consoles with tiny libraries

[masschamber]

So I was just thinking about all of the odd ball consoles and handhelds I have and was thinking about what gives a console a small library

What do you think is tiny library?

I personally never felt the 7800, jaguar or even the odyssey 2 have too small libraries, but I think the neo geos library is lacking (though I do like the neo geo)

I feel like the channel f has a tiny library but the microvision doesn't.

Most of the early Japanese consoles seem to have tiny librarys

What do you feel makes an tiny library?

[Skippy B. Coyote]

I went with 51-100. I've always felt like the libraries of Jag, 7800, and Atari 8-bit cartridge games were pretty tiny. They've got nothing on the Pokémon Mini library with it's whopping 10 games though!

[Flojomojo]

I chose the weasel answer, "it depends." You probably should have left that one out, it's going to be very popular.

 

When I was a kid, having 10 cartridges was "a lot." Twenty years later, the Windows Phone was a joke because it "only" had a few thousand apps in the store.

[Krip316]

Atari Lynx with 73.

[masschamber]

I went with 51-100. I've always felt like the libraries of Jag, 7800, and Atari 8-bit cartridge games were pretty tiny. They've got nothing on the Pokémon Mini library with it's whopping 10 games though!

dude their are several consoles with less than the pokemon mini

the gakken tv boy only has 6, the adventure vision only has 4, the tv jack 5000 has I think 5, the super vision 8000 has I believe 8, the telstar arcade has 4, the select a game has 5, the video brain has 9, the xport 3, and I'm sure there are other odd birds that I don't even know about that have similarly small libraries

 

also the atari 800 library has hundreds of carts, like over 200

[carlsson]

Yes, the Atari 8-bit computers should have as many or perhaps more cartridges than the C64, which itself clocks in well over 300. I voted for 13-30 which would include up to Super Cassette Vision but not much beyond that. Enough number of games that it becomes a worthwhile challenge to get them all, few enough to not make it impossible or (unfortunately) silly expensive.

[Video]

Depends, a larger number of carts or other media doesn't mean much if most the games suck (gamecom)

 

I typically consider under 100, which is probably most, if not all that weren't big players, like the top 2 competitors of the era. Granted tiny would be smaller than small, so sub 20? I only way that as many super tiny libraries are for things never really intended to be much more than they are, granted freaks of nature like that pong machine, Atari 2600.

[Eltigro]

The system with the smallest library that I have is the Game Wave. It has 13 released titles. I have one of those... and no controllers so I can't even play it.

 

Other systems I can think of with tiny libraries... Virtual Boy, Nuon, Pippin...

 

All of these have less than 30 games, so that's where I'm voting.

[Tanooki]

I weaseled too on the it depends, because it does. Some stuff it's hard to even call a library when you're looking at under 10 games because it was just some short lived whatever and that's that. Others bomb hard like Virtual Boy with the 14 in the US and about double that in Japan but it only lived like a year and a half. Some would be jerks and call the N64 library small at 300 since the PS1 had like 4x that amount or so but for a normal person hell even 30 games over a stretch of a console is considered a lot.

[spacecadet]

I went with 31-50 as kind of a hedge, but I don't know what systems actually have a library of exactly that size, if any...

 

I feel like if a console is a major release from a major manufacturer, even 51-100 is a tiny library. But I know there are systems out there with as few as four games. (My first console, the Coleco Telstar Arcade, was one of those.) Generally, though, those were systems that either weren't really intended to have a lot of interchangeable games, or they were just from small manufacturers who really didn't have a lot of hope in the market.

 

But any big, mass market system with under 100 games, especially in the post-crash era, is kind of an embarrassment for the manufacturer.

[Austin]

Under 20, for me. Virtual Boy is a prime example here.

 

I think 30 - 50 games is a healthy amount, depending on how long the system was around. For platforms like the Jaguar and 32X, that's a solid amount of games for the barely over two years they were on the market.

[Jess Ragan]

Anything below one hundred is small. I voted 13 to 30 for "tiny," though. I guess it's all subjective, but unless they're extraordinarily fun games, 30 or fewer won't keep you entertained for long.

[Iwantgames:)]

The system with the smallest library that I have is the Game Wave. It has 13 released titles. I have one of those... and no controllers so I can't even play it.

 

Other systems I can think of with tiny libraries... Virtual Boy, Nuon, Pippin...

 

All of these have less than 30 games, so that's where I'm voting.

Your not missing much lol, I have 6 game wave controllers and have played it only once or twice. Its best game is a bejeweled clone called Gemz

[masschamber]

Does anyone know of any consoles with less than 4 games besides the xavix xport? as that seems to be the lower limit, maybe some oddball European consoles?

[RetroLucky]

If you can surpass a dozen games that you want on a platform after excluding multi-plat titles (that are mostly the same across 2+ systems), but include superior ports, then you're safe to classify that as more than a small library

[carlsson]

Interesting challenge, the hunt for the console with the fewest number of interchangeable games. Ideally those should be ROM based, so not custom chips as in the GI AY series like PC-50x. And even that one has 8 known games so it is more than Adventurevision and the others.

[Video]

How about the hyper scan? I think it had like 3 or 4 games. I was curious, as I'm into oddball s#$% and collecting cards. Adventure vision only had something like 4 games I think.

[carlsson]

Wikipedia says the HyperScan had 5 games: X-Men, Ben 10, Interstellar Wrestling League, Marvel Heroes and Spider-Man. Two more were announced but cancelled: Avatar: The Last Airbender and Nick Extreme Sports. However Wikipedia also notes that Ben 10 and Spider-Man are similar to Marvel Heroes which should bring it down to 3 distinctly unique games. Then again both X-Men and IWL are fighting games, so if you consider them alike we'd be down to 2 types of games for a console with a library of 5...

[John Stamos Mullet]

I chose the weasel answer, "it depends." You probably should have left that one out, it's going to be very popular.

 

When I was a kid, having 10 cartridges was "a lot." Twenty years later, the Windows Phone was a joke because it "only" had a few thousand apps in the store.

yeah, but of those 1000 "apps" only about 50 were real, useable apps, and the rest were fart sound generators and completely useless lists of infor that were gleaned from Wikipedia. Edited August 29, 2018 by John Stamos Mullet

[HoshiChiri]

This is an interesting question- I went with the 13-30 option. Partially becuase, as spacecadet pointed out, I'm not really aware of any systems in the 30-50 range so it makes a good cut point.

 

But how does one determine if a console has enough software? How much is enough, anyway- assuming you play one game a week, how long do you need for it to be worthwhile? What if you play faster than that? What if the games are genres you don't like? How many more games are needed to make up for that? The mind boggles.

 

However, I'm going to arbitrarily decide 104 is the minimum for a good, if small, library. That's enough to play one game a week for a year and hate fully half the games on the system. Since I feel like most people wouldn't bother with a system they hated half the games on, that should provide space for faster players and the genre-picky to find adequate choices before replaying titles. By the same logic, a system with 30 titles would last you under 4 months- not nessecarily low enough to avoid owning, but low enough to make one question the value in doing so. Which sounds about right for a 'tiny' distinction.

[Rick Dangerous]

Under 100 for me...

 

7800, Lynx, Jaguar, Virtual Boy, CD-i,

 

I think this can be mitigated by a few great titles and or a robust homebrew scene. I own and enjoy all these consoles.

Edited August 29, 2018 by travistouchdown

[carlsson]

If a console had 10 rock solid games in varied genres and really top notch presentation, that library would be tiny but basically all that you need for a long time. Then another console might have 100 rather poor games of limited variation and sloppy graphics and sounds. While it has ten times as many games to collect, since they'd all be rubbish you would hesitate to complete the collection if the last 20 games both turn out to be unplayable, very similar to what you already own and quite expensive to obtain.

 

Those who vote for "depends" thus consider the signal/noise ratio in the library or whether it has "usable" titles to determine what is a tiny library instead of going by absolute numbers, which itself is a positive thing if one is into video games in order to play them, not just put them on a shelf.

[John Stamos Mullet]

One of my favorites is collecting the Sega Card games for the SMS. There's only 10 of them.

[mbd30]

Wikipedia says the HyperScan had 5 games: X-Men, Ben 10, Interstellar Wrestling League, Marvel Heroes and Spider-Man. Two more were announced but cancelled: Avatar: The Last Airbender and Nick Extreme Sports. However Wikipedia also notes that Ben 10 and Spider-Man are similar to Marvel Heroes which should bring it down to 3 distinctly unique games. Then again both X-Men and IWL are fighting games, so if you consider them alike we'd be down to 2 types of games for a console with a library of 5...

 

 

The Hyperscan looks like a strong contender for worst console ever. At least the RCA Studio II is an interesting museum piece. It's kind of cool from a historical and collecting standpoint. The Hyperscan has nothing going for it.

Edited August 29, 2018 by mbd30

[masschamber]

One of my favorites is collecting the Sega Card games for the SMS. There's only 10 of them.

The sega cards were really a by product of sg 1000 back compatibility, (fighting falcon or whatever is an sg 1000 game) and about half of sg 1000 games are on cards