Awesome But Impractical / Systems and Accessories

---

Game Consoles

Nintendo

• Nintendo 64:
  • The hardware in the N64 was powerful if used correctly, but it was hard to use. On top of this, Nintendo withheld a lot of important information on how to use the system effectively. Nintendo's thinking at the time was that great games should be hard to make.
  • Nintendo stuck to using cartridges for the N64, thus thwarting piracy, keeping load times low, making games more physically durable and allowing for game data to be saved on them, while the system's competitors adapted read-only compact discs that depend on a moving laser to be read and which probably shouldn't be handled by very young children. Unfortunately, the cartridges were very expensive to produce and have pitiful amounts of storage space, with 8 MB being the standard and 64 MB being the best that Nintendo could offer, while CD-ROM discs could store up to 650 MB (admittedly, most of this was for the use of game soundtracks, but that's still exponentially more than N64 carts). And the salt on the wound was that the average N64 game retailed for 50-60 USD despite using less space as mentioned above, as opposed to the more successful PS1 and its $30-40 games. It took about another 20 years for Nintendo to take another stab at cartridges for home systems, when solid state data storage technology had improved to the point where it was feasible to store AAA games on them once again, resulting in a commercially successful implementation of game cartridges for the Nintendo Switch. On the other hand, cartridges did continue to stay Boring, but Practical for their handhelds due to ther durability and lack of moving parts required, leading to an edge over the disc-based PSP.
• Nintendo GameCube
  • The Nintendo GameCube was originally intended to support stereoscopic 3D graphics. The reason this feature was abandoned was because it would have required a special display that was so expensive at the time that it was completely unfeasible.
  • Using the LAN adapter for Mario Kart: Double Dash!! is the only way to be able to play with more than four players. Theoretically, you can have up to sixteen players all playing at once, but it requires having several GameCubes, controllers, copies of the game, and TV screens on hand to take advantage of the whole thing. Aside from organized events and homebrew software made to play the game online, no one ever took advantage of the LAN features for the game.
  • The GameCube to Game Boy Advance link cable. Nintendo touted heavily the ability to turn your GBA handheld into a second screen, something that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures required as multiplayer action/adventure games (so players could individually mosey around without needing the camera to constantly stick with everyone). While this worked as well it could hope for those specific games along with select others like Pac-Man Vs., most console software had no use for it beyond simple data trading for bonus items, and the expensive cost sink of every player needing a GBA and cable signaled that it was a Band-Aid to true, easy-of-use online multiplayer Sony and Microsoft were already doing.
• Nintendo 3DS
  • The 3D feature. While it gives 3D without the need for glasses, it drains the battery life much faster than normal, can be disorientating if not viewed at the right angle, and just plain hurts the eyes of some people. This has led to the creation of the Nintendo 2DS and New Nintendo 2DS, cheaper models that lack the 3D function, and most of the games released later in the system's lifespan just don't use 3D at all.
  • The New 3DS system has the ability to wirelessly transfer images and video from the SD card to a computer. This sounds great, but it is slow and not all the data can arrive. It also relies on an older version of the protocol that modern operating systems don't support. What is really odd is the old version has a much better way to do this; unlike the New 3DS, the SD card can be easily taken out of its slot while you need to dismantle the New 3DS to get its SD card. Nintendo would learn their lesson for the Nintendo Switch, which as of a November 2020 software update allows transferring media to other devices via either a direct USB connection or using the Switch itself as a wireless intranet network to download media from, both methods having a wider range of compatible devices.
• Ultimately one of the factors in what killed the Wii U, among other things. On paper, it was basically a DS/3DS as a console. While the two screens and touch screen formula worked incredibly well for the previous two, it turned out to be more cumbersome for the latter, as having to keep track of two screens that aren't on top of each other is much more difficult than you'd think. And while being able to play off-screen is neat, the very short range the tablet having to be next to the console makes it rather pointless anyway. Combined with the monster of a controller that was the tablet itself, the selling point of the console just wasn't very worthwhile in many people's eyes.

Sega

• The add-ons for the Sega Genesis, the Sega CD and the Sega 32X. The wonders of improved graphics, CD-level sound and bigger space to make games with were the selling points. It also made the thing look incredibly clunky, and each one required its own power supply. That's right - if you wanted to play all three of these systems, you'd better have a surge protector.
  • Generally speaking, this was practically Sega's modus operandi; their consoles tended to favor the use of tech that was often ahead of its time to the point of being unrealistic in a money-making sense. This was especially true of their many, many attempts at making headway into online gaming well before the audience at large was really ready to make decent use of it, only finally succeeding with the Dreamcast and Phantasy Star Online - and even then, it was crippled by its built-in modem that wouldn't have carried it very far with the onset of much faster speeds.
  • Probably the biggest example of this trope and Sega is the Sega Nomad. Playing the Sega Genesis on the go or hook it up to a TV and play it like a regular Genesis, it was a hybrid console like the Nintendo Switch 20 years before it. However, despite this, things worked against it. The LCD screen that displayed the games could blur should there be fast scrolling (a bad thing considering Sega's famous blue mascot), drained batteries faster than the infamously-battery-hungry Game Gear (Game Gear's batteries could last 3-5 hours. Nomad? Only 2-3. And both used six AA batteries), couldn't use a separate controller to play one-player games (it had a built-in controller port, but since a controller was already built into the main design, a separate controller plugged into that port would invariably be player two) and no reset button, which made certain games Unintentionally Unwinnable.
• One of the main reasons for the Sega Saturn's failure was that it was too complicated for its own good. It had 2 32-bit processor, which sounds impressive, but they weren't properly linked together and required extreme technical knowledge to get anywhere with. The Quadrangular polygons on paper would strongly reduce the effect of texture warping and give better representation for round objects, but required extra work for any porting jobs and made modelling even more difficult due to the entire industry already being used to triangular polygons. Finally, the 2 VDP chips were extremely sophisticated and allowed the system to handle backgrounds and polygon and sprite mixtures easier (As seen in games like Bulk Slash), but resulted in further complexity and difficult with transparency effects. All this resulted in games generally looking and running worse, despite the system being technically superior in most ways to the Playstation and Nintendo 64. However, a few developers got over this handicaps, with later games for the system such as Panzer Dragoon Saga, PowerSlave, Last Bronx and the unreleased beta (Yes, that is running on hardware) of Shenmue showcasing its potential.
  • Sega is best known amongst arcade enthusiasts for being a leading brand in the arcade industry, both in the past and in the present, and pioneering dozens of innovations. It can be said that their many accessories for their home consoles were attempts to bring that awesome arcade tech into the living room, with impractical and expensive results, proving that not every kind of arcade game can simply be ported to consumer platforms.

Sony

• A lot of PS1 and PS2 games have multiplayer that requires linking two of the same console, two televisions, and enough space to support both. Awesome, you and your opponent have an entire screen to themselves! Given that the average user won't happen to have two TVs and two of the same system next to each other, this often means having to do a lot of heavy lifting just so you can play, say, Destruction Derby or Time Crisis 3^note It also has a same-console 2-player mode, but the screens are uncomfortably downsized on a console that can only do 480i at most and the framerate drops to 30. Don't even think of running the game on a large HDTV, because even if you fix the display latency issue with an upscaler (which is a major investment), the GunCon 2 is not compatible with non-CRT screens. with your sibling or a friend who's coming over. While having linked-unit multiplayer is less taxing and allows more screen space per player on the system than same-console, split-screen multiplayer, most gamers see reduced performance and screen size as an acceptable tradeoff for not having to own two of everything just to play a two-player game.
• When Sony announced that its PlayStation Portable handheld console would use a brand new optical media format—the UMD—everyone predicted that it would be the key to the console's success, much like how the first PlayStation's success was driven by the CD-ROM format. However, it turned out that optical discs weren't very well suited for a portable system—loading times got in the way of quick gaming fixes, and the moving parts of an optical drive ate up precious battery life and had trouble withstanding the movement and jostling that a handheld system must endure, leading to problems like the discs spontaneously ejecting. And because UMD didn't see any applications outside of the PSP, it didn't see the economies of scale that CDs and DVDs did and therefore not as much of an edge in manufacturing costs over cartridges. As a result, the Nintendo DS, which continued to stick to solid-state cartridges, ended up outselling the PSP by a wide margin, an ironic twist on the N64 vs. PS1 era. In the few countries where the PSP did win out such as the Philippines, their sales was mostly due to a combination of brand loyalty held over from the PS1 and 2 days and pirating game ISO images and putting them on Memory Sticks rather than legitimate software sales.
• The PlayStation 3's Cell Broadband Engine CPU was capable of amazing levels of performance and insane parallelization...theoretically. In practice, due to the CPU being designed very differently from any other CPU before or since, developers struggled to achieve such levels of performance due to it requiring a very unique style of programming.^note While multi-core CPUs did indeed take off and developers had to adjust to them, they were designed much more like traditional CPUs, and very different from the Cell. Worse still, because of its unique design, the chip was ridiculously expensive to design and manufacturer, putting Sony in a financial hole that they wouldn't dig themselves out of for several years.
• The Play Station Vita was Awesome, but Impractical in a few ways, leading to poor market performance and its eventual demise:
  • One reason why it bombed was, ironically, its powerful hardware. It was nearly on par with the PlayStation 3, and miles stronger than its competitor, the Nintendo 3DS—but this meant that games would need a larger budget to take advantage of these specs. The smaller devs that'd normally be on board with portable games refused to bite, and the larger studios that could afford to make Vita games stuck with their home turf of console games, at most giving Vita projects to their B-team. This created a negative feedback loop: with so few games being made for the system, not many consumers were interested in buying a Vita, and with so few Vitas being sold, not many developers were interested in making games for it. By the end of the Vita's lifespan, most of the releases on the console were ports, either of indie games that didn't truly take advantage of the console's impressive specs, or of JRPGs that appealed mostly to the small niche of players who already owned a Vita.
  • The OLED screen on the original model PS Vita provided beautiful colors, at the cost of draining the battery in only about four and a half hours. The later "slim" model switched to an LCD screen, and the battery lasts a full two hours longer.
  • The Vita also used proprietary memory cards that were ridiculously expensive, costing several times more than the equivalent microSD cards would. The system and its game cartridges had little-to-no onboard storage, so buying a Vita usually meant having to buy one of these expensive memory cards as well if you wanted to save games, never mind downloading entire games from the Play Station Network.

Others

• The 3DO was in many ways ahead of the curve of the gaming console market, and had much to promise at the time when compared to the SNES and the Sega Genesis, the biggest being that the hardware was capable of natively rendering textured 3D graphics. The 3DO also managed to earn the good will of third-party developers due to low licensing costs (as little as $3 per game copy sold), which would've theoretically given it a robust game library with developers wanting to jump on a platform providing the newest, most impressive tech out there. Where things went wrong came down to the fact that the 3DO was expensive for just about everyone else — The 3DO Company didn't have the funds to manufacture the console natively, and thus licensed the blueprints of the console for various manufacturers to produce their own versions, but this had a knock-on effect of introducing a middleman that increased long-term costs, and also left the 3DO unable to rely on the razor-and-blades business model other console manufacturers use (i.e. selling consoles at a loss, then making profits by way of selling the games via licenses, along with other complementary items), resulting in the consumer launch price being $699 in 1993 (almost $1,450 when adjusted for inflation in 2023). Combined with the lack of first-party content at launch, consumers weren't impressed, and many bigger-name developers weren't excited to jump onboard either (more to invest only meant more to lose), especially as the likes of the more-powerful Sega Saturn and especially the Sony PlayStation were just around the corner, thus leading the 3DO's exclusive library to consist largely of cheap shovelware who were more occupied by the console's FMV capabilities, a far cry from what it or future consoles had in terms of technical potential.
• Many early color-screen handheld systems such as the Atari Lynx and the Game Gear, due to requiring a backlight and a large number of batteries, and even then will often run for 5 hours or less before requiring battery replacements. This is why Nintendo held off on making a system with a color screen until 1998 (Game Boy Color) and one with a built-in light until 2003 (Game Boy Advance SP).
• The Atari Jaguar, Atari's last home console, was heavily promoted as the first "64-bit" gaming console. However, the console lacked a true 64-bit processing unit. Instead, it contained two processing units which theoretically could work together to do 64-bit calculations. The problem is that this multi-processor setup was difficult to code games for, and most developers exclusively used the Jaguar's weaker Motorola 68000 16-bit processor, the same processor as the Sega Genesis. Atari's obsession with making a 64-bit machine was misguided, as later game consoles like the PlayStation 2 used 32-bit processors, with 64-bit ones only truly taking off, at least for the purposes of gaming, at the start of The New '10s.
• The Neo Geo AES shows that yes, you could have Arcade-Perfect Ports in a home system in The '90s. Unfortunately, during the Neo Geo's prime, conventional home console technology still had a ways to go to be caught up with arcade game technology, resulting in game cartridges costing hundreds of dollars each; in other words, for the price of one game, you could purchase an entire game console or two! At the time, it was far better for the average consumer to simply settle for a lower-quality port for a much better price point, and by The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games, Neo Geo games started to get Arcade Perfect Ports on more mainstream consoles at the 30-60 USD price range and later Hamster's ACA Neo Geo port series for less than 10 USD a game, while AES games only get more and more expensive due to their growing status as collector's items, leaving the AES as a "die-hard fans only" item.
• The Game.com was the first handheld system to use both a touch screen and stylus, long before the Nintendo DS, as well as the first system in general to incorporate rudimentary Internet functionality. However, the touch screen technology wasn't very impressive, and the Internet functionality negated its use as a portable device, since you had to physically hook it up to a modem in your house. As The Angry Video Game Nerd in his review noted, you could use it to read your email... or you could just use the home computer, which likely had far better graphics anyways. Handhelds having Internet access would not become a big thing until the mid-2000s, when the advent of Wi-Fi protocol enabled wireless Internet, allowing portable gaming devices to have online access in a much more practical fashion.

Arcade

• Those jumbo arcade cabinets that frequently appear at many corporate-chain arcades look great and flashy, and often have control gimmicks that cannot be replicated at home without a hefty investment. However, the games produced for them often don't have much in the way of replay value or depth, and they often cost more than other arcade games, both to operators that purchase them and customers; whereas $1.00-1.50 (before bulk credit purchase discounts at certain arcades) is standard price for a credit on standard-sized cabs for racing games, gun games, rhythm games, etc., these games can easily cost two or even three dollars per credit, on top of the fact that these games are already very Nintendo Hard and will force a continue screen on a casual player in about 2-3 minutes.
• Going Guns Akimbo in a Light Gun Game. It looks cool, and you get twice as much ammo to work with, but the tactical advantage is negligible, you have to manage two health bars, and if you're playing on an arcade cabinet that isn't set to free play, you have to pay twice as much. Also depending on the game, dual-wielding can be pretty uncomfortable, if the gun is particularly big (like The House of the Dead III's shotgun and Ghost Squad (2004)'s assault rifle) or each player gets their own screen (like in Time Crisis). On top of all this, many games will increase the difficulty (usually by adding more enemies, giving them more health, or making them fire more attacks) if both player slots are in use, turning the game from what's already a quarter-muncher into a quarter vacuum. This is even if you have the dexterity to be able to "point and shoot" at two different targets at once, let alone hitting them and being able to do that quickly before getting hit or killed. Heck, even firing at one target can be a chore as you try to point both guns at the same spot.
• The original Darius used a beefy three-screens setup, which also featured powerful rumble motors and trickery using mirrors in order to have the playfield be seamless without bezels. While quite awesome and a big part of the series legacy, the setup proved to be problematic for both the developers and arcade operators, as the later group balked at the floorspace it took and its huge purchase price, while Taito didn't like the increased budget required for the engineering and was uncomfortable making more multi-screen games to justify the setup to buyers. After unsuccessfully trying to nudge the director in using a cheaper (but still impractical) 2-screens set, development on Darius III stalled due to Creative Differences over the screen set-up and the following installments would switch to standardized single-screen platforms until 2012's Dariusburst: Another Chronicle (which employs a less complex two 16:9 screens playfield).
• Arcades as a whole, once the cornerstone of the gaming industry, have been going this route since the 90s for several reasons:
  • Originally, console hardware was inferior to arcade hardware, so while you could get home ports of your favorite arcade games, they might be missing some features or levels, or the action might be watered down. Starting around The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games, games started to get accurate ports as console hardware technology was rapidly closing the gap, so people could just plomp down a few dozen dollars on ports of their favorites and never really have to pay for every credit again. Eventually, console and PC hardware would start to become the basis for arcade games themselves.
  • Around that same generation, the video game industry started to undergo a major paradigm shift, shifting away from arcade-style games to lean more into long-form video games that don't really fit an arcade environment. While these sorts of hours-long games had been around since the mid-80s with the likes of The Legend of Zelda and Phantasy Star, it wasn't until the era of polygon-capable consoles that developers were able to start producing narrative-driven adventures (with two of the most iconic examples of the 90s being The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VII) and "career"-type games (such as Gran Turismo) with the graphical power to render 3D graphics that could be considered realistic rather than being blocky polygons, which is when video games started to be treated as part of the greater entertainment industry alongside film and TV shows, rather than just children's toys. As a result, the demand for arcade-style experiences began to diminish, reducing the profitability of arcades (even ports of arcade games don't sell as well as cinematic AAA games, except for Fighting Games).
  • Arcade machines cost a lot of money individually and consume a considerable amount of energy, so it is not cheap for a business to maintain an arcade, and as a result, arcades in major countries started to raise their prices, with games previously costing 25 US cents being increased to 50 cents.^note Many people who were children around this time often complain that 50-cent pricing killed arcades. While this certainly turned away less-affluent gamers from playing at arcades, if anything, such pricing was a symptom of the economy shifting against the arcade industry's favor rather than being a cause. By the 2000s, arcades in the West were starting to go out of business en masse, and the ones that didn't were generally part of entertainment centers that provide socialization options like bowling alleys, billiard halls, and bars. Trying to run an arcade that's just an arcade in the 2000s or 2010s in the West was an exercise in futility, especially in more sparsely-populated parts of the world. However, by the 2020s, some pure arcades have been able to survive in a nostalgia-fueled comeback, usually by offering a business model where guests pay a flat rate per hour or day, in exchange for all games being on free play.
  • Arcade games often rely on gimmicks in order to entice people to try them in the arcade rather than just waiting for a home port. Unfortunately this tends to drive up the cost of the game and, more than anything, creates frustration for players who may not live near an arcade with the cabinet, as the home port may either have heavily modified controls that don't work that great, require an expensive dedicated controller, or simply not exist.
  • Today, with how sparse arcades are outside of East Asia (specifically Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong), one may have to drive or take public transit for hours just to visit an arcade, which is both taxing on one's wallet (in addition to having to pay to play the games) and mental health; arcades might not exist in one's own state/province or even country. The vast majority of gamers prefer to just stay home with console, PC, and smartphone gaming, because even if the game they want isn't available in their country, it may be possible to import it for relatively cheap cost (compared to the cost of going to an arcade and playing there) or use foreign-region accounts to buy and download them.
• Want to own your own arcade machine, either because you really want the full experience of the game, or there's no home port of it? In addition to the cabinet itself often being costly, so will the game itself, with just the PCB or dedicated machine costing at least $100, and that's for older titles. This is because arcade games aren't as mass-produced as consumer games (console, handheld, mobile, etc.), and arcade and consumer games operate on different types of licenses. Arcade games are designed to make revenue for the business that buys it, so the publisher will want in on the money generated by arcades; meanwhile, consumer games are licensed for private use only, and are meant to be sold by the hundreds of thousands or millions, so the publisher is fine with each copy only being used by one person, and in fact do not take kindly to people trying to operate consumer games in a revenue-earning manner.

PCs

• Extremely high resolution on PC games. Sure, you're outputting your game at 4K resolution and have visuals that would make fantastic wallpapers, but it means nothing if your PC can't even run the game at more than 30 frames per second, and in games that are very action-intensive and rely on split-second decisions, it's far more useful to use a lower resolution that achieves 60 frames per second instead.
  • Playing older games with scalable resolutions at 4K often come with UI scaling issues, so vital information like health are now squeezed into the corners of the screen as they are hard coded to only take a certain amount of pixels. The alternative is they're stretched to fill a consistent area of the screen which while they look still look low-res, it's better than being too tiny to use.
• Maximum quality settings seem to exist only for additional stress for benchmarking or as Bragging Rights Reward. The image quality improvement over the previous quality preset tends to be minimal at best, often requiring side-by-side image comparisons. And all of this can drop the performance to about 80% if not more in comparison.
• "AAA" PC games are heading into this with ever-increasing system requirements. They require large amounts of memory and discrete video cards, which eliminates most laptops and tablets that are being favored for hardware purchases. This has given a boost to indie games, which tend to have much lower requirements.
  • Hardware makers are trying to fight this by providing budget laptops and even CPUs with more powerful GPUs. AMD released several of their Ryzen CPUs with GPUs capable of running AAA at low settings, while Intel announced they are releasing CPUs with similarly powerful GPUs in the nearish future.
  • AAA games have been reported by developers as being extremely taxing and expensive to work on, having to put so much effort into visuals for a game that could've been made ten years ago with only slightly less impressive graphics but with (in most cases, anyway) the same gameplay and a much more feasible budget and workload.
• With the release of the GeForce RTX 20 cards with ray tracing and hardware that helps with AI, games that implemented the features it used fell into this category. Ray tracing did offer a stark visual improvement with realistic reflections, shadows, and global illumination, but it often cut performance by around 30%-50% on average. The AI hardware was supposed to mitigate this by letting the game render at a lower resolution and have the AI reconstruct the missing pixels to the desired resolution (a feature NVIDIA called DLSS), but it was often derided as something that smears details on the screen and was only available on certain games due to the AI needing to be trained for that game.
  • Ray tracing has received some improvements such that games on even the lowest end RTX card, the RTX 2060, can run ray tracing at near maximum quality and 1440p resolution at 60FPS. However, turning ray tracing off still yields an almost 2x performance improvement. Supposedly, the next generation does offer enough performance improvements on the hardware side to practically mitigate this, but this has yet to be seen.
  • DLSS on the other hand received markedly better improvements in the 2.0 version, which not only solved the "smearing" issue, but also could work with any game as long as the game implemented some form of temporal anti-aliasing, which most of the popular game engines do have. The only thing holding it back is it still requires games to actually support it.
• Acer's Predator 21X laptop is notable for being the first laptop with a curved 21" screen, as well as containing a 4.1 GHz i7 processor, 64 gigs of RAM, TWO GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs, 5 drive slots, 2 power supplies, 5 cooling fans, 4 speakers, 2 subwoofers, a mechanical keyboard with a trackpad that flips over to a numpad, and a battery that lasts less than an hour while gaming. All in a package that weighed 19 pounds and cost $9,000. Despite the excessive, well, everything, the entire limited run of them sold out, so there are 300 of these in the hands of some seriously berserk gamers.
• A mega-monster gaming PC crammed into a laptop is one thing, but how about a liquid-cooled gaming laptop? The ASUS ROG GX700 comes with a dock that connects to copper pipes inside the laptop, allegedly boosting its CPU's capabilities by 48% and the GPU's by 43%. Awesome. The impractical part? The whole assembly weighs 18½ pounds in total (necessitating a custom-made suitcase with wheels to lug it around in) and costs 5 grand...

Accessories and setups in general

• Metal DanceDanceRevolution pads are vastly more durable compared to soft pads. They don't slip, rip, or fold, they don't break easily, and you can use your shoes on them. However, they cost hundreds of US dollars. Worse, when compared to the arcade pads, they are nowhere near as stable. Either the pads will wobble all over the place or the sensors will wear and tear, even when modifying and maintaining the pads. For the cost and longevity, it's far cheaper to practice on a real DDR machine in an arcade (especially when arcades have special deals). Alternatively, the StepManiaX pad, while it may cost 4-digits in price, it has the same, if not better, quality built of pads that are customizable; unfortunately, the pads are sold out due to increasing demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The osu! keyboard, a two-key mechanical keyboard designed exclusively for playing osu!. It looks pretty, but it costs 40 USD, i.e. $20 per key. For the price of three or even just two of these controllers, you can get a full-sized mechanical keyboard that has 50 times more keys and can be used for a much larger variety of games.
• Virtual Reality. Once a distant dream limited to Sci-Fi stories, advances in technology have led it to becoming a real thing. Unfortunately, it's still got many issues to iron out. Older attempts at VR were even worse:
  • The Nintendo Virtual Boy. The mechanism used to generate the video game image is cool when you think about it. It works like a supermarket scanner, except on your eyes, and without a laser. However, many players reported that it hurt their eyes and head. Worse, the Virtual Boy came on a stand and had no headband, so finding a comfortable position to actually play any games was difficult.
  • Sega had their own VR system planned, and unlike the Virtual Boy, it was capable of displaying games in full color; unfortunately, the test results determined that the device could cause headaches and other potential injuries, so Sega decided against releasing it.
  • Although there have been many advances in virtual reality to the point where there are more successful VR devices like Steam VR and Sony's PSVR, many gamers still feel that while they obviously provide a fantastic sensory experience, there's relatively very little that they achieve in terms of gameplay, especially given the cost. If you just wanna play Touhou Project or a Fighting Game, there's practically zero point in VR gaming. Additionally, even with the improvements in VR technology, many players still get motion sickness and eye pain/strain from VR.
  • Additionally VR setups that tracks the player's movements have the requirement of needing a section of clutter free space to work with and a place to place the camera. And you'd better make sure nobody puts something in that space or walks into it while you're playing, as you're basically blind and deaf to your surroundings and VR systems won't warn you about foreign objects (yet). If you don't keep yourself rooted into one spot, expect to slam your hands or arms into walls or furniture.
• Elaborate setups for vehicle simulation games. Unless you spend a lot of time on playing the game, these setups require a lot of space and expensive controllers. However, you do get an experience as-close-as-possible to the real thing.
• Cloud Gaming. Instead of having the game and the hardware needed to run it, you instead stream video from a top-of-the-line PC that can run the game at maximum settings; in short, remote computing but optimized for games. In theory, all you need is a high-speed Internet connection and a device that can handle video at the quality of your choice — usually a PC, but there are also dedicated cloud gaming devices such as Google Stadia (before it was announced to be shut down in 2023) and you can even use a smartphone — to play. However, cloud gaming runs into multiple problems:
  • First, this depends heavily on your Internet connection not only being fast, but stable. Any lapse in your connection could lead to inputs not being registered, video output getting messed up, or you being kicked out of your game entirely. This leaves cloud gaming completely out of the question for those who do not have access to consistently fast Internet. At least your old PlayStation 2 doesn't need an Internet connection.
  • Second, because the game hardware is connected to you over the Internet, this naturally introduces latency, which is highly unacceptable for games where a few frames or milliseconds can make a big difference, like Fighting Games and Rhythm Games. This is aggravated if you live in a region without dedicated servers - the Middle East and Africa tends to get the worst of this.
  • Finally, cloud gaming has some unsettling implications about game ownership and what will happen to the game, particularly if it's a cloud-exclusive, when the service is inevitably terminated. With the traditional model of you having the game data, even if it has some sort of DRM one could theoretically crack the DRM so that they can run the game without it, as has been done with dozens of DRM schemes and thousands of games. But with cloud gaming, all you have is the video data, which certainly cannot be reverse-engineered into a working game.
• The Frostbite Engine in Electronic Arts games. It's an undeniably powerful engine that features realistic animations, dynamic lighting, destructible environments and high fidelity graphics. However, as Frostbite was originally designed by studio DICE for their Battlefield games, it's perfect for making shooters but struggles to work for games outside that genre. When EA pushed their studios like BioWare to use the engine for their RPGs, development went to hell with developers being forced to build new tools from the ground-up to support basic features in the genre like a crafting system and inventory menu; as a result of the engine's technical issues, several EA games were either cancelled or released in buggy launch states as seen with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem (2019). Furthermore, bringing out the best of Frostbite is dependent on specialized technicians and engineers who aren't always available for every game as EA diverts them towards their more profitable sports titles. With the failures of several Frostbite-based games and the lack of resources caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic, EA started scaling back on using the engine in the 2020s.
• The Creative Labs 3DO Blaster. On paper, it sounds super cool — an entire 3DO setup contained in a computer expansion card, playable in a resizable window on your desktop (sounds mundane now, but remember that this was back when emulation was nowhere near as widespread nor possible on most computers of the time). How could one not be intrigued on that concept? Unfortunately, the cost could not be overstated, both in the literal and figurative sense. One must recall that an average desktop computer would cost or come just shy of quadruple digit prices back then, so expecting the user to fork out another $400 for the card was a lot to ask. On top of that, the card required a CD-ROM drive...but said drive had to be one of Creative's drives that utilized a proprietary interface, so if you either didn't have one or had a drive that wasn't compatible, you were either out of luck or had to fork over yet another $100+ for one of them. In the long run, it was generally a much better idea to invest in playing the games the computer was meant to play rather than buying this bizarre hybrid solution, effectively cementing its fate and now making it a highly valued collector's item.
• The infamous Mattel Power Glove for the Nintendo Entertainment System is an interesting product of its time that is mostly known for its appearance in The Wizard and for not being all that useful as a controller. While it does look pretty stylish, it was very awkward to use. For starters, you had to enter a code before playing most games. Once you have it set up, technical limitations of the time mean that it doesn't translate your movements into the game as you'd expect: rather, each input is associated with a certain gesture. It also had regular buttons on its side, defeating the entire point of the Power Glove. Nowadays, the only reasons why someone would buy one are curiosity or as a collector's item.
• In the early '90s a company named Cheetah released a line of "Characteristicks" - joysticks shaped like popular licensed characters. There was Bart Simpson, two variants of Batman (Animated Series and Returns), an Alien and a Terminator skull. Cheetah's joysticks were already notorious for their poor ergonomics and low quality components (using cheap contacts instead of microswitches), and stuffing them into shells shaped like famous characters only exacerbated the problem, making them extremely unwieldy and ensuring they would break in only an hour or so of sustained use. The Alien sticks in particular have a lot of rough edges, which can potentially cause injury to an unprotected palm. Given all that, one would hope they would at least look good as a display item for devoted collectors, but nope - they're made of very cheap plastic and have highly visible seams running throughout them.
  • More broadly, novelty controllers in general fall under this, with two well-known ones being Resident Evil 4's Chainsaw controller and one made for Dragon Quest VIII with a shape based on the series' signature Slime enemies. But they are at least of decent build quality and look good on a shelf, making them amusing display pieces. More than can be said for the Characteristicks!

---