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| Top 10 - Worst Console Add On's! |
| Thursday 4 September 2008 |
 It's Top 10 again as we take a look at the worst add on's to grace our beloved consoles.
Add On's have long been a much maligned feature of consoles. At their best they can add to a gaming experience. They can at their worst splinter the userbase and without the right support leave consumers feeling short changed.
1. 32X
A regular in lists such as these, after the relative failure of Mega CD, rather than try and justify it to the fans Sega instead choose to include yet another under used add on! Mega CD at least had 100's of games (how many were good is another thing) the 32X however saw only 34 games released. They were not without their merits however with the brilliant Star Wars Arcade. Despite some good games though there will be little resistance to the notion that the 32X was a poor mans entry into the next generation and one that came at great expense to the customer. It could be argued that by continually adding bits to the Megadrive, Sega set themselves on the slippery road that lead to their demise as a platform holder.
2. Wii Zapper
Simply put the zapper is here for just being a lump of plastic that offers very little to the gaming experience. In same cases where the nunchuk is used extensively it can actually restrict the player and make the controls stiffer. The wiimote and nunchuk combo helps deliver a great amount of freedom of movement the zapper eradicates all of this.
3. Power Glove
Shown off in the feature length Nintendo advert The Wizard, the Power Glove was unveiled as the ultimate way to control games. This was misleading as the games struggled to recognize what fingers motions you were making, resulting for example in Mario running when you wanted him to jump. As you can imagine this causes great amounts of frustration and can lead to you wanting to throw the Power Glove out of the window.
4. R.O.B
Ok so yes at the time it was cool...but look back at it, really? If Microsoft announced a new bundle with a clunky looking plastic robot that interacts with the console. Short for Robot Operating Buddy, R.O.B was a decidedly toy like add on for the console and shows Nintendo's roots off. Only two games were created for it both involved R.O.B slowly stacking stuff.
5. Menacer
As Nintendo released the sublime Duck Hunt and created the fantastic light gun that went with it. Every console seemed to have one afterwards, whilst Nintendo released the Super Scope with the SNES, Sega released the Menacer. More akin to a bazooka than a light gun, the Menacer was well a menace to use, it wasn't easy to use with its unwieldy design. Whilst light games often suffer from poor support the Menacer was particularly noticeable for its total lack of good games.
6. Gamecube Broadband Adaptor
Whilst there is nothing technically wrong with the add on it is also worth looking at what value for money a customer would get for their investment. Just three games supported online play and two of them were Phantasy Star Online games. Nintendo's lack of support for true online games (a few games did offer LAN support) is an annoyance and makes the add on a waste of money for those looking for a long term catalogue of online games.
7. 64DD
Nintendo had relatively high levels of success with the Famicom Disk System and seemed to want to replicate that success with the 64 Disk Drive. This particular piece of hardware was a chunky disc drive that sat underneath the N64 and plugged in via an expansion port on the consoles underbelly. The main problem with 64DD was that by the time it came out it was outdated and irelevant. By then the Playstation with its CD based media and memory card combo largely made the advantages of the Disk based system largely obsolete. The system never saw release outside of Japan and whilst some of the games that were released such as the F-Zero track editor and various Talent titles were good there were just not enough releases.
8. Auro Interactor
Compatiable with the Sega Megadrive/Genesis and SNES this rumble vest was lame by modern standards as it just appeared to rumble not in tune with the actions on screen as game back then didn't have any sort of force feedback mechanicisms. It instead reacted to button presses which just doesn't work right. To further show off this devices lameness you looked like a prat when wearing it.
9. Laser Scope
Konami wanted a bit of the light gun action after Nintendo brought their own to the NES. However this was no where near as cool as Nintendo's effort, taking the form of a large clunky head set headset with a microphone and crosshair that covered one year. Playing with it was a mixture of moving your head to try and line up the crosshair which was no mean feat as it seemed to just not work. Then add in the fact that you had to shout "fire!" (obviously with the explanation mark) and the resulting delay meant whatever you were shooting at had long gone. Tests have shown that any words can be shouted with the same results, may I suggest crap, pants and lame? The headset was designed with a Konami game Laser Invasion in mind, but neither were met which much positivity and flopped!
10. Numerous Plastic Wii Accessories.
Every store is jam packed full of them, crappy pieces of plastic that make little or in the most part no impact on gameplay. Well actuallly thats a lie, plenty of them make the otherwise egonomically designed and very desirable wiimote into a lumbersome piece of junk.Labels: Features, Top 10 |
posted by flameboy @ 18:55  |
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| 1 Comments: |
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Uhm. the 64DD was suppose to do lots more like remembering stuff and such. The CD could not do that. since it was a ROM(Read only Memory). the 64DD was designed so that events that happened would be saved, like foot prints in Zelda or a box that you destroyed.
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Uhm. the 64DD was suppose to do lots more like remembering stuff and such. The CD could not do that. since it was a ROM(Read only Memory). the 64DD was designed so that events that happened would be saved, like foot prints in Zelda or a box that you destroyed.