What was the worst system ever made?

[+jgkspsx]

I was watching some high score attempts for the Mattel Aquarius earlier, and holy gee. Move over game.com, step aside Cougar Boy, stand back Supervision, take a seat PlayStation 5, get out of the way CDi, we are talking Mattel Hyperscan levels of badness here.

 

Look at this:

 

I mean, LOOK AT THIS!

 

 

It’s always embarrassing when you forget to implement enemy collision detection.

 

 

And then listen to this!

 

 

To be fair, not all of the games look this atrocious, but most of them are abject and horrid clones of popular arcade games. There were apparently only ten official Mattel releases, of which Utopia and Treasure of Tarmin were the only real good ones, and not many more third party releases.

It lasted for FOUR MONTHS on the open market before Mattel paid Radofin, the manufacturer, to TAKE BACK THE MARKETING RIGHTS.

 

How is it that the Intellivision was so advanced and worked so well and this “computer” manufactured by the same company, Radofin, was so awful? Every official game released for this thing was already on the Intellivision in better form except arguably Utopia.

 

To be fair, I have never played a real one, but I owned two controllers that I sold on the newsgroups long ago. My recollection is that they were like the Intellivision controller I dislike but even worse.

 

Is there really a worse system than this that has ever been released? Maybe the Hyperscan is worse but I don’t think it is.

[CatPix]

What is "the worst" system?

 

There isn't one universal definition of it. For example here I could argue that while the system was weak for the year of release, it was still more powerful than a ZX Spectrum. So does a system with decent specs is "worse" when it mostly received bad games?

 

Of the 3 main portable consoles released in the early 90's, it's the "worse" one specs-wise that won, and the most advanced that failed the hardest.

 

Since you name the Hyperscan, on paper, the hardware is more powerful than a PS1, except on the 3D spectrum. Everything else is vastly superior.

Yet the games are atrocious on all points, including loading. Yes, it's CD tech, but early CD consoles like the 3DO, PS1, and even the CDi and Neo Geo CD had 1X CD players. The Hyperscan uses a 4X CD player, yet, even the CD-i and the Neo Geo CD load games faster than the Hyperscan (for the sake of arguing, except very late Neo Geo CD games but those games provided infinitely better gameplay, visuals and sound :p ).

 

This for me makes the Hyperscan worse. Because as bad as the Aquaruis was, there were similar machines sold BITD on the market that did as poorly both graphics and sound wise. And they were more expensive!

 

The Hyperscan was absolutely behind competition, even the Wii was more powerful. Note that I can accept it, but the Hyperscan games are worse than games that were released 10 years before, even on the worst platforms of the era. Comparatively, most CD-i games are better on all points than Hyperscan games! This is very embarrassing!

[electricmastro]

The five worst systems:

 

5. Sega 32X

 

4. N-Gage

 

3. Virtual Boy

 

2. Game.com

 

1. CD-I

[dudeguy]

Game.com is up there for sure. the system was at least 8 years too behind the times. the boxes looked cool at the time but little did I know that the games looked like handhelds from the mid 80s

[electricmastro]

9 minutes ago, dudeguy said:

Game.com is up there for sure. the system was at least 8 years too behind the times. the boxes looked cool at the time but little did I know that the games looked like handhelds from the mid 80s

Even the original Game Boy from 1989 didn't have nonsense like this.

 

 

Edited May 1, 2022 by electricmastro

[+atari2600land]

You people are forgetting one thing:
ActionMax.

[dudeguy]

1 hour ago, electricmastro said:

Even the original Game Boy from 1989 didn't have nonsense like this.

 

 

poor man's Sonic. hard to believe anyone actually wouldve bought that system or any of its game. outside of a wealthy collector who "had to have it all" or an 80 year old grandma who thought her grandson asked for a "Game Boy" or "Game Gear" something like that

[+jeremiahjt]

This thread makes me want to pull out my Aquarius and give it a go. My Action Max too.

[CatPix]

Is the ActionMax even a console?

[+jgkspsx]

5 hours ago, electricmastro said:

Even the original Game Boy from 1989 didn't have nonsense like this.

 

 

This is by far the worst game.com game. By this logic I could say the Game Boy has The Amazing Spider-Man and is thus the worst system ever.

 

The game.com had the worst screen viewability of any console I know, and the refresh rate wasn’t good, but the resolution was very high and games like Batman & Robin and Jurassic Park look great if you can see them.

 

The fighting games and Indy 500 are pretty bad, but, hey, they’re not much worse than the Jaguar’s fighting and racing games. Sonic Jam is the only game that is categorically unplayable.
 

Everything else is playable at worst and actually pretty good at best. Jurassic Park has mission-based levels that are pretty interesting, although it has infuriating hit reactions. Batman and Robin feels a little incomplete, but it’s much better than Batman Returns on the Lynx or Adventures of Batman and Robin on the Game Gear. Duke Nukem 3D and Resident Evil 2 are great for what they are. The arcade conversions are at least as solid as the original Game Boy ones except for Sinistar.
 

Admittedly, the best experiences on the system are the puzzle and board games: solitaire, Lights Out, Monopoly, Scrabble, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Henry, Quiz Wiz except for the exceptionally annoying kid. If Tiger had marketed it to middle-aged people as an affordable replacement for those giant dedicated Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and Quiz Whiz handhelds, they would have sold a lot more and it would have been remembered a lot less.

 

Unfortunately, emulation for it is awful and not representative of how the actual system plays or (especially) sounds.

[+jgkspsx]

4 hours ago, dudeguy said:

Game.com is up there for sure. the system was at least 8 years too behind the times. the boxes looked cool at the time but little did I know that the games looked like handhelds from the mid 80s

It was also 10-20 years ahead of the times: online leaderboards, internet access, touchscreen.

[+jgkspsx]

7 hours ago, CatPix said:

What is "the worst" system?

I would rank systems based on the number of great and really unique (at the time they were created) experiences AND based on the percentage of the library that is worth playing, to normalize for hugely successful systems like the PS2 and the Game Boy. Certainly technical capabilities have nothing to do with it (except, as you said, in a negative way).

 

I guess by that rubric the Hyperscan does take the crown. There isn’t anything worth playing and there isn’t anything unique except the conversion of the hellscape of microtransactions into physical form before microtransactions were really even a thing. In fact, it is pretty much the prototype of the digital gatcha game: you have to gamble on buying a pack of cards that may or may not add content to your games. That is certainly the wrong kind of innovation.

 

I think for the definition of “system” I would call it anything that got its own branding. So the Sega CD 32X, the Coleco ADAM, and the 64DD would be separate systems for this purpose.
 

In that case the CD 32X might be the next worst system after the Hyperscan in that case because almost all of its six games were released almost contemporaneously in significantly upgraded form on the Saturn, the PC, the 3DO, and other systems. Only Fahrenheit and Surgical Strike are found in their best incarnations on the 32X, and let’s face it, they are not the best FMV games as far as gameplay goes even if the video footage is worth watching. (And Surgical Strike was only released in Brazil.)

 

This list is awful: https://screenrant.com/worst-video-game-consoles-ever-made/amp/

 

The 32X, the Virtual Boy, the Jaguar, the NGage, the 5200, and maybe even the Ouya (?) had enough exclusive games and enough best-at-the-time versions of popular games that they are well above the bottom of the list. The first three are some of my favorite systems. Having a small library doesn’t make a system bad unless the library is all bad.

[electricmastro]

5 hours ago, CatPix said:

What is "the worst" system?

 

There isn't one universal definition of it. For example here I could argue that while the system was weak for the year of release, it was still more powerful than a ZX Spectrum. So does a system with decent specs is "worse" when it mostly received bad games?

 

Of the 3 main portable consoles released in the early 90's, it's the "worse" one specs-wise that won, and the most advanced that failed the hardest.

 

Since you name the Hyperscan, on paper, the hardware is more powerful than a PS1, except on the 3D spectrum. Everything else is vastly superior.

Yet the games are atrocious on all points, including loading. Yes, it's CD tech, but early CD consoles like the 3DO, PS1, and even the CDi and Neo Geo CD had 1X CD players. The Hyperscan uses a 4X CD player, yet, even the CD-i and the Neo Geo CD load games faster than the Hyperscan (for the sake of arguing, except very late Neo Geo CD games but those games provided infinitely better gameplay, visuals and sound ? ).

 

This for me makes the Hyperscan worse. Because as bad as the Aquaruis was, there were similar machines sold BITD on the market that did as poorly both graphics and sound wise. And they were more expensive!

 

The Hyperscan was absolutely behind competition, even the Wii was more powerful. Note that I can accept it, but the Hyperscan games are worse than games that were released 10 years before, even on the worst platforms of the era. Comparatively, most CD-i games are better on all points than Hyperscan games! This is very embarrassing!

Well, I say that CD-I is one of the worst, but that said, their version of Lemmings seems pretty decent.

 

 

[Koopa64]

People who vote for the 32X and Virtual Boy don’t know what “worst console” truly is

 

as monstrous as the Aquarius looks, the game.com is arguably worse. It has less excuse to be so bad. Then there’s stuff like the Action Max and the Hyperscan. 

[Turbo-Torch]

I bought a Game.com when it first came out from KB Toys.  Seemed pretty innovative for $70 bucks.  Dual game slots, touch screen, PDA functions, serial port and digitized sound.

Got back to the car and tried it out...D pad didn't work in one direction. Went back into the mall and exchanged it.  That one had a line of missing pixels!  Went back again and got a refund.

 

A few months later they had them marked down to $20 bucks and the games were only a few dollars.  Tried again and that one worked great.  I hate to admit it, but I played it so much, the touch screen is damn near worn through.  Monopoly, Lights Out and Solitaire were great with the touch screen. 

I even bought the Internet cartridge which was a worthless curiosity.  Hooked it up to my external modem and it actually worked well to call into the local library's computer.  My ISP was dial up back then and I think I even managed to retrieve email once.  Hmmm...I might have to dig it out and see if it'll work with my wifi modem to access some current BBSs. ?

 

Action games were sadly crippled by the shitty low refresh LCD screen they used.

Williams Arcade Classics was especially frustrating because I knew it was well done, but unplayable because of the blur.

 

And anyone remember the obnoxious midget from the commercials?  If you wanted to sell something to a bunch of Ritalin junkies back in the 90s, a midget seemed to be mandatory to promote your item or music.

 

I'm off to see if I can find that internet cartridge...

 

    

[+jgkspsx]

Even both the CGR guys liked Duke Nukem 3D for game.com:
 

 

I would rather play the game.com Resident Evil 2 than Resident Evil Gaiden personally:

 

 

(Admittedly the incomplete GBC prototype of Resident Evil looks a lot better and has a lot more game to it)

 

The game.com’s designers had a really great vision. I am sure the penny pinchers at Tiger made them cut it down into the anemic wreck that it is. I don’t deny it’s probably close to the bottom of the system quality ranking, but, man, even the Aquarius’s better looking games almost universally have truly ear-splitting sound that make it difficult to believe I could ever spend much time with them.

[Mikebloke]

I have a few consoles, so saying which is the worst is relative. It seems like for some the mark is how backward it is compared to its competition at the time. As someone who had an amstrad 464 and didn't realise quite how far behind it was from the competition at the time, I think you can argue 'worst' is not always about what is possible on a system but rather how it compares to its contemporaries.

 

This aquarius for example, looks like it was already 6 or 7 years behind looking like a 1292 system in the age of colecovision. The hyperscan is a similar situation where its well behind its rivals at the time. The new Ataribox could arguably be the modern equivalent though I do respect that people like the system for niche reasons, there doesn't seem to be much point if you already own a low-mid level pc or laptop or even a rasberry pi depending on your reasons for owning one. 

 

I almost forgive handhelds, the supervision for example might look 'bad' but it's hardly unplayable. 

[CatPix]

I wouldn't take "what a system can make compared to competition" a definition of worst system. Or at least not the sole point of comparison. Else, the best handheld of the 90's is the Atari Lynx and the worst is the Game Boy, the worst console of the late 2000's is the Wii, the worst console of the previous gen is the Switch and the best is... you get me I'm sure ?

This is why for me the Hyperscan is the worst system, not because it's weaker than the console it competed on, but it was worse than the console it could be compared to : given that the system is mostly 2D but use a powerful 32 bits CPU, it should be compared with the PS1/Saturn/N64 and not the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii it was a contemporary of.

Target and price should be accounted for, else, for most of the 90's the best system would be the Neo Geo then after that, PC would always win.

Yes the ZX Spectrum has incredily low specs compared to the Atari 8 bits and C64, but it was sold for 3 time less.

This doesn't seems to be a problem when comparing the Switch to the PS5/XboxwhateversillynameMicrosoftnametheirconsolewithnow .

 

This is also why calling the Aquaruis the worst system isn't fair. There were worse systems than the Aquarius on the market back in the day, and some were sold for more.

Yes, the Aquarius is still a mediocre machine plagued with mediocre games... but not the worst.

[+jgkspsx]

54 minutes ago, CatPix said:

This is also why calling the Aquaruis the worst system isn't fair. There were worse systems than the Aquarius on the market back in the day, and some were sold for more.

Yes, the Aquarius is still a mediocre machine plagued with mediocre games... but not the worst.

I am interested in hearing which systems were worse and which libraries were worse. Even the Casio PV-1000 library looks better, cartridge-wise. Are there any other systems that had no way to create graphics except using repurposed fonts?

[roots.genoa]

There were a lot of (more or less) obscure micro computers in the 80s that didn't fare that much better than the Aquarius indeed, and we know some of them quite well in France (VG5000µ, MO5, TO7, Oric, etc.). I'm not that familiar with them personally, but I'm not sure their games look (and sound) much better, mostly because they were not designed for that.

[dudeguy]

Did anyone buy an N-Gage? That has to be up there for worst consoles from what I gather. They say you have to take the console apart to switch out the game cartridge. The portrait style screen resolution looked terrible for gameplay. It seemed like a cool novelty and something different but for practical reasons, it doesnt sound like the easiest system to play

[CatPix]

Some example of VG-5000 games (and probably "good" ones, given how the system is obscure to begin with)

 

 

 

 

There was also the Vtech Laser 500, which unlike the Laser 128, was a clone of nothing but was a bottom of the barrel Z80 computer with BASIC and that's it :

 

"Schools computers" could also fit here, as they made for education and school use but not games. I say "could" because usually those systems were big enough that they received decent games, like the BBC Micro and the Thomson computers. But those are still good examples of how "rough" gaming could get on computers and why I personnally see nothing outstanding in the Aquarius performance (but nothing amazing either, it IS low-perf hardware with low effort games, no problem with that statement)

 

 

 

[Tanooki]

12 hours ago, Koopa64 said:

People who vote for the 32X and Virtual Boy don’t know what “worst console” truly is

 

as monstrous as the Aquarius looks, the game.com is arguably worse. It has less excuse to be so bad. Then there’s stuff like the Action Max and the Hyperscan. 

Very well said.

 

Just because a company bungles and behaves short sighted not seeing things through with a piece of hardware, in the first case there an add-on, the other a personal console, doesn't make them arguably the worst ever made.  The 32X has a small library, Virtual Boy smaller sure.  But what games?  Look at their libraries, I'm less versed on the 32X side than the VB, but neither have that many mediocre games, and are any of them other than a select couple truly awful?  VB for one between the US/JP not counting dual-region releases had 22 unique titles, and anyone who knows the library will tell you that only each region had one truly shit release -- Virtual Baseball and Virtual Lab -- poor executed being generous, broken being honest.  The 32X doesn't have anything truly terrible either, some poor yes, questionably mediocre definitely, but it has a good many great titles, not in the proportion the VB does but it also has a notably larger library too so more crap can slip through.

 

When talking arguably worst system made it needs to encompass bad hardware, bad games, bad accessories, and stupid company all rolled into one with the combined interests of having an actual gaming device.  That would mean something like the ActionMax isn't really a console but a glorified light gun TV game, and the CDi was never sold as a console, game capable yes.  Philips had this pie in the sky multimedia box a good decade ahead of the times that backfired which started centered on CDs for music, VCDs for movies(tons came out), CDs for education and research purposes, and yes then there were the games that did work on it.  It was the douchebags in the US gaming media who proclaimed it a console, then in the case of EGM, tried to kill them off when they immaturely couldn't handle being told they couldn't have something panning it out of the region after not too long which is a good part of where it's crap misrepresented rep came from.

[zzip]

Channel F?   It's a few months older than the Atari 2600, yet it seemed way more primitive.   Or at least the games did.   Maybe talented programmers could have done more.

[Hwlngmad]

12 minutes ago, zzip said:

Channel F?   It's a few months older than the Atari 2600, yet it seemed way more primitive.   Or at least the games did.   Maybe talented programmers could have done more.

Nah.  The Channel F has solid enough games that it is not the worst.  No, something like the Mattel Hyperscan is much worse.