Ever wondered what happens when the head of a successful coorporation hires his or her mentally challenged kid to run the business instead of a qualified person? You get terrible product. Today I'm gonna be looking at the five worst video game consoles meant for play at home. But there's a catch, all these consoles are made by highly successful companies. All of these companies have other systems or products which have done exceedingly well. Also I'm writing about consoles that you've actually HEARD of. What's the point of bashing something that you've never even seen or heard about? So let's just take a look at just what happens when these corporations get sloppy.

So to kick things off we have this wonderful company called "panasonic".


Panasonic has been making wonderful electronic products since before I was born. So travel back to 1993 (the beginning of flop systems) and someone decides that they should try their hand in the video game market. And here's what we got......


#5: The Panasonic 3do. Yes it's not a terrible system but the price of it and lack of good first party games murdered it. This's the system that actually was 700$. Take that PS3! Some good third party games were released on this system. You had need for speed and street fighter . And you had a generic sega genesis controller rip-off.

Sega genesis controller:

Panasonic 3do controller:

So maybe if they had found a way to make it not cost as much as a computer this system WOULD have done well. But the rest is history.

Now we skip ahead a little bit to 1995. And we have this wonderful little company called Nintendo.


Nintendo is doing the smart thing by realizing that their fans are getting impatient. The soon to be successful nintendo 64 keeps getting delayed. So here's how they cope with the situation....


#4: The Nintendo Virtual Boy. Another good system with a terrible design. What mental person would strap an entire system to his or her own head? It's not virtual reality anyway...it's just something that can be done with 3d glasses . But it's strapped to your head. Virtual reality failed anyway because people like to be able to destinguish between reality and what they're playing. And they don't like to look like a cyborg.


But the virtual boy wasn't even virtual reality anyway. I honestly didn't mind the all red colours, but I hated how when playing the darn thing I couldn't look at anything else (yes I rented one when it was new). Gaming is a social thing, and I can't think of a device that better ruins that experience. I'm sure it would have been fine if you plugged it into a tv and used 3d glasses instead . Or even a handheld system that made use of 3d glasses would have been more successful.

Now we're travelling back into 1993 again (oh yes most awesome year of awesome systems). And guess who comes out of console retirement....


They just disappeared somewhere in the early 80's and then we didn't see them again until this beast popped onto the market.


#3: The Atari Jaguar. Good price, decent hardware. DUMBEST CONTROLLER KNOWN TO MAN!

How can you expect a game system to become popular if your controller sucks? You think that atari would have learned their lesson after the Atari 5200 controller.


Yay so many useless buttons I can calculate the meaning of life while my game loads! I mean even Panasonic was smart enough to just copy the controller idea from a successful company at the time. If atari had really used their heads they would have sold a tool that lets you chop the bottom half of the jaguar controller right off.

Now I remember reading about the Jaguar when it was new and honestly it scared me a lot because it seemed like a great system. I was getting worried for nintendo because it appeared atari had what nintendo had but just more powerful. I always wondered why the jaguar failed. I never even heard about the terrible controller until many years after the death of the jaguar. Also apparently the library of games for it was pretty bad.

So now we skip ahead 1 year to 1994. And here we have this rival company called sega.


They're suffering the same trouble that nintendo would suffer a year later. Their fans are getting impatient waiting for their next home system to be released. So this's how they decide to fill the void.


#2: The Sega 32x. I just looked at this when it was released and laughed. Next thing you know they'd have an addon that turns your sega genesis into a toaster. I'm honestly surprised at how long they dragged out the life of the genesis for. Makes you wonder why sega never released this addon for the system

I didn't realize that the stupid 32x required an extra power adapter. I knew this addon was doomed just from watching the commercials. Sega cd was a good idea because it added the ability to play games in a different media format.


The 32x was just cartridge.....onto a cartridge system. That's not an addon, it's some sort of ghetto processor upgrade.

Any now it's time for the grandfather of terrible console systems. Here we have a respectable electronics corporations known as philips.


The year is 1991....all these awesome systems were coming out of nowhere. But nothing could prepare us for the masterpiece known simply as the....... CD-I!


#1: The Philips CD-i. I'd hardly ever heard of this until I started posting here. ...But I had heard of it.... Probably what makes it the worst is that they kept making it for a straight 7-8 years. And it failed the whole time. It was expensive , and had no good games. That's like throwing a 3do and a jaguar together. Nice. And when I say no good games...I MEAN NO GOOD GAMES! I've personally never played any of the games on this system. But all the reviews I found of the "best games" for this system state that the games it has are complete garbage.


Now before I start hurting the feelings of legions of sensitive nerds.. I do realize that all of these systems have things that're good about them too.


But then there's something about each one that's like having a dead elephant weighing those good aspects down. I suggest that actually test marketing a system first is a good idea to figure out the problems. And as the cd-i shows, having an ok system is all fine and dandy. But having no good games just turns a system into a really expensive calculator. Or something to write an article about how bad of a system it is.