Horrible / Video Game Consoles and Other Hardware

"Released in 1989, [the Power Glove] was a glove that was meant to work like a controller, if your controller was broken and reversed and sporadically doing random things. It had NES controller buttons on the forearm, but the user could also control the game using their arm motions. In concept, it sounds pretty cool, but as you may have heard from James and other gamers, actually using the glove was a frustrating, terrible experience. And two whole games were designed for this glove. Two whole games! Woo! These two games were the only way to play with a Power Glove without it feeling horribly broken, and they ultimately never took off. So ultimately, the Power Glove failed."

— PhantomStrider, "Nintendo's 10 Worst Failures"^note Technically, the Power Glove was actually a failure on the part of Mattel and PAX (detailed below), as even though it was an officially licensed Nintendo product, it wasn't manufactured or produced by Nintendo themselves.

Even the most snobbish member of the Glorious PC Master Race knows not to use these to mock filthy console peasants, for they would be preaching to the choir.

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Repeat Offenders

• Commodore:
  • If you ever wondered what the worst-selling video game console of all-time was, look no further than the Commodore C64GS. What was intended to be Commodore's original answer for competing against the likes of Nintendo and Sega turned out to be the beginning of the end for the Commodore brand altogether. The long design of the system was the molding of a typical Commodore keyboard without the actual keys needed for some of these games to activate properly. It didn't help that the game they first bundled the system with, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, included the goof of requiring that the user press a certain key on a system that didn't have any keyboard buttons at all. Commodore later changed the game to a 4-in-1 cartridge of old Commodore 64 games, while the Terminator 2 cartridges that weren't put out were later bundled into the regular Commodore 64 system instead. Combine that with the fact that it was only £50 less than the actual Commodore 64 computer and that it had a limited release in only the United Kingdom and Germany, and you got yourself a console that, what originally shipped in 20,000 copies at the time of its launch, ultimately sold only a tenth of its meager launch sales; remaining stock were converted back into regular Commodore 64 units to be sold as normal home computers. Guru Larry talked about it in more detail on his Top 10 ACTUAL Worst Selling Consoles video in his Fact Hunt series.
  • The next console they created was the Commodore CDTV. Their goal with this console was mainly to be a multimedia system similar to the Philips CD-i. Long story short, when you decide to compete against the Philips CD-i over bigger competition like Nintendo and Sega, you're bound to set yourself up for failure there. Being released for only the United Kingdom and Germany and promoting it as the "Commodore Dynamic Total Vision"^note technically making it Commodore Commodore Dynamic Total Vision, Commodore decided to rush their release into Europe first by using the computing system of the already-outdated Amiga 500 as the base of its functionality, removing the keyboard (though allowing it as an extra for £70), having a weird controller that's a mix between a proper controller and what looks like a remote controller in the middle of it, and allowing it to run CD-ROMs instead of the typical floppy disc drive at the time. What also didn't help matters was the fact that it was sold for an even more exorbitant £600, which translates to around £1,300 as of 2020, combined with the fact that Commodore was so desperate to get people to buy it that they demanded the CDTV be sold on the opposite side from Amiga computers in stores. Despite Commodore's drastic measures and threats, people weren't thrilled about what the CDTV was doing, with reviewers exposing this console's dark truth not long after it was released to the public. Even more pathetic is that despite it lasting longer than the CD32, the console only sold around 55,000 total units in both countries (nearly 30,000 in the UK and 25,800 total in Germany) ^note (the Amiga CD32 meanwhile sold around 100,000 copies all around Europe, at the very least), which sealed Commodore's fate by that point, and the CD32 could just play CDTV games just fine without it being necessary. Guru Larry reviews it on on Top 10 ACTUAL Worst Selling Consoles video in his Fact Hunt series.
  • Once a staple of the home computer market, Amiga was brought down by its one foray into the home console market: the Amiga CD32, which was released in September 1993 and discontinued in less than a year (for a mercy, it was never released outside of Europe and Canada). The console is a hodgepodge of questionable design choices seemingly made to spite console gamers, including the power button being on the back of the unit instead of on top or up front, and the controller ports being on the side instead of in front. The CD unit was also notably faulty — the lid had no safety lock and, depending on how old the system is, the discs may not spin unless a weight (like a paint can, for an extreme example) was on it to help keep it closed. The controller's design was similarly questionable: in addition to being designed in an upside-down way in comparison to the more user-friendly controllers of its competitors, the face buttons are labeled with odd media player symbols^note Comparing the CD32's button symbols to the SNES's: the SNES has A, B, X, Y, L, R, Start and Select; the CD32 has Stop, Eject, Loop, Chapters, Rewind, Fast Forward and Pause/Play instead of simple letters, numbers, or basic shapes^note Not that it particularly mattered since most of the games that were ported from Amiga PCs (which were intended for a joystick with two buttons) didn't get the control scheme rearranged for a SNES-style gamepad, meaning you'd get weird, console-unsuited stuff like having to press up to jump in platform games, instead of one of the face buttons. In other words, even if CD32 shipped with a really good controller, the games still would have played like garbage because they weren't optimized or programmed to properly utilize it. The MSRP was another slap in the face: $400 (adjusted for inflation, almost $700 as of 2018) on its own, for which you could've bought a Mega Drive or SNES with a second controller and multiple games to go with either choice. And for all of its boasts of being the first 32-bit console^note Which was a lie, the Japan-only FM Towns Marty beat it to the market by 7 months, it was more of a low-end Amiga computer in a console shell than a true home console like the Saturn or PlayStation. The CD32's library does little to justify a purchase: for every one halfway-decent game (most of which were already available on older Amiga systems or other PCs or consoles), there were at least five shovelware titles such as the infamous video game adaptation of AKIRA. Furthermore, the console was also based off of software from the Amiga 1200 instead of something else that was original or exclusive to itself. All that meant the CD32 being banned in the United States over a patent dispute before it was even released there (though a handful of NTSC consoles were sold in Canada) was seen, in hindsight, as a mercy to hardcore gamers, and today the console is ignored by both collectors and the retro gaming community. The Angry Video Game Nerd pulled no punches in his criticisms of this console before destroying it with a flamethrower. What's probably worse as a kicker to it was that it was a repeat of what happened to the parent company's aforementioned Commodore CDTV.
• JungleTac:
  • The Wireless 60 is a Wii ripoff with poor and stolen graphics, dull gameplay, and fake motion controls. Shane Luis of Rerez takes a look at it here as the very first episode of "The Worst Ever" series, where he calls it the worst game system he has ever played.
  • Wireless: Hunting Video Game System aka the Wireless. The console tries to act like a home console version of the Big Buck Hunter arcade game found in certain establishments (with 20 total games on it), but none of them really work out so well at all. Games there range from the typical military shooters and gallery shooters to games that feel out of place for this type of console like Darts and whatever Be Careful could be classified as, and all of them (including their ripoff of Duck Hunt) hold major problems that ruin whatever fun might have been had with them, some of which including game-breaking bugs and games that are either too short, too long, or could even be played without doing anything at all. Combine that with a broken set-up for even playing the console properly, including a lesser pointing system when compared to the Wii, plus the fact that this actually rips off a different light gun system done by Hamy, and you got quite a system that you'd be better off forgetting about completely. However, if you want to see it in action, Shane Luis from Rerez has a video where he has his friend/co-host Adam also look at the system alongside him.^note At the time of review, Shane wrongly assumed that the Wireless was the first console in the Wireless line due to the name of this particular console, as the Wireless 60 came out in 2009, 2 whole years before the Wireless, meaning the Wireless is the actual predecessor at hand, not the Wireless 60.
  • Wireless Air 60, the sequel to the aforementioned Wireless 60, is a console that knocks off Microsoft's Xbox 360 or Xbox One with the Kinect functionality but managed to make the knockoff Kinect become a lot less functional by comparison. The problems from its predecessor still remain here, only in addition to fake motion controls, it also features a completely broken method to move various things from one way to the next in many different ways. Rerez considers this sequel to be even worse by comparison, so much so he destroyed it at the end of his review. You can watch it here.
• Soulja Boy has released several terrible consoles in a thoroughly misguided attempt to cash in on the retro video game console trend that was made popular by the NES Classic, SNES Classic, Sega Genesis Mini, and (to a much lesser extent) PlayStation Classic. Yong Yea covered the entire history of Soulja Boy's failed console releases here, as has Izzzyzzz here, while iiluminaughtii covered it as part of her chronicle of Soulja Boy's numerous scams starting at 12:11 of this video:
  • The SouljaGame Console and the SouljaGame Handheld both boasted hundreds of built-in games and capabilities that sounded too good to be true (the Handheld was advertised to emulate the Switch, 3DS, and PlayStation Vita ^note {not only do stable emulators not exist for those handhelds, with only the 3DS having a usable emulator, it doesn't have all the inputs needed to emulate a PSP or an old 3DS sans Circle Pad Pro, let alone a Switch} and the Console's advertising had a screenshot implying that it could play Tomb Raider (2013) at 4K resolution). As it turns out, they were nothing more than cheap Chinese consoles sold at inflated prices that could barely do half of the things that were advertised. The games that could be played were emulated with terrible video settings that were meant to fill widescreen displays but led to the video being slightly cropped. Not even the metadata were spared by the creators' incompetence and laziness; a significant number of games on the Console have art from other games, fan-made covers, or materials that aren't from a video game at all^note including Mamegoma images — apparently the creators tried to get generic art by Googling "mamegame" but misspelt it as either "mamegome" or "mamegama" and failed to realise the admittedly adorable picture they ended up with had nothing to do with anything. The Console was bundled with games that Soulja Boy or the console designers couldn't possibly have the rights to, which eventually forced him to pull the SouljaGame from his online store to avoid legal action from Nintendo. Despite all that, many people never even got their consoles despite paying extra for three-day shipping. Madlittlepixel gives a breakdown of the SouljaGame Console, literally and figuratively, and later showcases what it ^note (or rather, the TsingChu X Pro, the original Chinese console the SouljaGame is based off) is actually capable of. JonTron riffs on it here, but he was forced to review the original Chinese console because his copy of the SouljaGame never showed up. Rerez also showcased the actual consoles (in their original forms and not with the Soulja Boy brand on them), as well as a couple more consoles he released before being sued by Nintendo in the Retro SouljaBoy Mini and SouljaGame Fuze here.
  • After canning most of those consoles by force from his Soulja Watch website, he came back later in January 2019 with three different consoles on sale: a different version of the SouljaGame Handheld that was released (which looked like a Play Station Vita, but has since later been "remodeled" a bit to look like a Nintendo Switch after the Vita was discontinued), the SouljaGame Portable Screen (which was a portable DVD player (that might also play the rare EVD), though it includes a small disc of 300 NES games inside of it with bootlegged stuff included there), and a third SouljaGame Handheld (though this one was properly named the PVP 3000 (Game Console Suit), with it sometimes going under different names and retailers properly like the PXP 3 Slim Station instead) that tries to ripoff the PlayStation Portable. All three of these consoles hold significant issues that make them completely unplayable for one reason or another.
  • The third SouljaGame Handheld (or PVP 3000 or PXP 3 or whatever it might be found under) gained some extra notoriety initially for not only having a various amount of exclusive cartridges of said many-in-one games alongside having one within the console that could be activated on its own right (assuming you actually have one of those many-in-one cartridges around the first time around), but also bootlegged Genesis games like Angry Birds and Super Mario World, none of which perform well. Most egregious is a ROM of Sonic & Knuckles locked onto an incompatible cartridge, resulting in Blue Sphere masquerading as Sonic & Knuckles. And as an added bonus, the video output cables that came with the system are also prone to failure if they're ever used long enough. Rerez covers that console in better detail here, with the note that during its production the souljawatch.com website the consoles were sold at shut down, stating that maybe it should stay that way.
  • He then eventually found a proper SouljaGame Portable Screen (though it went under the name Buyee (not to be confused with the proxy shopping service with the same name that lets you bid and purchase Japanese products online) as a portable DVD/EVD player with the same Super Game 300 disc included), and with a controller being cheap and easy to break (the buttons feel like marshmallows or chewed up chewing gum and often require moving your fingers around to get them back into their proper molding) combined with the disc player potentially breaking its optical disc drive randomly, never mind the faults involved with game emulation, it's almost no wonder why he finds it to be the worst of not just the Soulja Boy based knock-off consoles, but potentially other consoles he reviewed like the Wireless Air 60 and SX-86 above.
  • By March 2020, Rerez accidentally found the second SouljaGame Handheld in the X-7 Plus (and a more recently updated version of it named the X-12) when covering the worst Nintendo Switch knock-off(s) yet. The X-7 Plus specifically was modified to look like a Switch, only it doesn't have the split Joy-Con abilities like the Switch would; the X-12 was a little bigger, but not by much. However, they both hold similar designs to the Vita, including a right thumb stick that alternates as buttons for some reason, a poor camera that significantly delays audio and makes things fuzzy, and custom composite video output cables that are ridiculously short and easy to glitch out either system, especially the X-7 Plus. Weirdly enough, the X-7 Plus doesn't have their default SD cards working properly on the system, yet the X-12 can, and it somehow does it worse by comparison. Add all that with more emulation problems from both systems, including one game on the X-12 that somehow showed its debug screen upside-down, and you can see how absolutely worthless Soulja Boy's second gaming endeavors were.
• Tiger Electronics:
  • The R-Zone, which manages the impressive feat of being a Shoddy Knockoff Product of the Virtual Boy. The one thing it did have in its favor that the Virtual Boy didn't was that you could wear it on your head rather than having to use a stand. However, when you did put it on, you were treated to graphics worse than a Game & Watch or even their prior handheld games (mostly due to the eye-searing "red on slightly darker red" color scheme) rendered about three inches in front of your right eye. Needless to say, this didn't produce anything even vaguely resembling virtual reality. Making this whole system even more ridiculous, there were no less than four different versions: the standard "headgear" version, a much larger tabletop variant, a traditional handheld version, and one which also incorporated an electronic organizer, all of which crashed and burned equally. Stuart Ashen gives his take on the handheld version while The Angry Video Game Nerd briefly analyzed the headgear version. Mark Bussler of Classic Game Room also took a look at the system and the handheld version, the former being so bad it warped him to an alternate dimension. Poor Octavius King had to play the headgear version upside-down due to being blind in their right eye, which the headgear was specifically molded for. They also covered the handheld version and the tabletop version. The commercials were horrible in their own way, since they showed footage from the arcade versions of the R-Zone titles rather than the crude monochromatic blobs that passed for the system's graphics. When the AVGN released his video of the top ten worst video game consoles he had reviewed thus far, he really did consider it the absolute worst console he had ever reviewed, and that console ended up beating some video game consoles that are also on this list. It also had the misfortune of spoiling a dramatic reveal for Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers by revealing that Tommy was the White Ranger at least a month before "The White Light" aired via a freebie card in magazines.
  • The Game.com^note The dot is silent (The console's advertising is horrible in its own right; see its entry on the Advertising subpage for more on it). It introduced the touch screen, Internet browsing, and the potential for online multiplayer (no game for this system used it for gameplay) a full seven years before the big names. Unfortunately, it just wasn't possible to do that well with 1997 technology. The device had to be tethered to a bulky modem and two expensive add-on cartridges if you wanted to use the Internet (text only, for fairly obvious reasons). Its Game Boy-grade CPU was crippled (by multiple culprits, one being the OS-mandated processing overhead) to the point of barely surpassing the Game & Watch. The touchscreen didn't have a full percent of modern touchscreens' sensitivity, and suffered so much ghosting and smearing that faster-paced games were virtually unplayable. You can actually see the touchscreen electrodes when you pick the thing up, all 108 of them. Add a library of under 20 games, and you have an example of great idea, lousy execution. Here it is in action, specifically the game Sonic Jam (which is not an actual port of the Saturn game but merely a compilation of levels loosely based on some from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles). For some reason, there was a port of Mortal Kombat Trilogy, a sluggish and stripped-down version of the game that only included 13 of the characters of the console versions (and neither Scorpion nor Sub-Zero are one of them), and a limited pool of special attacks and finishers for each. Ashens reviewed this game system and several of its games. He was not merciful, nor was AVGN when he tore the thing to shreds in the Tiger Electronic Games episode. Frame Rater also reviewed the entire library in this video. Rerez also reviewed the console and all of its games for their "Worst Ever Series," adding that several games on the console performed worse than comparable ports released around the same time on hardware that was made much earlier.
  • Tiger made a last-ditch attempt to save the console with the Pocket Pro revision in 1999, which was somewhat smaller and had a much better backlit screen... but cut out the original model's internet connectivity and unique second cartridge slot. Unsurprisingly, it again flopped at retail, having been overshadowed by the technically superior Game Boy Color released a year earlier. Tiger would discontinue the Game.com line in 2000 and never make another cartridge-based handheld system again.

Other Video Game Consoles

• The Action Max VHS Video Game Console, created by Worlds of Wonder (the people behind the beloved Teddy Ruxpin as well as another game of gunning, Lazer Tag, as well as distribution for the Nintendo Entertainment System during its first year in the US) was a game system that used VHS tapes as the medium to play games - except that the system itself was not what played the tapes, but rather the user needed their own VCR to play them, while the system was used for recording scores and playing gun sound effects through its speaker. Using a light gun (or two for 2-player games), players would shoot at the screen. The gaming was strictly point-based and dependent on shot accuracy - players could not truly "lose" or "win" a game. This, along with the fact that the library of the system was composed entirely of light gun games that played exactly the same way every time, greatly limited the system's appeal and led to its quick downfall with a measly 5 games to its library. Ben Minnotte of the Oddity Archive provides further history on the Action Max and attempts to play it here. When TripleJump ranked every home console (and accessory relating to said home console) from worst to best, the Action Max was ranked the third worst console released, with its console being considered the worst in terms of games held. ^note The only two "systems" that were ranked worst than that were the APF Imagination Machine for being very expensive for even 1979's standards, and the entire first generation of video gaming systems, which were hundreds of systems playing only Pong and noting only two consoles from that generation truly stood out in that era. The system's failure would also serve as one of the contributing factors for Nintendo canceling their partnership with Worlds of Wonder.
• The Advanced Game Player and Advanced Game Player 2, whose names were obviously patterned on that of the Game Boy Advance. And never has there been anything more unworthy of such a title. Both had the same eight games, all of which were stored internally but required a different game card to access; the system came with four such cards, two games to a card, although these didn't even always work since you wouldn't always get the game you were trying to play (sometimes the console would load up a pair of games from another game card for some reason - this meant that as long as you were fine with whatever randomly came up you didn't really need the cards anyways). Of the four face buttons, only one actually gives the games any input, making it a bizarre nod to the Atari 2600 controller (the other three control volume, brightness, and the power switch which you could accidentally hit and shut off your game). The only good thing is that it's backlit, but the backlight works independently of the system itself so you can turn this on and use it as an ordinary handheld light. It's one of those systems that promises thousands of different games when it has only eight and the "different" games are merely variations on the difficulty and speed. To really ice this rancid cake, however, the control interface would flip over at random times. You can't make this stuff up - the directional buttons would randomly remap to the face buttons and vice versa. The games themselves were utter crap, including such gems as "Hit Brick" and "Fill Brick" and two "Car Racing" games which for some reason are both sequels with no original installment. This is the kind of thing grandparents who don't know anything about gaming buy for their grandkids, especially since the AGP2 sort of looks like a PSP so it obviously must be one.
• The Atari Jaguar CD. Its very existence is preposterous, given the Jaguar's low sales. The toilet bowl-shaped design was the least of its troubles - few machines even worked, and were nigh irreparable to boot. Only 15 games were made for it, none of which could outperform Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing" music video in terms of graphics. One of the developers of the Highlander tie-in game for the Jaguar CD revealed why: when they were making the game for it, they found out the hard way that the add-on was clearly rushed out the door and was too buggy and resource-constrained, to the extent that everything for it had to be coded by hand from scratch just to make a game on it. The massive failure of the Jaguar permanently ended Atari's involvement in the video game console industry and relegated the company to a third-party software developer. America would not have a dedicated home-grown gaming console system for years to come until Microsoft debuted with the Xbox in 2001, finally putting America back onto the game console map again.
  • Dr. Insano, after struggling to get one to work, said:
    [N]ot only is it prone to hardware failures, it's prone to about five different ways it can fail. It can fail if the CD device isn't perfectly set on the machine. It can fail if the contacts aren't clean. It can fail if the MemoryTrack cart isn't perfectly set, and it can easily fail because the laser itself or the motor mechanism are defective, and they often are, and in this case, it failed because the lid is so poorly designed that, when closed, it actually closes too tightly and mashes the CD against the inside of the drive, preventing it from spinning, and that could easily cause additional internal damage [...] And even when I did get it to work the Jaguar still froze all the time, and I do mean all the damn time!
  • Spoony himself later remarked that after spending three days getting the thing to work "the motor on the CD drive completely crapped out."
  • It took James Rolfe (in tandem with Richard Daluz, his repairman) three tries to get a salvageable, let alone working, unit. ^note (The third was presented as a DVD extra.)
• The Game Master by German company Hartung, which was also released in the UK as the Systema 2000, was a horrid knockoff of the Game Boy ^note (three others were Watara's Supervision, Welback's Mega Duck {also known as the Cougar Boy}, and Bit Corporation's Gamate, which are the lesser of the four evils). Of the two dozen or so games made for it, all of them are just poor-quality knockoffs of Game Boy games. The screen also had a very low framerate and was very blurry. Even though it had a dot matrix display, it has nowhere near the resolution as that of the Game Boy and only had a single color. The controls for most of the games are slippery and unresponsive (not helped by the lopsided D-Pad and buttons positioned at the bottom of the system, forcing the user to stretch their thumbs down there or pinch the system by the bottom and causing it to fall out of their hands) and the music in most games sounds like a random mess of beeps, or distorted classical tunes in some games. The packages for every game (at least the UK versions) were no better as they not only featured very cheesy art, but poorly-translated Chinese text describing every game's features and the carts merely crammed in plastic baggies together with said manuals. Here is Ashens' look at the system and a handful of games for it.
• The Gizmondo was only sold for just under a year in 2005-06, and it's not hard to see why. The system came in two variations, one costing $229 and the other $400. The difference? The cheaper model had commercials that would be downloaded onto the console and randomly played when accessing the home screen; mercifully, the ad servers never went online during the system's lifespan. For the cost of either model, you could've just bought a Nintendo DS or PlayStation Portable and a few games. You would get a hell of a lot more value with either, since the Gizmondo only saw 14 games released — only eight of which got released in North America — none of which were really worth owning as they were either ports of games you could get on consoles or lackluster exclusive titles. Worse still, one of the most heavily-touted features of the Gizmondo, its built-in GPS, didn't work at all in the United States of America^note Though it did work in the United Kingdom... for all of a few weeks before going down for good as well. All this before getting into the controversy surrounding Gizmondo Europe's links to the Swedish mafia, a wrecked Ferrari, the subsequent arrest of the company's director, and the subsequent dissolution of manufacturer Tiger Telematics ^note (not to be confused with Tiger Electronics of the aforementioned Game.com and R-Zone). And as one last kicker to it, besides not just being the worst selling handheld system of all-time (at least until the debatable, IndieGogo-existent ZX Spectrum Vega+ came out), the Gizmondo is completely made out of a rubbery plastic to make it look more luxurious at the time than it really was, which makes the console feel more like a strange, sticky goo after a certain point of time, as Guru Larry notes here. Josh Scorcher placed it not only as his third worst console of all-time (behind only the multimedia-focused consoles known as the Philips CD-i and the Pioneer LaserActive for how they both failed spectacularly), but also saw it as his worst handheld console ever here.
• The HyperScan from Mattel, a small console released in late 2006 and discontinued only months later the next year. Similar to the likes of the later Skylanders, Disney Infinity and Nintendo's amiibo, the console has a scanner where you use cards to scan in power-ups for the character you want to play in the game. However, unlike the aforementioned games with figures and amiibo, the scanning refuses to work properly, leaving one to constantly either swipe or hold the card in place on the scanner to get it to read. Moreover, the system is incredibly light with no rubber pads to keep the console on the table. The games (all five of them) have abysmal loading times and unimpressive graphics for its time, which explains why they only cost $20 at the time of release. Despite retailing at only $70, the HyperScan failed to please its children demographic and Mattel had to sink to $10 to push its product ($2 for their video games) before folding it in 2007. The final results for it lead to only 10,000 total units sold, meaning only the Casio PV-1000 (which was in the Japanese market for only two months before being discontinued) and the above mentioned Commodore C64GS sold worse as stand-alone consoles by comparison. Even worse, most units had to be returned due to said issues with its scanner, as Jamie from AllTimeGaming mentions in Guru Larry's Worst Selling Consoles video. Classic Game Room takes a better look at it here. The Angry Video Game Nerd also reviewed the console as a part of his 2014 Twelve Days of Shitsmas series, as well as looked in-depth at four of the games that were released there (the fifth, a Spider-Man game, was not reviewed because he couldn't get a hold of it) and notes that it had fewer titles released for it than the Virtual Boy, which he reviewed earlier. Rerez also reviewed the console and all five of its games for their "Worst Ever Series", adding that the console's disc drive and AV cables (which are hard-wired into the console) are prone to failure as well as the scanning component; taking four tries to get a working console, a personal record for the show.^note A comment on the video adds that, due to the console's failure, all five games are functionally incomplete due to Mattel never releasing all of the cards, meaning that you could only get a 'complete' HyperScan experience if you were to hack the console, or even get an emulator.
• The Interact^note Also MyQi, WiWi, MiWi, MiWi Xtra, MiWi 2, MiWi 360 Deluxe, Digitron, and iSport, the only gaming system ever put out by Intec, a company that specializes in accessories for most gaming systems. This system is not advertised on Intec's official website at all, and for good reason. It's a flimsy ripoff of the Wii with a suspiciously similar-looking console and controllers. Unlike the Wii, this system only sports graphics that would look bad on the SNES and only mono audio support. The games for it are all soulless copycats of other better games, and some of them even steal graphics from well-respected franchises like Half-Life, Crash Bandicoot, and Metal Slug. Whereas the Wii had plenty of games with poorly implemented motion controls, the Interact, as ProJared explains, has "faked motion controls" - using certain peripherals are the same as pushing the A button.
• The Ouya set Kickstarter records at $8 million in a month, with promise of a developer-friendly, hackable gaming system where players could try any game for free before buying. It was expected to revolutionise gaming, until backers actually received it, revealing it to be a flop.^note Though, in hindsight, the fact that the Ouya's E3 2013 booth was in a parking lot across the street should have been a bad omen. The system struggled to play smartphone games, despite being an Android system in a console shell, and the Ouya Store was filled with shovelware from the start (with one game even being animated rain). The controller (which cost $50, half the system's price) had poor build quality, with the analog sticks wearing down after just weeks and buttons sticking down, along with a bad design choice in no dedicated Start button. The promise of all games having free demos was dropped a year in, and having a registered account and credit card info was required for use. In the end it flopped so hard that Ouya, Inc. had to sell itself to Razer to escape its massive debts, and was discontinued in 2015, barely two years after launch. When the servers were finally shut down in 2019, all consoles turned into paperweights because of always-online DRM attached to every single game. Thus, the Ouya, on top of everything else, became a cautionary tale in the history of Digital Distribution. CrowbCat chronicles everything that went horribly wrong with the console in this video. Rerez also made a video covering the Ouya story as part of their "Worst Ever" series.
• If you thought the PlayStation Classic was bad, you'll feel thankful that was what Sony did when compared to the P1 Mini Game Console. With this system, they only did the bare minimum to try and make it look like a PlayStation Classic knockoff on the surface, and the controller that's given can break on you very easily with the cheap molding looking like it can crack apart at any time! Not that you would want to play it for very long, considering its instructions imply it can malfunction and melt on you if it's played for more than 5 hours at a time, with its games library only featuring 8-bit NES quality games for what's supposed to be a PlayStation Classic knockoff! And even though it does feature hundreds of games, you wouldn't want to play any of them on there, bootleg games or otherwise. Combine that with it being around in either 2019 or 2020 and still requiring old, standard definition quality to make it work, and you got something that makes Sony's blunder not feel so bad there by comparison. Rerez looked at the quality of this device properly here.
• Released during their Audience-Alienating Era in the mid-90s, the Apple Pippin was Apple's attempt at entering the video game console market in collaboration with Bandai to hilariously bad results. It was a video game console that ran off of Mac OS 7 and was supposed to be a sort of hybrid between a video game console and a computer. Despite having superior CPU and memory to rivaling contemporary consoles, the Pippin lacked a dedicated graphics and sound processor. In addition, Mac OS 7 didn't actually come preloaded onto the system: In what was possibly a poorly thought-out attempt to future-proof the platform, the OS had to be included in the game CD and loaded into the system's memory at startup, thus leaving little memory for the actual game. These factors would prove to be the Pippin's own undoing. As a result, games ran slowly, often with drawn-out load times to even load a new menu and inferior graphics to the PlayStation released the previous year or even the 3DO released three years earlier. Only 13 games were released in America, with even less in Japan and Europe. Highlights include Racing Days, which is best described as a watered-down Ridge Racer with poorer graphics, and Super Marathon from Bungie (yes, the same Bungie of Halo and Destiny fame), which is a port of Marathon and Marathon 2 from the Apple Macintosh except with worse graphics and a poorer framerate, both succeeding in showcasing the technical shortcomings of the system. It retailed for $599, which was ridiculous considering the power of the system. What really killed it however, is that any game written for the Pippin can also run on the Macintosh, rendering the Pippin absolutely unnecessary. Despite high expectations from Bandai and $93 million spent in marketing, the Pippin flopped, selling only 48,000 units, making it the worst-selling video game console of the fifth generation, as well as the third worst-selling console of the 90s, behind the previously mentioned Commodore CDTV and the Pioneer LaserActive. Unsurprisingly, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he put the kibosh on the Pippin only a year after its release. While Apple would later revisit the video game industry a decade later with the iPhone and its App Store, they would never again attempt another dedicated gaming console. PC World named it the 22nd worst tech product of all time in a 2006 article.
• There are a number of shoddy knockoff game systems regularly churned out by an unnamed company affectionately dubbed as simply "POP Station". Why are they so bad? They're glorified Game And Watches ^note (specifically, they're clones of Casio handhelds from the mid-1980s, which were themselves knockoffs of the Game & Watch, making the POP Station a ripoff of a ripoff) masquerading as high-end electronics. The only good thing out of them have been the reviews by Stuart Ashen. Worse, they in themselves have their own knockoffs - and true to form, they're still worse than the original.
  • Every "knockoff" system ever made, such as the Zone 40 (a Wii knockoff) and Guitar Star (a Guitar Hero knockoff that you plug straight into your TV set). It plays horridly with fragile and often unresponsive or delayed controls, the charts don't match the songs at all, and the songs themselves are poor-quality MIDI files with ear-grating guitar soundfonts. Watch Clone Hero streamer Acai as he rips through one of these systems and laughs at how utterly bad it is. Ashens reviewed a similar piece of hardware called "Guitar Fever", but no matter which name you call it, it still sucks.
  • Special note goes to the infamous Laden Vs. USA made by the same people who make POP Stations. Yes, they (in this specific case, a company named Gao Ming [or the Panyu Gaoming Electronic Co.]) made a terrible Game & Watch knockoff game based on one of the most horrific terrorist attacks in history. Watch Ashens review it and see the sheer disgust he has with its very existence become all but visible on video.
• At a time when LCD games were being phased out and the Game Boy Color was about to be released, the ill-conceived Pro 200, made by a company under the name ProTech, was sold via mail order, and claimed to be a cheap alternative to all the other systems out on the market. The system was marketed as having 200 games, being a full-function calculator and featuring "state-of-the-art" computer chip technology. In reality, the system had only 15 games (the marketers got the 200 figure by counting each difficulty level as an individual game), most of which were Tetris ripoffs. The ones that weren't Tetris ripoffs were just as bad (for example; Frog-a-Long is just a poor man's Frogger) due to the system's ridiculously small screen which had a tendency to fade when not looked at straight on, much like those cheap electronic toys one could find at a bargain bin. The commercial advertising is even worse, going as so far as to drop an SNES Street Fighter II cartridge into a trash can at the halfway point. Inexplicably, the Pro 200 continued to be advertised through newspaper ads with the same ad they made in 1998, and it's been bootlegged and cloned by even cheaper companies since its release.
• The RCA Studio II was a poorly-designed console even for its day. Released in January 1977 before the Atari Video Computer System and shortly after the Fairchild Channel F, the RCA Studio II had some major flaws, likely due in part to being rushed through development in an attempt to beat the aforementioned competitors to the market. Despite having five built-in games, the console could only play games in black and white; it had internal speakers whose only sounds you could hear were repetitive beeps; the numeric keypad controllers were built directly into the console, forcing you to huddle up close to the screen just to use them; and the RF switch box was of a faulty design that supplied the signal to your TV set which, at the same time, gave you both video and DC power to the system. Not even the AVGN could understand how that worked, having its only viable comparison being the Atari 5200 in terms of setting itself up. Only 15 games were released on the RCA Studio II, the five built-in games plus 10 cartridge-based games, despite that it was one of the first systems to use interchangeable cartridges. It only sold 53,000 to 64,000 copies per RCA's estimations and was discontinued in February 1978 due to poor Christmas sales. Watch this and this review. Incidentally, Joyce Weisbacker, the daughter of the console's designer Joseph Weisbacker, wrote a couple of games for the Studio II, making her the first woman to develop a commercial video game.
  Angry Video Game Nerd: Man, if there was ever an RCA Studio I, I'd hate to see it.
• Before the critically-acclaimed Sega Genesis Mini, there was the Sega Genesis Flashback. Created by AtGames, it boasted 80 games installed right out of the box; in addition to a cartridge slot that accepts regular Genesis games. This sounds great on paper, but half of them were not legitimate Genesis titles; and were actually filler games made by AtGames themselves (or an outside contractor), which included generic math/puzzle games, shoddy knockoffs of arcade staples like Frogger, or original ideas that were hastily thrown together. None of them are particularly fun to play, but what about the actual Genesis games? Games with any kind of unusual cartridge — such as Virtua Racing, Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament — flat-out don't work in the slot, and even on the pre-loaded games, the emulation quality is horrid; especially the sound. The music for Sonic the Hedgehog alone sounds so depressing due to the botched music emulation, it makes the game feel like Dr. Eggman already won long before you even pressed Start. That might as well be the case, given that the console shipped with two tiny 6-button controllers that are extremely unresponsive — due to being infrared, rather than the Bluetooth used by most modern wireless controllers — and make playing even simple puzzle games more akin to pulling teeth. The controllers also interfere with each other when used simultaneously due to the aforementioned infrared setup^note Since only one button input can be registered at a time, one controller will always end up taking priority over the other; when that happens, inputs on the other stay held down momentarily, rendering it nigh-on impossible to put in multiple inputs — such as a special move in a fighting game — quickly, which basically makes co-op play on the system a fool's errand. Yes, there is the option to plug standard Genesis controllers into the unit, but not everybody has one lying around, especially in 2017. The console itself barely even looks like an actual Genesis console^note If you squint your eyes, it almost looks like a Genesis 3, and inexplicably, only supports mono composite to keep it as inexpensive as possible. With the NES Classic Edition being out a year before, the overall level of quality is inexcusable. Thankfully, Sega dropped AtGames after the poor reception of the Genesis Flashback and partnered with M2 to develop both the Genesis Mini and its eventual sequel.
• The Super Mini SN-02 looks to be a Shoddy Knockoff Product of the SNES Classic with "821 games", but it isn't even that. The console only has 8-bit NES games, and many of said "821 games" are just duplicates of each other, Chinese bootleg hacks, or stolen ROM hacks that were never made for a commercial use. And it is being sold in stores such as Amazon and Walmart. What gets even worse is that the console has inappropriate nudity and racist content, in a console ostensibly aimed at families. Here is NBC News reporting on the bootleg and Time Extension's article on the matter.
• The SX-86 Mini Games Console Entertainment System, an obvious knock-off of the SNES Classic but containing controllers modelled after those of the PlayStation, has the usual suspects for a cheap bootleg game console (pirated games, poor controller design, bad sound emulation, etc.), but the emulator in use is problematic enough to increase the console's issues tenfold. Containing numerous games for the Neo Geo (misspelled as the "Neo Ngo" in the system; also includes some of Capcom's arcade games for some reason), Game Boy Advance, the aforementioned SNES and PlayStation ^note (only four PlayStation games are included, most of them Japan-exclusive; of those, two of them run horrifically even by this system's standards (with one of those games originally being released for the Neo Geo anyway); the third, Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII, is a Simplified Chinese Fan Translation; and the fourth, Ugetsu Kitan, is an extremely niche and obscure horror Adventure Game about a terminally ill man being Driven to Suicide and ending up having a pre-mortem fever dream involving Japanese ghost stories and a mysterious girl who warned him that he would die in discomfort {not that you'd know that unless you understand Japanese, preferably to the point where you can read all the jōyō kanji, or have an Android tablet or iPad with the Google Translate app handy}), Sega Genesis, and NES/Famicom, none of them work properly, bogged down with such issues like input lag, slower framerate, and graphical issues (worst of all is The Adventures of Batman and Robin which is missing the background, making the game near-impossible to play). And that's not all - the emulator itself lacks a proper "Start Game" function, a few of the functions are ultimately worthless (to specify, "Game Guide" brings up an error message and it has "Load Progress" despite the lack of a save function), and one must restart in order to play a game. Whereas most cheap knock-off consoles have the games built into the internal hardware, the SX-86 has the games on a micro SD chip inside an adapter, and the console itself faces errors even when starting up for the first time (including with the SD card reader), requiring one to shut off and restart multiple times until it works. It even manages to fail from a presentation standpoint, as while the NES, Genesis, and Neo Geo games are at least represented with mascots from their respective first-party franchises like Mario, Sonic, and Iori, the GBA option decides to use Crash Bandicoot as its representative, while the combined SNES and PS1 option bizarrely decides to steal promotional artwork from Blazblue Central Fiction, a game from a series that came out generations after these systems were on the market. Shane Luis of Rerez takes a look at it and you can practically feel the confused anger he expresses. And just for an extra kicker, the refusal to reliably boot up continues past the initial setup, with the system oftentimes not even sending a signal to the TV.
• The LJN Video Art is widely considered by console collectors to be the worst console ever made. Whether it even falls within the traditional definition of a video game console is questionable, because it's just a drawing program. You can load in "activity cartridges" with "pages" of line art, but that was it. Even as a coloring software, it's horrible because of its stiff (borderline unresponsive), yet really squeaky controls and lack of a save function; a 50-cent coloring book and a set of crayons could provide a better experience. The console lacks a soundtrack of any sort, instead outputting white noise. See Gamester81's review of it here, as well as the AVGN's evisceration of it during the finale of his 2014 Twelve Days of Shitsmas series here, with him not only agreeing that it's the worst video game console ever made, but found that the Styrofoam that came with it gave him more interest than the actual console did. He even went so far as to say the boring NES coloring game Color a Dinosaur was better in comparison.
• The VIS (Video Information System) was released by Tandy at RadioShack stores in 1992. It was built in the footsteps of the Philips CD-i and Commodore's CDTV as yet another CD-ROM based "multimedia" device, and had PC-like hardware^{Fun Fact}It was the first home console to be based on the x86 architecture which would go onto be the standard for game consoles beginning with the PS4 and Xbox One with an already-outdated Intel 286 processor, and a "modular" version of Windows 3.1. The reason why the system flopped can be summed up as such: it was marketed as primarily being an edutainment device, and its lineup was mainly cheap interactive storybooks and ports of existing Windows and DOS software, such as the Compton's MultiMedia Encyclopedia (which was promoted in the console's extremely cheesy promo video as being a Killer App, as it was for multimedia PCs in general). The closest thing to a legitimate video game was Links golf - but it was already available on PC and Amiga too. With a launch price of $699 (around the same price as the similarly unsuccessful 3DO, which was a far more decent platform and had an above-average gaming library), it was too expensive for a game console, and one could spend a few hundred dollars more to get a real PC that could do everything the VIS could and then some; thanks to poor customer reception, some RadioShack employees jokingly declared that the VIS was "Virtually Impossible to Sell". In early 1993, Tandy attempted to sell the VIS through mail-order catalogs at a lower price of $399, and re-branded it as a Memorex product. Eventually, Tandy gave up after only being able to sell 11,000 units. Chadtronic riffed on the video that Tandy advertised the VIS on here while also briefly looking into some of the console's faults along the way.
• The Zeebo was launched by TecToy in 2009 in Brazil, a country where legitimate console gaming was historically reserved only for the wealthy classes. It was created to try and capitalize on the country's growing middle class as an alternative to expensive consoles and the large bootlegging/piracy scene, but botched the attempt at every possible turn. Despite its marketing as a cheaper alternative, the console's launch-day price was still more expensive than one month's worth of salary for the average Brazilian family. The game library did little to justify this price, as most of it was simply ports of mobile games, stripped-down versions of games that gamers could find elsewhere, or just plain shovelware-quality titles.^note The major culprit was Qualcomm's Brew OS, which was built for cell phones and not gaming systems. It turned out to be incredibly difficult and time-consuming to develop for, with even basic features like two simultaneous players requiring some serious programmming workarounds to achieve. Add other problems like a flimsy controller and TecToy's financial issues, and it's not hard to see why the Zeebo only lasted for two years on the shelf before being discontinued, despite attempts to push into other markets as an edutainment system. Derek and Grace of Stop Skeletons From Fighting made an in-depth video on how the Zeebo was doomed from the start here.
• The ZX Spectrum Vega+ surpassed the Ouya by some distance in terms of disastrous crowdfunded consoles. Based on being a handheld version of an earlier and fairly successful microconsole that came pre-loaded with 1,000 ZX Spectrum titles and was officially approved by Sinclair themselves, it quickly ran into more-or-less constant Troubled Production; to the point that by the time the console shipped out, the creators no longer had the rights to the vast majority of those games and lost their previous endorsements thanks to the sheer Development Hell that went on behind the scenes. When the handheld finally showed up, at significantly under even the intended 400 units, it was in as barebones of a state as possible. Several of its most egregious problems were knockoff-grade build quality, no charging cord, faulty batteries, multiple ports that didn't work,^note Most notoriously, the SD card slot was completely non-functional; meaning you couldn't add anything to it even if you wanted to, and in turn defeated the entire purpose of the system as an easy, portable way to play classic ZX Spectrum games. and the original 1,000 games cut down to 14 homebrew titles, which weren't even mapped correctly to the thing's controls at the base settings. Even the boxes they came in were plain cardboard haphazardly stuffed with crumpled paper, rather than actual packaging material. Guru Larry declared, after tooling around with a few, that it was more useful as a knife than a gaming device; given its oddly sharp edges that could cut through things frighteningly well. Daniel Ibbertson of KickScammers also made a monstrous 82-minute video that discussed in-depth the complete insanity that went on behind the scenes of this console's confirmation and long-awaited existence... and even that isn't the end of the story.

Accessories and other Hardware

Accessories

From controllers that cost you fights against Breather Bosses to unusable alternative displays to potential console brickers, some accessories are best avoided.

• The Sega Activator was created during the first big push by video game companies to make virtual reality games (at least a full decade before the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR made VR gaming viable). Designed as an octagon set on the floor, this special controller could let players play games with their body, ostensibly letting you enter the game you're playing. In practice, it was awkward and exhausting: each side of the octagon correlated with D-Pad directions and the Genesis controller's face buttons, and the game was controlled by moving one's arms and legs over the infrared sensors on the octagon, and much like the Power Glove described below, only a small handful of games were made to support the Activator: Mortal Kombat, Eternal Champions, and Comix Zone (and even then, they didn't support it very well). Trying to play other games with it was an exercise in exhaustion and futility. All this, combined with the need for perfectly level ceilings (ceiling fans and vaulted ceilings would interfere with the sensors), the need for its own power supply, and an $80 asking price, made it a very hard sell. The one upside is that the technology for the Activator was later used and improved by Sega for a Japan-exclusive arcade game: the deluxe version of Dragon Ball Z: V.R.V.S.
• The AirStrike Drum Kit was created for use with Power Gig: Rise of the SixString (see the 7th gen folder for details on that game), with the main gimmick being that instead of drum kits for games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, it instead uses sensors placed where the pads would be and you drum over them, which makes it quieter compared to a standard one. However, during the actual game, it barely worked at all, with the sensors being incredibly spotty at actually picking up any drum hits, making it nearly impossible to play it like a regular drum kit. It could be alleviated by adding a stand to it, but it actually decreases the range of the sensors according to the game itself, so it's not much help there either way. On top of that, the drum sticks have to be held in a specific position so that the sensors on the bottom can be picked up by the sensors on the "pads", which makes it hard to pull off any somewhat complex patterns and drum rolls. The whole contraption also requires 6 AA batteries (two for each drum stick and two for the pads themselves), and an Xbox Dashboard update in 2012 broke the functionality of the pads, making an achievement requiring the use of it unachievable. This video goes into more detail on the pads and how they (barely) work in-game.
• Around 1992, Camerica "released"^note It is unclear if it was ever officially released at all, as no advertisements of the device exist in any known store catalogues around the period. If it was released, it was likely in very small quantities as many retailers were unwilling to stock Camerica products at this point in time due to the company's rocky relationship with retailers. Most stock you see today came from liquidation sales of Camerica's then-unsold inventory that started around 1996. the Aladdin Deck Enhancer on the world. This device was intended as an add-on to the venerable NES, but failed to add any positives. In what was likely an attempt to sell the device to parents who refused to upgrade to the Super Nintendo, it was advertised on the box as a memory expansion (similar to the later Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak), claiming to add 64KB of RAM to the machine. In reality it only added 8KB of VRAM that served the same purpose as the CHR-ROM chip^note The ROM chip on an NES cartridge that contains graphics data for the graphics chip to directly access found on many mainstream commercial NES titles so it didn't make any meaningful difference. What this really served as was a dongle for lower-cost proprietary cartridges by Camerica, only eight of which were released and the only one that was any good having been released as a standard cartridge prior (most of the others were, too). Its method to circumvent the 10NES lockout chip is known to fry top-loader NES systems, and only works on the original front-loader as a result (though not even that is guaranteed), being very hard for clone systems to replicate. The system was never given a full release and rapidly faded into obscurity until the likes of the Gaming Historian and Angry Video Game Nerd picked it up.
• The dance pads bundled with DanceDanceRevolution DVD Game are unique: they don't register your inputs at all because the game has the players voting on each others' performances instead of actually scoring them. They also tend to slide around during gameplay, so they're not even good for very casual players. kkclue talks about it briefly in his rundown of various DDR controllers.
• Mattel and PAX's Power Glove, an NES accessory made famous by its appearance in The Wizard and hyped by no less than Nintendo Power, would theoretically allow the player to control the game using one hand. It was meant to be a big thing, but ended up a barely-functional piece of garbage. It cost more than an NES console and was nearly unusable. There were only two games released with programming specifically for the Power Glove, although three others were planned - the infamous Bad Street Brawler and Super Glove Ball. There was a method intended to make the Power Glove work with other games via a keypad and punched-in combination, but even then it controlled at best like a drunk on a unicycle. These days, it's best known as a recurring motif in The Angry Video Game Nerd, being famously eviscerated in his 14th video back in 2006 and featuring in later videos, as well as being frequently associated with the character in Fan Art and Fan Games. Its awfulness is lampooned in an episode of Regular Show, where Mordecai and Rigby win one in a fighting game tournament, only to find out how much it sucks.
• The VictorMaxx Virtual Reality Stuntmaster, a large set of goggles that can plug into an SNES or Genesis and play games in front of the user's eyes. The box also boasted a "motion sensor", which supposedly reacts when the user turns his/her head. Whilst having a slightly better design with a headband rather than the Virtual Boy's stand, the thing's size and weight put serious discomfort on the user's nose. However, getting it to work presents the biggest problem: there were no instructions in the box (though it did have a bizarre joke résumé) and the wiring system was a complete mess. When you finally get it working, you are treated to a horribly muddy Game Gear-like display that seriously hurts the eyes. And the "motion sensor" promised on the box? It was a ripcord-like stick you clip onto your shirt and plug into the device, that shifts the display a little when the ripcord runs along a sensor. James Rolfe and Mike Matei take a look at it and they both agree that it makes the Virtual Boy look good by comparison.

Miscellaneous

The stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else, but is still awful enough to note.

• The large long box jewel cases for US Sega CD games are reviled among collectors and retro gamers for being extremely fragile, often cracking or breaking with very little use, and shattering outright if not stored very carefully. The depth of the case was problematic as well, as discs would not stay held in their slots, necessitating a packed-in foam sponge to hold the disc in place and keep it from rattling around inside the case, and since this sponge was held in place by the case lid, that was even more stress on an already fragile piece of plastic. American Sega Saturn collectors don't get off any easier, as those same cases were reused for Saturn games. Sony, on the other hand quickly abandoned their own badly designed long box casing (either long-box jewel cases like for CD-based Sega console games or black plastic cases with cardboard or paper box art simply glued on, which was prone to falling off) after the PS1's first year in favor of standard-size jewel cases with many early hits for the system being re-issued in this format while Sega stuck with long boxes until the Dreamcast era. It's common to see lots of unbroken Sega CD/Saturn cases go for big bucks, and one of the most demanded aftermarket products by collectors is replacement Sega CD jewel cases. Even more insulting is that Japan and Europe got the superior flat square jewel cases while the Americas got the long box cases.

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