are supposed to be fun. They look at Nintendo and then at other big companies and go “what the hell? Nintendo looks like CRAP! Every other AAA company has WAY more impressive games!” without realizing that Nintendo isn’t really trying to make impressive games. They make fun games that are fun to play. Games anyone can start having fun with less than a minute after picking up the controller.
They were fun, the first time. But how many iterations does someone need of the same game?
People complain about the latest game in a series like Tomb Raider or Assassin’s Creed going “OMG, IT’S JUST THE SAME THING AGAIN!” It’s literally a joke with Madden or Call of Duty, but for some reason Nintendo gets a pass.
It’s cool if you’re a kid and Breath of the Wild is the first Zelda game you ever played… For anyone else? Unless you have on the nostalgia goggles, there are better things out there.
That is an interesting opinion, thank you for sharing.
The Switch was a slow burn for me. Initially I bought it and hated it. I bought BOTW (had it on Wii U as well) and I felt underwhelmed. Fast forward to end of year and games like Mario Odyssey came out. Not to mention I had a lot of travel and the system just felt perfect for me. Loving the Switch 2 now.
Ironically I bought a Wii U and loved it at first. Only to look back now and see it’s a system I never bought more the 3 games for …
Same with Switch. I got it for MHGenU so it was still worth it—I put hundreds of hours into GenU, it’s one of my favorite MH games ever.
Every other game though, I’ve just played on my computer. My friend lent me BotW to try and as soon as I stepped outside and the framerate dropped, I shut it down and looked into how to play it on my computer. A little while later, I had it running at 1440p/120+ FPS with shaders and mods and stuff. Since then, I’ve just been playing everything on my computer.
PS5 or Nintendo Switch.
PS5: No games I want to play except Demons Souls Remake. Its the only PS5 game I own. Every other game I wanted to play I just play on PC instead.
Switch: Weak, underpowered “console.” Never left the dock, ever. Still had performance problems in first party titles, like Breath of the Wild chugging to 15fps or less in the Korok Forest when facing East for some reason. After I was disappointed with Breath of the Wild, I haven’t touched the 2014 midrange tablet “console” since. Only emulated the games for an immensely better experience.
IIRC that Tegra X1 chip was launched in 2015 so the Switch launched with an obsolete SoC. It’s surprising to see how much performance they’ve been able to wring out of that old tech for nearly a decade. Color me impressed.
The PS4. My wife and I played a lot of PS3, so we were excited for the 4, but it just didn’t hit right. We ended up barely using it. At some point we let someone borrow it and never asked for it back.
I don’t even remember what we didn’t like, except that we were both pumped for the latest sack boy game, which ended up not anywhere near as fun as the first one.
