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.
The Switch.
Damn thing was fragile af, and they wanted to rent everything to us, no more Virtual Console no more solid hardware, they spend more money suing people for fixing it then they do on it like blocking local backup of saves so they can force a cloud sub and them still not having fixed the drifting JoyCons then charging you more than they are worth for repairs.
Probably the Switch. It’s … fine, I guess? NES? Awsome. SNES? fantastic. GB? amazing for its time. Genesis was killer. Atari 2600 was huge in its day. The switch? Meh.
It doesn’t help that I’m generally unhappy with nintendo being a bunch of greedy fucks as I see it.
I owned a fucking Virtual Boy. Do I really need to explain why I was disappointed?
PSP. I know now people are racing 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 Nintendo Wii.
Like so many, I fell to the marketing hype. Was completely bored of the thing after like a week. Where it was definitely some peoples cup of tea, it was most certainly not mine
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.
By default it’s the Xbox 360 because it’s the only console I owned. Apart from the RROD it was actually pretty great. I mostly played oblivion on it. One time I was in a very cold city with minimal blankets and no heater. I fired up the Xbox and warmed my fingers on the fan air. It was
goodtimes.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.
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
I bought a WiiU for Bayonetta 2.
Not only was the WiiU itself little more than a paperweight beyond running it, the game itself was extremely lackluster and simplified.
I didn’t even bother emulating bayo 3.
I am one of the few lucky ones to actually get an Ouya… It wasn’t great.
My friend got an ouya, I think he mostly got it as a bit of a curiosity since he was a game dev student (and now does it professionally)
It absolutely didn’t do anything particularly different or better than any other gadget we could have hooked up to the TV to game on, but we did have a lot of fun with it for a while. It was kind of nice that it was so small so he could carry it around easily if he wanted to take it somewhere for a party or something.
And a few of the games we first discovered on the ouya are still mainstays of our parties when we manage to get together as busy adults.
Through a series of moves, roommate swaps, and marriage, that ouya (though not the controller) has actually now ended up in my possession
It’s on the left with my small collection of retro consoles and handhelds. Couple other cool bits of geeky paraphernalia scattered in there too. Disregard the mess on the coffee table and such, this was taken in the middle of some renovations, turns out I don’t take many pictures of my entertainment center.
Nice portal gun hiding up on a shelf.
Every so often I get reminded of the Ouya. I still have mine from the Kickstarter somewhere. It was good in concept, and I even saw posts of it being sold in major retailers like Target, but it just fizzled out far too fast.
I came to say this. Some good games on there, but Julie Uhrman is the worst. and to think, she just failed upward.
Xbox. I wanted a gamecube but my parents didn’t like nintendo for some reason. Now im old and i don’t like nintendo for some reason, and I still don’t like xbox
My friend, there are lots of reasons not to like the litigious corporate monstrosity that Nintendo has become.
Also, they don’t really do proper adult games like Elden Ring. If you love Zelda I understand but it’s time to move on.
“Proper adults” play whatever the fuck they like, including Zelda.
not proper adults, ops saying games catered towards adults
minus that one comic book looking gorey slasher game for the wii
That was pretty fun, very clever too. They could spend more on the graphics because it was greyscale.
I was a bit conservative myself (or maybe lucky that neighbor kids had a 3DO and Sega CD I could try) but I did own a Sega Game Gear. That thing drank 6x AA batteries like there was no tomorrow. And the game library was very looser lackluster after the Sonic titles.
That thing drank 6x AA batteries like there was no tomorrow.
There were NiCad rechargeables. I didn’t own a Game Gear, but a friend did, and I remember him using NiCads for that and RC vehicles.
It’s been a looong time. But I think it drank those too? Engineers in those days maybe didn’t know how to optimize a full color screen with good brightness like that device sported.
It drank everything. I had a screw on battery pack that attached to the back of it and I still remember it didn’t last very long.
Probably the virtual boy. It was so cool at the time, I got Red Alert(?) and it was fantastic. Then there was like, a bowling game, and maybe a wario game? And nobody made anything else for it, and it sat in a drawer for years before my parents made me get rid of it. It could have been so good.
Yup came here to say this. Had Mario tennis and I’m sure some other game but yeah not a lot of games. However it did cause a lot of headaches.
But otherwise I mean, I’ve not bought anything I would say is disappointing but also I haven’t bought any current gen bullshit.
WiiU was maybe a little closer to a disappointment? But more so because it wasn’t as popular. I absolutely loved the 2nd screen for shit like shoving the UI for MH3U on there so I could look at it while keeping the main screen clear.
there were only 14 titles released in the US
Shit it was red alarm, dang it.
Also, that number sounds about right lmao, it was so bad
Aw I came for this answer. I was fortunate to see through the BS because I was very immersed in the tech at the time, but the VB genuinely had cool potential and I wanted it to succeed so it could lead to new generations of full-color VR (which took like another 2+ decades).
