21 Consoles And Handhelds That Crashed And Burned

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[citation][nom]Th-z[/nom]I wouldn't put PC Engine/TurboGrafx in there. It may not sell well in North America, but it was very popular in Asia, far from crashed and burned. The console is known for memorial shoot em up games like Gunhed, and lots games, including arcade ports were produced for the console.[/citation]

I agree. In Japan, that generation went 1. SNES, 2. PC Engine, 3. Megadrive. But this is a western site, so I guess Asia's successes aren't heavily weighed. The DC and Saturn did much better than the TG-16 in the US, for example, so it makes sense.
 
I still have the TurboExpress with the optional TV Tuner. It still works, but with the death of regular TV it's lost most of it's usefullness.
 
either I know quite a bit about obscure video games, or this list isn't nearly as comprehensive as it coud be. I've heard of most of these, so I would say they went far from crashing and/or burning.
 
I agree that the PC-engine shouldn't be on the list since it was an amazing little machine. I still have one (with cd-rom) with an arcadecard. This machine survived well into the 32 bit era.SApphire was a game wich pushed the boundaries to infinity and beyond. A 32 bit game on an 8 bit machine. Not bad for an 8 bit machine. I disagree with people however that the saturn should be on the list. The saturn was/is an amazing and very much underrated machine with tons of really great games and it took the crown (imo) from the Engine in terms of shooters and arcade conversions. I liked it a lot better than the PSX. The saturn was a true hardcore gaming machine with games like Radiant Silvergun (best vertical scrolling shoot em up ever), soukyugurentai, Nights into dreams, guardian heroes, sillouette mirage, etc.
Oh, and where is the atari 5200 on this list?
 
ah the virtural boy... i rented that brom block buster, 5 headaches, and 3 system falls later, it broke... not that i told blockbuster it fell, but yea... crappy system none the less.

oh god the game.com
i have one in my closet...
the thing was fun, but i was a kid without an allowance when it came out, so i couldnt afford many games, and when i could, it died... well... the store that still carried the game.com games did...

 
[citation][nom]anxiousinfusion[/nom]Gizmondo (2005) It's probably a typo but what is GoForce 3D 4500? GOForce?[/citation]
GoForce 3D 4500 Features High-Performance 3D and Multimedia Functionality, Revolutionary Power Management, and 3.1 Megapixel Camera Support in a Single Processor.

The unique features of the GoForce 3D 4500 WMP include:

-Specifically designed for handsets, the GoForce 3D 4500 features geometry processing for arcade-quality 3D acceleration and gaming
-Programmable shaders, bilinear and trilinear texture filtering, texture compression, support for six simultaneous textures, and a 40-bit color pipeline for high-resolution detailed images
-Revolutionary new NVIDIA nPower technology for better battery life allowing for longer talk time
-Support for MPEG-4 and H.263 formats for VHS-quality recording and playback
-A 3.0 megapixel JPEG codec, for capturing and viewing sharp, crystal-clear photos
 
I love my vita, its easily the best handheld I have ever had. Unfortanatly, the fact is most of the games arent particularly good. A few exceptions would be Uncharted, Need for Speed and Persona 4 Golden. If it does go belly up I will firmly point the finger at Call of Duty: Declassified, the poorly designed and terrible controlling miscarrage of the COD franchise. A shame too because if it was good it could have been a system seller.
 
ok nintendo fan gays and playstation fan di(ks stop arguing nintendo is for boys playstation is form mens if u want both of them thats settles it your a gamer.
 
I remember buying a virtual boy from america as a kid, and took it back home to england. woot. They were pretty cool, only had tennis to play on, but it was quite immersive and gimmicky 3D but a step in the right direction.

its more immersive when your peripheral vision is no longer the living room!
 
I feel like a loser for buying a PS Vita. I paid a huge amount for it too. Little Big Planet is the only title I enjoy, and subsequently, my console has been sitting in my cupboard for a while now!
 
[citation][nom]pacioli[/nom]Also recall... Microsoft bought Sega out and much of the tech developed for the Dreamcast eventually made its way into Microsoft's own console... the XBox.[/citation]

Microsoft did not buy Sega. It was sold to another Japanese company, Sammy. Perhaps you are confused by the use of Microsoft's Windows CE as a means to host the DirectX APIs to facilitate porting PC games to the Dreamcast. The OS was booted from the disc and wasn't resident in the console firmware itself, despite the WinCE logo on the machines.

Sega made several games for the Xbox. Some were ports from the Dreamcast and others were new franchise entries exclusive to the Xbox. But the same was true for the competing PS2 and GameCube.
 
[citation][nom]CrisisCauser[/nom]I agree. In Japan, that generation went 1. SNES, 2. PC Engine, 3. Megadrive. But this is a western site, so I guess Asia's successes aren't heavily weighed. The DC and Saturn did much better than the TG-16 in the US, for example, so it makes sense.[/citation]

Actually, the PC Engine came out before the Super Famicom in Japan. It was taking over the market there while the demos for what would become Pilot Wings were appearing in Japanese gaming magazines. At the computer game developer (Cinemaware) where I worked back then, we had a PC Engine and a bunch of games before the SF had even been announced. My then boss was obsessed with the potential of CD-ROM and NEC was the first to commit to a CD-ROM add-on for a console. Several Cinemaware games like It Came From The Desert and Lords of the Rising Sun were released on Turbo-CD.
 
[citation][nom]tobalaz[/nom]I owned both a tg16 and TurboDuo, amazing systems. The cdrom definetly made for some great games like Ys Book 1&2, Ys 3, Ys 4 (with the nightwolf translation bin/que rewrite), Dracula X, Gate of Thunder, Lords of Thunder, Street Fighter and Super Street Fighter (yes it was a hucard but still amazing). The 5 player games like the TV Sports games were a huge hit with all my friends, we'd play for hours together.The tg16 did amazing in Japan and the Asia market (PCE or PC Engine there) , so much so I can't call it a failure anywhere here but the states.The follow up system the Supergrafx really crashed and burned everywhere getting only 3 titles, but Super Ghouls and Ghosts was a dead ringer for the arcade version.Sega Saturn crashed and burned hard everywhere.Sega Dreamcast did extremely well in the states (even was selling better in the US than the PS2) but so poorly in Japan and the rest of the Asia market Sega pulled the plug on it before they got bought out by Sammy (Japanese company that made games and roulette wheels). Phantasy Star Online was a blast.The 3D0 was a fun unit with some great games. I think the reason for the crash and burn there was more due to no ESRB ratings system yet and the overflow of adult games really removing it from something Parents wanted to get their kids. You'd walk into an EB Games and find a racing game like Crash N Burn right next to an interactive porn flick like Real Plumbers don't wear Ties. I saw many a parent yank their kids back from the 3D0 games when they saw what was over there.Can I safely say Digital Dreamware was probably the predecessor to Rez? It seemed more like some kind of electronic acid trip than a game but still.... I've got stacks of 3D0 games and a console I still mess with from time to time, the video cut scenes definitely made it worth playing over and over. Putting the ram in the cartridge with the game instead of in the system killed the NeoGeo as a home unit, but boy was it bad-ass for the day. Most parents can get past a big initial cost for a console but when every game is another $200 a pop on top of that its a no go. As an arcade unit though the NeoGeo was amazing and there always seemed to be at least one in every arcade I went into. Hell they're STILL in arcades this day (when you find arcades).NeoGeo CD was a major crash and burn because there wasn't enough ram, they put a 1x cdrom on it, and the games were programed to interact with the amount of ram in cartridge not in system so everything choked and stuttered because no one rewrote the games to optimize them for the system.If I'm not mistaken, I believe the FM Towns was the first cdrom system, but before it could come to the States the tg16 pretty much killed it.I'll tell you though the one huge mistake that was made that switched the entire face of the home console, Nintendo having Sony make a 32 bit cdrom add on for the SNES on mostly Sony's dime with the understanding Sony would have control of licensing those lines of games then dumping them the day before the launch (and with the observed 32x add on for the Genesis tanking the way it did can't say I blamed them). Sony was beyond pissed and with a little redesign released the units as the first PlayStation. Nintendo stuck to cartridges and released the N64 and they've barely been holding in the console market since, innovation with their controllers is their single selling point anymore.[/citation]

To make things even worse, Nintendo had its own CD-ROM add-on for the SNES that was looking quite good. It had superior features and a much lower price ($200) than the Sega CD add-on but when Sega had a hard time selling their product Nintendo got cold feet and killed their own.

There were games ready to go. Square had Secret of Mana, which was released as a cut down cartridge that felt a bit disjointed due to the missing FMV sections. Konami had a shooter Xexex that took advantage of the 3D features. The SNES-CD was to include the later version of the FX chip that made Star Fox possible. The chip was far too costly for most developers and the few who used it had to reduce the ROM capacity of their carts to make up the difference.

In the SNES-CD all developers would have been free to use the FX chip at no added cost to their game's manufacturing. This would have been worth the cost of the CD add-on by itself, bringing 3D into the mainstream a few years earlier. But Nintendo was feeling risk averse and decided to hold back.

 
[citation][nom]magicandy[/nom]The Nuon didn't even make it past conceptual stages. The most vaporware device on this list - the Phantom - at least had a demo shown at E3. The Nuon however never drew enough interest to get a prototype made. It's not even vaporware......just a concept that never saw the light of day. This article seems to be for failed consoles that actually got made at some point, even if never sold.[/citation]

Simply untrue. The Nuon was based around a custom VLIW chip that was part of the demos from the beginning. Several model were released by licensees and a number of DVD movies with special Nuon features shipped, while several more were redone as plain DVD releases. Eight games were available, including Jeff Minter's Tempest 3000. Minter's VLM-2 audio visualizer, a improved version of what was built into the Jaguar CD add-on, was part of the Nuon firmware.

Nuon failed badly but it was a shipped product ecosystem that made it into retail stores.
 
colecovision i had almost forgot about! turbografx on the other hand wasn't a gaming system it was a movie system you pretended to play by it's image capture if you aimed it properly at your TV for points. you didn't actually control the enviornment on the screen, it was all a bunch of pre recorded b.s. with that 1950's revival of 3-D pretension that is back for a 3rd round today, it sucked in 1980's and it sucks today, it ain't 3-D until you get off the 1D plane newbs!
 
I am surprised the Sega Dreamcast is not on the list as it had a relatively short life span. Actually, any Sega console/expansion after the Genesis didn't have a long shelf life. I know as a Sega fanboy at the time and was duped into buying everything Sega that never lasted long.
 
[citation][nom]f-14[/nom]colecovision i had almost forgot about! turbografx on the other hand wasn't a gaming system it was a movie system you pretended to play by it's image capture if you aimed it properly at your TV for points. you didn't actually control the enviornment on the screen, it was all a bunch of pre recorded b.s. with that 1950's revival of 3-D pretension that is back for a 3rd round today, it sucked in 1980's and it sucks today, it ain't 3-D until you get off the 1D plane newbs![/citation]

Pretty sure you're thinking about the 3D0 not the tg16.
And yes, most games were interactive movies with puzzles or side scrolling platformers, but there were a few really nice 3d titles like Madden, Mike Ditka Football (Quarterback Attack), AD&D Slayer, Space Hulk, Blade Force, Crash N Burn, Need for Speed and PO'ed.

Something most people didn't know...
Night Trap and Sewer Shark were Colecovision games made for a VHS cartridge add on that never saw the market then were recycled for the Sega CD and 3D0.
 


Thanks for the head-up!
 
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