Forum - View topicThe List - 8 Defunct Game Systems
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belvadeer
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N-Gage: At this point, the N-Gage is little more than a curiosity. It wasn't a serious contender in the handheld market, but at least the QD redesign did a bit better. There were some fairly decent titles for it, like Sonic N (a port of Sonic Advance), but it never did escape its taco phone moniker.
Jaguar: As far as my knowledge of this console goes, Alien vs. Predator may be one of the few above average titles for it, or so I've heard (it's not the same as the arcade or SNES versions since it's an FPS). Interestingly, considering Atari named this console for a big cat (much like they did for the Lynx), I recall there was a launch title for the Jaguar called Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy, which was a sci-fi shooter in the vein of Starfox, but with the main character being an anthropomorphic jaguar. That made me wonder if Atari was planning on making Trevor their company mascot or something, but it didn't happen. Gizmondo: To be perfectly honest, I had never heard of this handheld. I only ever learned about it on the Unseen64 website (and even then, they don't have a lot of information about it). I'm quite surprised to hear it had such a scandalous history and person behind it though. 3DO: Regarding the 3DO, there is one game for it I had always wanted to play: Lucienne's Quest. I had the issue of GameFAN that covered the game's features and read over it numerous times. This fantastic and fun little RPG became an incredibly expensive rarity among gamers. It did have a sub-standard Saturn port with Japanese voices in battle and redone character art, but no one cared much for that one, and it was never localized anyway. I had hoped someone would acquire the code and assets for Lucienne's Quest and remake the game for modern consoles or something along those lines, but as Micro Cabin was bought out back in 2008, those hopes long since died. There was no way I was going to convince my parents to buy a $700 console back in the 90s just for one game (even though the 3DO had some other solid titles, like the first Gex game and Super Street Fighter II Turbo), so my only hope now would be if I'm willing to buy the console and game with the inflated prices of today's used market. Not happening... Last edited by belvadeer on Wed Apr 04, 2018 3:43 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Siegfriedl88
 Posts: 348 |
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after reading this list i had too check my storage room and see if i had any listed.
I of course had the dreamcast simply cause i really wanted too play skies of arcadia, but more surprised i had the the atari jaguar. i never get rid of any systems i used too have and the oldest in my collection is the odyssey 300 released in 1976 |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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It was very short lived because it came out in 1988, which by then was an NES-dominated video game market. It was also a major pain to set up (requiring you adjust the VCR's settings, and VCRs are infamous to this day of being difficult to understand to set up), and, considering the tape was playing as the player was playing, gameplay was limited to simple timed mini-games. If you want to see more, here is someone's video on the ViewMaster Interactive Vision, as well as an entire playthrough of Disney's Cartoon Arcade (albeit on 4 parts as this was before YouTube removed the length maximum), if you want to get an idea of what it was like. This is the only detailed coverage of the VMIV I have ever found on YouTube. |
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0nsen
 Posts: 256 |
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It was exclusive to Japan and made by the guy that made the GameBoy (among other things) after he left Nintendo and before he died in a car accident. Which happened about a year before the WonderSwan was even released. The WonderSwan was decently popular in Japan (something like 8% market share), but had a hard time competing with Pokémon, the GameBoyColor and then the GameBoyAdvance. A sad story, since the device is really cool. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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All I remember from intermittently renting 3DO's from our local video place was the addictiveness of "The Horde", and even that game could play on lesser systems, but 3DO added the new gimmick of digitized-video cutscenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZNVyjz6XCo See, after SegaCD (forgotten again...  ), that was the new big thing:
Cartridge games were going to go to silver disks, which would allow you to beef up the game with CD audio and grainy artifacted digital-video to spice up the story. SegaCD at least used video in some of its games, like Night Trap, or added plot-cutscenes to Sewer Shark, but some of the first US games were Sony's upgrades of "Hook" and "Cliffhanger", which were simply the cartridge platform games with CD music and a couple of five-second movie digitizations attached between levels. (The JRPG's like Luna: Silver Star or Breath of Fire III at least knew how to make JRPG's a little more visible by putting us closer and shooting larger closeups of the sprite action running around the worlds, and were arguably the missing-link between the key evolution of Final Fantasy VI and VII.) I remember 3DO was also going to get into putting grainy MP2/QuickTime style videos of cartoons (their sampler had one Batman and one cheesy public-domain fairytale) on disks in addition to games....Can you imagine it? Video on disk? Philips CD-I, OTOH, was going to aim to more of a hybrid game and video machine, and I only remember that one for a Clue video-mystery game that wasn't as good as the one on laserdisc. As for the Jaguar, they were still putting the majority of their games on cartridges, and only moved into disk a year later. No, really, freakin' cartridges?? Last edited by EricJ2 on Sat Feb 24, 2018 11:53 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Zendervai
 Posts: 201 |
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For whatever reason Square ported Final Fantasies I, II and IV to it. Those GBA ports were kind of ports of the Wonderswan versions. They also stuck a SaGa game on it. The original Final Fantasy Legend. |
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Macron One
 Posts: 151 Location: Netherlands |
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The first model of the FM Towns Marty (1991) was priced at 98000 yen , the equivalent of $710 at the time, arguably making it the more expensive console, going by relative dollar value. There was an even more expensive version of the FM Towns Marty (Car Marty), marketed as an in-car entertainment system and released in 1994 for about 300.000 yen IIRC. If you consider it a game console, it is likely the most expensive one yet produced. |
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CandisWhite
Posts: 282 |
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I loved those doofy little Tiger Electronics games. I remember playing their Ecco the Dolphin inside out.
And, as a sidenote, TOYS R US is not dead (both in the States and Canada); They've filed for bankruptcy but it is the kind that puts parameters on their business, not requires them to liquidate. I just wanted to mention this because the store is still open for business, real world people still earn their paychecks from them, and it would be a sad irony that now, when they need customers the most to survive, that people stayed away because they believed the company was dead. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Well, the Tiger Electronics games themselves were not so bad, being a successor to the Game & Watch line of sorts. What I was referring to, however, was their own full system, the Game.com: 
This thing had a few good ideas (a stylus-based touch screen and online leaderboards--and this was in 1997), but everything else about it was a total mess. It ran on a low-resolution LCD screen with no backlighting--though the Game Boy was like this too, the contrast was much lower than that of the Game Boy, making it hard to see when in conditions too bright or too dark. To surf the Web or check your e-mail, you needed a separate cartridge, which the Game.com didn't come with, though the games themselves allowed you to post your scores and times to Tiger's servers. That being said, the connection was strictly wired (which is a bad for a handheld device), and while you could use other dial-up modems (it did not support any sort of connection besides dial-up), it was difficult to do without using Tiger's own Game.com modem. From what I'm reading, the Game.com had severe framerate problems, though its sound quality was much higher than that of the Game Boy. The Game.com was a good example of how you cannot sell a product simply on its concepts. The execution has to be good too. As for Toys R Us, yes, that was something I was thinking but forgot to point out. We have several Toys R Us locations near me, and of those, only one of them is actually going out. Toys R Us is by no means doing fine as a business, but it looks to be far from out. If Kmart and Sears have been able to hang on for so long despite being at or near bankruptcy, then so can Toys R Us. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3018 |
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The weird thing about "defunct consoles" is how excited you were as a kid to see them in person. Ads for them were often everywhere in magazines and comics, so whenever some kid brought their Virtua Boy, R-Zone, or Game.com on a school field trip, all of the boys would gather around to see what all the fuss was about.
Same thing when you went to a slumber party and the host's older brother had a 3DO or an Atari Jaguar... when everyone else you knew had an SNES or Genesis, anything unfamiliar had a real mystique about it. |
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Tenebrae
Posts: 489 |
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Best game on Dreamcast: Skies of Arcadia. Would be nice to see it remastered on a modern platform...
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BodaciousSpacePirate
Subscriber Posts: 3018 |
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Meh, I own over 60 Dreamcast games and Skies of Arcadia isn't one of them, can't have been that great of a game.  spoiler[I have it on Gamecube, it's pretty awesome.]
...which is to say, the Dreamcast had an extremely deep library of good games relative to the number of releases it had in the US, to the point where two avid Dreamcast collectors might have very different collections of "essential" titles. |
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Dark Absol
 Posts: 813 |
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cool-Aid Guy: -crashes through the wall- What? No, 'Oh, Yeah!'?
Last edited by Dark Absol on Sat Feb 24, 2018 6:13 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Primus
 Posts: 2794 Location: Toronto |
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[quote=Article]I mentioned Tiger Electronics briefly before as a company known for its kitschy, simplistic handheld games. Well, there was a point when it tried to break past that reputation into the world of legit handhelds with the Gizmondo in 2005.[/quote]
Gizmondo was from Tiger Telematics, not Tiger Electronics. Two entirely independent companies run by different people. By then, Hasbro had already purchased Tiger Electronics and had them make things like VideoNow.
Square supported Wonderswan because at the time they were feuding with Nintendo. |
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IanC
Posts: 685 Location: Essex, England |
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The Dreamcast was a massively overrated system with terrible controllers. Did it have good games? Yes. But not enough to deserve the amount of ott feelings it seems to bring out in people. Frankly the Sega Saturn, as mis-managed as it was, was a better console than the Dreamcast, and it had a better controller. How Sega managed to mess that up with the Dreamcast confuses me.
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