The PS4. My wife and I played a lot of PS3, so we were excited for the 4, but it just didn’t hit right. We ended up barely using it. At some point we let someone borrow it and never asked for it back.
I don’t even remember what we didn’t like, except that we were both pumped for the latest sack boy game, which ended up not anywhere near as fun as the first one.
Xbox One. Everytime I booted it up to feed the Halo crave, there’d be an update that took like an hour. Finally get on… Halo needs to update. 1 hour later, I’ve lost interest.
Repeat 6+ months later.
PS5 or Nintendo Switch.
PS5: No games I want to pmay except Demons Souls Remake. Its the only PS5 game I own. Every other game I wanted to play I just play on PC instead.
Switch: Weak, underpowered “console.” Never left the dock, ever. Still had performance problems in first party titles, like Breath of the Wild chugging to 15fps or less in the Korok Forest when facing East for some reason. After I was disappointed with Breath of the Wild, I haven’t touched the 2014 midrange tablet “console” since. Only emulated the games for an immensely better experience.
IIRC that Tegra X1 chip was launched in 2015 so the Switch launched with an obsolete SoC. It’s surprising to see how much performance they’ve been able to wring out of that old tech for nearly a decade. Color me impressed.
That’s kinda, at least historically, been Nintendo’s whole thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Design_philosophy
Honestly, my gaming laptop. Bought a few years ago, 3050. It was good and I could play games on it - but I live in a situation where all my electricity is solar generated and limited, charges 12v batteries and runs mains appliances via inverter. And the laptop was just too power hungry for long gaming sessions.
It was more a failure of me to properly research than a problem with the product, but was a let down. Bought a steam deck and never looked back.
I get a nervous inhalation each time an acquaintance asks me for advice in buying a gaming laptop.
Their computing world started with laptops, and they want to extend the idea. It’s so hard to express to them it’s generally not a good one.
Yeah right, especially with handheld devices becoming increasingly popular. The steam deck was by best purchase by far, in terms of fun per pound spent. And there’s much more powerful alternatives out there now.
The Atari 2600. I was expecting a NES.
I owned a fucking Virtual Boy. Do I really need to explain why I was disappointed?
The Switch.
Damn thing was fragile af, and they wanted to rent everything to us, no more Virtual Console no more solid hardware, they spend more money suing people for fixing it then they do on it like blocking local backup of saves so they can force a cloud sub and them still not having fixed the drifting JoyCons then charging you more than they are worth for repairs.
The Sega Game Gear. That sucker could drain six AA batteries in about three hours. Do you know how hard it was to find a place to buy AA batteries on Christmas day?
While a rechargeable battery pack fixed that problem, most of the games were garbage compared to the GameBoy. The first party games were the best, but most everything else was ‘meh.’
I never did get that TV tuner add-on either.
Instant flashback to my childhood. At some point i finally got a used game gear somewhere and the games were just awfull.
PS3. Coming from the PS2, the library was bland in comparison. And later on, when I got interested in console modding, the PS3 was the slowest and most cumbersome to do anything and with barely any variety of homebrew stuff. And also, I’m dreading having to replace the controller (due to the 3rd party PS button situation) and replacing the HD (due to how entangled pieces apparently are).
Later on, it’d become an overpowered PS2 console for me.
PS3 was on one the best consoles ever released tho
Maybe the library was meh (I didn’t really notice it) but from a hw it was peak. It was famously sold at a loss based on how much power it had
I’ve replaced the HDD with an SSD a few years ago. It’s very easy. Just make sure you backup your savegames and settings first.
Xnone. I bought it on, and for, the Fallout 4 release. They both sucked so bad I haven’t bought a console, or Bethesda game since.
I still want the console experience though. Couch gaming, mostly all set up. I don’t have the inclination to research a build, buy all the individual parts and build the thing.
I was thinking about a Beelink SER8, but the Steam Machine announced. When the steam machine releases I’ll compare it to equal price point minis. Steam gets a valve bonus, plus a bonus to knowing that’s the target Devs will be trying to hit.
I am one of the few lucky ones to actually get an Ouya… It wasn’t great.
I owned Ouya. The games weren’t great but OK. Some were fun. At least console wasn’t too expensive. Then I tried to change my email for my Ouya account and learned that the company behind Ouya disappeared. I was frustrated and sold my Ouya :(
My friend got an ouya, I think he mostly got it as a bit of a curiosity since he was a game dev student (and now does it professionally)
It absolutely didn’t do anything particularly different or better than any other gadget we could have hooked up to the TV to game on, but we did have a lot of fun with it for a while. It was kind of nice that it was so small so he could carry it around easily if he wanted to take it somewhere for a party or something.
And a few of the games we first discovered on the ouya are still mainstays of our parties when we manage to get together as busy adults.
Through a series of moves, roommate swaps, and marriage, that ouya (though not the controller) has actually now ended up in my possession
It’s on the left with my small collection of retro consoles and handhelds. Couple other cool bits of geeky paraphernalia scattered in there too. Disregard the mess on the coffee table and such, this was taken in the middle of some renovations, turns out I don’t take many pictures of my entertainment center.
Nice portal gun hiding up on a shelf.
Every so often I get reminded of the Ouya. I still have mine from the Kickstarter somewhere. It was good in concept, and I even saw posts of it being sold in major retailers like Target, but it just fizzled out far too fast.
I came to say this. Some good games on there, but Julie Uhrman is the worst. and to think, she just failed upward.
PSP. I know now people are racing about it, but the games basically all sucked except a few and it was a pretty good emulator handheld though. But it mostly collected dust.
I wouldn’t call any console I own a disappointment, even the Wii U had several games I loved and put too many hours into. But the system I ended up playing the least was the Steam Deck. It’s just too bulky to feel like a proper portable, not nearly as cozy as the Nintendo handhelds I grew up on. I get some use taking it to FGC events as a monitorless setup (and I will be bringing it to Combo Breaker 2026 next week), but that’s kinda all I ended up using it for.
I still don’t regret buying it as the most important thing to happen to Linux gaming, but it was a system I bought to have more than to use. I later bought a Miyoo Mini Plus and ended up putting far more hours into that than I ever did the Deck. If anyone ever gets SteamOS running on a device in that size form factor, they’ll get my entire bank account.
I acknowledge the Steam Deck is an important step forward for PC gaming, but I just didn’t get enough use out of it to justify the purchase. I ended up giving mine to my friend whose only gaming option prior to that was a shitty old laptop. At least now we can play stuff together that’s been made in the last decade.
Probably the Sega 32X. The messaging around it was kind of confusing, and still being fairly young when it came out, I was expecting it to be the gateway to 32 bit gaming that I would be enjoying for years to come. I ended up getting virtua racing on it, which was better than the Genesis version, but nothing spectacular really. I also got virtua fighter, which was a genuinely good game. Almost everything else was ports of mediocre games that had already come out on the Genesis. A couple of original games like knuckles chaotix just… Kinda sucked. Then when I found out that all of the support was going behind the Saturn, and that’s where all of the new and original games were going, well I just felt swindled.
Probably the Switch. It’s … fine, I guess? NES? Awsome. SNES? fantastic. GB? amazing for its time. Genesis was killer. Atari 2600 was huge in its day. The switch? Meh.
It doesn’t help that I’m generally unhappy with nintendo being a bunch of greedy fucks as I see it.
