What was the worst video game console of all time?

[Beware the Beast Man]

My vote goes to the Sega Saturn:


A girlfriend of mine in college had it, and the game catalog absolutely sucked. The Saturn pretty much got squeezed out by Playstation and Nintendo 64. Apart from the Dreamcast, it pretty sealed Sega's fate. Then again, I was never a fan of the Genesis game console either.

[TK421]

1. The Atari Jaguar has my vote. It had almost no titles

[Magrittes Pipe]

2. The Odyssey, of course.

[Beware the Beast Man]

3. I saw one of those three weeks ago!

At an antiques store on Lorain Avenue. Of course it was overpriced...

[GirlinContempt]

5. Try BEST

ppppft what do you know

[billyskank]

4. I assume you're judging it purely on what titles it had

From its Wikipedia entry:

The Saturn design, with two CPUs and 6 other processors, made it difficult to get the maximum performance out of the console. The parallel design was too complex for many game developers. Yu Suzuki is reported to have said "One very fast central processor would be preferable. I don't think that all programmers have the ability to program two CPUs - most can only get about one-and-a-half times the speed you can get from one SH-2. I think only one out of 100 programmers is good enough to get that kind of speed out of the Saturn." Third-party development was also hindered by the lack of a useful software development kit. Because of this, many Saturn games needed to be written in assembly language to achieve decent performance on the hardware. Frequently, programmers would only utilize one CPU to avoid some of the trouble in programming for the Saturn.

The main disadvantage of the dual CPU architecture was that both processors shared the same bus and had no dedicated memory of their own beyond a 4K on-chip cache, which could be configured as a 2K cache with 2K local RAM. This meant the second CPU would often have to wait for the first CPU to finish, reducing its processing ability — as all data and program code for both CPUs was located in the same shared 2MB of main memory (DRAM and SDRAM). This unusual design was employed in the Sega 32X as well.

From a development standpoint the architectural design problems of the Saturn meant that it quickly started losing out on third party support to the PlayStation; the main disadvantage of the Sega Saturn compared to the PlayStation was the lack of more flexible and correctly functioning hardware-aided transparency. Later games like Burning Rangers used software emulation to offer transparency effects.

Overall the CPU was very stable, and drew less glitches than Sony's PlayStation console. Although Saturn was rumored to have half the number of texture mapped polygons (200,000 per second) than PlayStation (360,000 per second), the RAM gave it a great advantage for 2D games engines. The Saturn shone for developers of RPG and arcade games. Sega Saturn is regarded as being more reliable and more powerful than the Playstation, but the difficulty in programming the console did not make its strengths obvious.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn

The Sega titles for the Saturn were mostly superb, with the notable exception of Daytona USA which was a pale semblance of the arcade game. Sega employs fantastic programmers.

[Beware the Beast Man]

14. Partially.

I hated the Genesis for the opposite reason: they had a huge game catalog but the performance was inferior to, say, Super Nintendo. Yes, you could upgrade to 32-bit or CD games, but you had to buy new equipment.

[GirlinContempt]

6. I'd probably have to agree on the Saturn

About the only Sega system that I enjoyed was the Dreamcast, and it was doomed.

[billyskank]

8. I enjoyed many hours playing on my brother's Saturn

Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally were fucking wicked games.

[GirlinContempt]

10. Wicked or no

compared to the rest of the market at the time, it just couldn't hack it. Not enough titles, not enough GOOD titles. Granted, it wasn't as bad as the Sega CD.

[Blue-Jay]

7. 3DO - I actually have one of those.

When it was released, it actually wasn't TOO awful, but they didn't bother putting out any decent games, so it died.

[billyskank]

9. That thing was an oddity

IIRC it was a CD-based console, with a powerful (for its time) processor. But the world wasn't ready for a CD-based console. The same was true of the Sega Mega CD. The main thing was that consoles couldn't do decent texture-mapped 3D graphics yet. The Saturn/Playstation/N64 were the first generation of consoles to be able to play serious games.

[Beware the Beast Man]

12. I was going to post 3DO.

Its problem lie in the fact that it was way ahead of its time, like 2-3 years before PS1.

[Blue-Jay]

16. Precisely. I *was* able to buy a shitload of games

for next-to-nothing when it started to tank. The graphics & gameplay were awesome despite the lack of support.

(maybe I'll hook it up again to play Wing Commander tonight)

[mainegreen]

11. Anything CD based

Please wait while something loads, slowly

ARG!

[GirlinContempt]

13. CD consoles suck

It's why I don't own one :P

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

15. Nokia N-Gage

Did ANYONE buy that piece of crap? Anyone?