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
I am one of the few lucky ones to actually get an Ouya… It wasn’t great.
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.
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.
Your entertainment center is so cool I didn’t even notice the so called “mess”.
The real shame is that the coffee table isn’t really visible because it’s pretty cool itself, it’s a hatch from a ship (I believe a WWII Liberty ship)
Bit of family history with it too. My dad originally had it, but my mom hated it, so eventually it went to live with my grandfather. He died, and it ended up back in our basement. My sister and I both really liked it, and we had a bit of an agreement that whoever moved out first got the table, and I won.
EDIT: Also for anyone else who likes my setup, the entertainment center and shelves in the wall are IKEA Fjallbo, no pretty affordable. The shelf of the far right is just an IKEA Kallax.
And I have the TV synced up to Phillips hue lights behind it and in the ceiling
That’s a lotta Chianti
I’m not totally sure where the bottles came from, we don’t really drink chianti, and they’ve just kind of been hanging around on a shelf somewhere, but they ultimately ended up on this chandelier
I came to say this. Some good games on there, but Julie Uhrman is the worst. and to think, she just failed upward.
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.
I bought a gaming laptop around 2005. You could anchor a ship and melt the polar ice caps with it. I don’t think I ever installed a single game on it.
I think it’s the Wii for me. I always felt like the controls were too limiting have games that played well. Sure there are some good games I played, like Mario Kart Wii and Mario Galaxy, but overall I remember being disappointed with both the game selection and how bad the controls were.
(dis)honorable mention: the Switch 2, because there’s nothing to play on it that I can’t play better on pc+deck.
For me it was Xbox One. From day one (no pun intended) it just didn’t feel good to me. The UI experience never got away from being awful. The system itself was a sluggish awful mess. It should never take more than 3 seconds to load your options menu . On top of that Everytime I turned on my console it would take a half hour or more to update. The must have games just never came. The games they did come played worse than nearly anywhere else. If I was a teenage when I bought this system and played everyday some of these short comings could have been avoided. But as an adult it just felt terrible . From here I went back to Pc gaming made a rig that would destroy any console at the time. It was so bad to me I canceled my Xbox Live Subscription I had for 15 years ! That killed my love to Xbox entirely.
Probably second place was the PS3 but I bought it at the end of the generation and never got the exclusives I should have …
The Atari 2600. I was expecting a NES.
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.
Man alive, that’s gutting. I also haven’t bought a Bethesda game since F4. Was hoping they might have doubled-down on the improvements between F3 and F:NV, but what they came out with was no kind of RPG at all, a shocking disappointment.
Means I missed out on F76 and Starfield, which is no kind of hardship at all. And I’m whatever the opposite of “hyped” is for ES6 - looking forward more to booting up Morrowind again.
Hm, that’s tough.
For perspective, I’ve owned a lot of systems from the NES on.
The first year of the Nintendo DS. The (first, Grey) system was quite ugly and there really wasn’t much great software coming out. That all changed after the first year, oh boy. My favorite system ever now.
The Wii. Too much gimmick stuff distracting from the experience (eg metroid wiimote shooting and wiimote sideways). So much shovelware!. It’s still a nice system (especially considering backwards compatibility too) but still.
I also had the 32X and virtual boy at some point of time but did not regret them as I knew what I was getting. After burner, star wars and virtua racing or (then) cheap stereoscopic red games.
The Wii. Too much gimmick stuff distracting from the experience (eg metroid wiimote shooting and wiimote sideways). So much shovelware!. It’s still a nice system (especially considering backwards compatibility too) but still.
It’s funny you say the controls distract from the experience, when I’d argue they add to the experience.
You ask me, the Wii is great and just keeps getting better, even now, with active homebrew communities. Many games allow you to choose what controller type you want, and there is a lot of creativity in the different games for using the Wiimote (though you may find those gimmicky). The biggest downside is trying to play if your TV is near a window and the sun is out. You have to close the blinds or it messes with the IR sensor.
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.
I think one saving grace for the Game Gear was that you could also play Master System games using an adapter, if I remember correctly?
You might be thinking of the Sega Nomad, which was made explicitly to pay the full size cartridges. My dad had one for a while and it was the Game Gear turned to 11, flaws and all. Huge, hot, heavy, and devoured batteries. It was a cool concept on paper but nobody wanted to spend hundreds on it to play Sonic the Hedgehog on a tiny screen with a giant warm brick as a controller.
I was in primary school when the Game Gear was a thing, so my memory was foggy - but the adapter was definitely a thing:
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.
I guess I’m lucky this never happened to me. I tend to do a lot of research on a console before I get it, and wait until mid-generation when it’s matured with some good games. The closest thing might be the Oculus Rift, since I never did find an addictive VR game I loved. If I hadn’t bought it, I might’ve never tried out Half-Life: Alyx, and would’ve been forever curious. But…it definitely wasn’t a killer app.
Nintendo Switch
I’ve never really clicked with the Switch and we’ve had one since launch. It’s not all bad, handheld and home console in-one is a pretty cool concept, but it underwhelms in all ways. Also browsing the eShop is painfully slow too.
I haven’t gotten into a console since SNES.
I bought a PS5, played it a few times, but it gathers dust. I think it was last powered up in 2024. I don’t find the games fun.
What games do you play?
None at this point
Switch is easily my least played console. Its library was nearly entirely made up of games I already played on the Wii U. On top of that they had the cheek to require a subscription to play online. No thanks.
Switch was what made me realize golden era of gaming was over, but it took about a year to set in because of the disconnect between the NX presentation and the actual product.
Seriously, go take a look at the original NX Switch presentation and it would almost seem that Nintendo was selling a completely different product.
All of the Wii era inspired hardware went mostly unused because the Switch couldn’t play Wii games, and Nintendo didn’t bother to even port their own titles outside of recycled Wii U content that didn’t sell well on the original console.
The software similarly was a joke. I have more functionality on a Nintendo DS than a Switch, and that isn’t even including “unofficial” homebrew. You can’t even voice chat with your friends without using an external app, which is insane considering the DS, DSi, 3DS, Wii, and Wii U that preceded this.
Major features that gave Nintendo the edge were gone. DS Downlaod Play, Streetpass, included minigames & apps, themes, free online, eshop points, wifi events, etc.
On top of that, the library was just not interesting enough to warrant paying $60 a pop for single player games, and the multiplayer selection was sparse, despite the main feature of the console being joycon controllers.
I got bored of it after only a year, and ended up having to change the joycon c-sticks a couple years later because of the drift issues.
IMO it was a massive success just because of the portable format allowing you to play big name games on the go, but it absolutely fails as a handheld console when compared to the DS line, which did so much more for so much less.
Now that other handhelds like the Steam Deck, AYN stuff, Legion, etc exist, there’s really no need to buy a Switch (2) for third party titles, which makes it a complete Nintendo only buy in.
The kicker is that Nintendo made absolute bank which is now why the Switch 2 is going for $450 (soon to be $500) and bumped their game prices to a whopping $70-80 because they know people were fine with it.
If I had more time on my hands, I would legitimately go make a modern version of Streetpass and download play for modern handhelds because that stuff was so cool and useful.
Yeah, I loved Streetpass so much.
